Quotes & Sayings About Limbo

Life is like a game of limbo in reverse. The bar keeps rising higher and we need to keep rising to the occasion. — Ryan Lilly

They were both from the real world, their own distinct ones, but I was somewhere in limbo. Set apart, I didn't know how to let either of them in. — Amina Gautier

These were "fossil behaviors," Darwinian vestiges of earlier times brought out of physiological limbo by the stimulation of primitive brain-stem systems, damaged and sensitized by the encephalitis in the first place, and now "awakened" by L-dopa.1 I — Oliver Sacks

The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end. — Victor Hugo

The step that we are on is only a step to the next place, and no step regardless of how massive is ever a destination. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I wanted to think of what could not be thought except in intersections; I wanted to satiate my fiendishness in a neutering gnosis. I wanted to see the first chimp paint it's own likeness in a limbo state of gravitating iconostasis, flanked by altar candles and decked in a dark green Zuchetto upon which stars would genuflect in a prism without manacles, unrivaled by the boring, mundane phenomenon of space's black canopy loved by the plebeians. — John Thomas Allen

Being alive is far betting than being in Limbo. — Mike Townsend

In limbo is an indecisive manhalf dead half alive
Half on earth half in sky, neither can he run nor fly — Jagdish Bali

As Mr. R. U. Sayee has well said: 'It should be clear a priori that fairy lore must have developed as a result of modifications and accretions received in different countries and at many periods, though we must not overlook the part played by tradition in providing a mould that to some extent determines the nature of later additions.' It must also be self-evident that a great deal of confusion has been caused by the assumption that some spirit-types were fairies which in a more definite sense are certainly not of elfin provenance. In some epochs, indeed, Faerie appears to have been regarded as a species of limbo to which all 'pagan' spirits - to say nothing of defeated gods, monsters, and demons - could be banished, along with the personnel of Olympus and the rout of witchcraft. Such types, however, are usually fairly easy of detection. — Lewis Spence

A woman could do a lot of crazy things for a pair of fine-looking dimples. — Amy Andrews

I have a record I love, 'Limbo,' which is very catchy. — Daddy Yankee

I was hoping Betsy Nash would disappear. Literally. She was so insubstantial, I could imagine her slowly evaporating, leaving only a sticky spot on the edge of the sofa. But she lingered, eyes darting between me and her husband before we even began speaking. Like she was winding up for the conversation. The children, too, hovered about, little blonde ghosts trapped in a limbo between indolence and stupidity. The pretty girl might do all right. But the piggy middle child, who now waddled dazedly into the room, was destined for needy sex and snack-cake bingeing. The boy was the type who'd end up drinking in gas-station parking lots. The kind of angry, bored kid I saw on my way into town. — Gillian Flynn

This is one other thing I know: without autumn, there is no end. Without red and gold and orange there is no finality, no conclusion. Without the sudden shift in the air, without the scent of apples and the crisp chill of morning, summer could go on forever. Without fall, summer lingers. There is a marvelous limbo where I live now, without the changing of seasons. No blazing display to signify the end of everything good. Perhaps this is what drew me to California. A place where time is suspended. — T. Greenwood

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away. — Peter Sotos

Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo. — Theodore Levitt

There isn't a name for my situation. Firstly because I decided to kill myself. And then because of this idea:
I don't have to do it immediately.
Whoosh, through a little door. It's a limbo.
I need never answer the phone again or pay a bill. My credit score no longer matters. Fears and compulsions don't matter. Socks don't matter. Because I'll be dead. And who am I to die? A microwave chef. A writer of pamphlets. A product of our time. A failed student. A faulty man. A bad poet. An activist in two minds. A drinker of chocolate milk, and when there's no chocolate, of strawberry and sometimes banana. — D.B.C. Pierre

He'd forgotten, in those long years in Bedlam, through fear and grief and pain, what it was like to simply be with a pretty woman. To tease and flirt and yes, perhaps steal a kiss. He didn't know how she felt about that kiss - or if she'd let him kiss her again, but he was certainly going to try. He had lost time to make up - much of life itself to live. He'd spent four years in limbo, simply existing, while others found lovers and friends, even started families. He wanted to live again. — Elizabeth Hoyt

More importantly, I didn't know then that one day I would genuinely be free. That freedom came out of a thousand small steps of obedience, most of which I took during the waiting or limbo time. The more I learned to lean into Him on a daily basis and simply live out my faith in the everyday elements, the more I was prepared for the bigger steps when they arrived. Not only that, I was given the gift of living my life fully in the present, rather than being fixated and frustrated over some distant time or hope. In the crossroads called limbo, you do arrive at mile markers. You become more mature. More healed. Less surprised by or resistant to or unprepared for the good things God is giving you in the ordinary. Your challenge is to begin to embrace the waiting times as part of the overall journey. Limbo is a key part of the healing process! As you are faithful daily, He is working in you powerfully, and it all counts. Every single moment! — Suzanne Eller

I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point. — Keri Hulme

And even these ((the common hill fairy, the standard elf of folk-lore) are in danger of being banished into the limbo of forgetfulness by the quite artificial fairy of juvenile literary commerce, with gauzy wing and skirts reminiscent of the ballet. It has always seemed to me extraordinary that literature has been able to create wings where none were before, for our native fairies are as wingless as ourselves. But for such an innovation the Elizabethan poets and playwrights were probably responsible - a topic which we must consider in another chapter. — Lewis Spence

And so a miserable but possible scenario is that countries in the bottom billion oscillate between the traps and limbo, perhaps switching in the process from one trap to another..
Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. In every society of the bottom billion there are people working for change, but usually they are defeated by the powerful internal forces stacked against them. We should be helping the heroes. So far, our efforts have been paltry: through inertia, ignorance, and incompetence, we have stood by and watched them lose.
Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. These societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. — Paul Collier

I am the soul in limbo. — Andre Breton

Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks
admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve. — Henry Miller

Everyone makes choices in life. Some bad, some good. It's called living, and if you want to bow out, then go right ahead. But don't do it halfway. Don't linger in whiner's limbo. — Maria V. Snyder

I never want to be suspended in the limbo of non-decision again. It's like torturing yourself on purpose. — Siobhan Vivian

They are afraid. They would, today, keep secret a thousand things that, yesterday, they would have told one another freely. Freedom. Where is it now? We are driving it into limbo - their kind. To limbo. — Philip Wylie

I put a sour cherry pastille on my tongue, but the combination jarred. A meaty, protein taste was called for. With a cool skin, sticky sweet fragrance in the nostrils, the aleatory drip of timeless water echoing in your ears, a limbo beyond the muscle spindles... you become a spiced mummy in a cool chamber beneath the Nile. This salt-surfeited breeze tingling every corpuscle of my skin set me adrift on a cool back eddy near a basser sea... but the wave lap and sibilance of the palm leaves was like the rustle of a costly veil... in what exotic world did a vortex of primary colours drain into the eyes?... did it all make me a taffeted plankter drinking substance from the spectrum of a fractured sun?"

-"Cancerous Kisses of Crocodiles — William Scott Home

The limbo of life is like a song, a melody that comes around occasionally but that sticks in your head and never goes away. — Leigh Hershkovich

Well, limbo is not a good place to be. — Bill Joy

It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo's clamor. — Cormac McCarthy

Every limbo boy and girl, all around the limbo world. Gonna do the limbo rock, all around the limbo clock. — Chubby Checker

Instantaneous interpretation hails from the Limbo that produced unsensed sensibilia, unconscious inference, incorrigible statements, negative facts and Objektive. These are ideas which philosophers force on the world to preserve some pet epistemological or metaphysical theory. — Norwood Russell Hanson

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go. — Brooks Atkinson

Which means what?" I demanded. "That I'm nothing? That I'm not a person? That you can do anything you want to me and it's okay? You're so full of it! But you're wrong. I know that I do matter. I am important. And you're a pathetic, cold, pointless wastoid who's going to grow old alone and die, then roast in limbo forever. — James Patterson

A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is vexing: I feel in a kind of limbo - an author but not truly an author, true authorship being conferred by having a book physically published - a thing you can hold in your hand, purchase in a bookshop. — William Boyd

Reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of all things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is really the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bound by reason. — G.K. Chesterton

When, Strike wondered, would he next enjoy a pint on a Friday with friends? The notion seemed to belong to a different universe, a life left behind. The strange limbo in which he was living, with Robin his only real human contact, could not last, but he was still not ready to resume a proper social life. He had lost the army, and Charlotte and half a leg; he felt a need to become thoroughly accustomed to the man he had become, before he felt ready to expose himself to other people's surprise and pity. — Robert Galbraith

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy. Making people laugh one moment and the next making them feel really uncomfortable. — Steve Coogan

As a competitor, winner or loser, one crosses the line into limbo. The adrenaline is gone, the anticipation is gone. The verdict is either comforting or devestating but it neithers returns the exhilaration of the race nor helps directly to win the next. Maybe all that matters is that there is a next. — Stefan Kieszling

Here the clouds constantly adjusted like obedient phantoms, so that shadows never lengthened or shortened. At any point in space, Limbo never became any darker or lighter than the moment before. — L. E. Henderson

With a tension in his stomach, such as one suffers when watching an acrobat leaving the virtuosity of his safety in a mad unraveling whirl into probable death, Felix watched the hand descend, take up the note, and disappear into the limbo of the doctor's pocket. He knew that he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a peal: so he would have to cover the doctor. He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself, though originally brought on by no will of his own. — Djuna Barnes

I don't want it all to be pretty - it's a combination of loss and gain. Things are born, live and hang in limbo. That's what life's about ... — Cornelia Parker

He used to call vampires "the breathing ghosts"- for, as he put it, we existed in a kind of limbo-land between the living and the dead. We breathed, but we were not alive. We flitted through the air, but we still left foot prints on the ground. We were, and are, neither one nor the other, but something else entirely. — Eleanor Keane

Trapped in limbo, believing in a lack of belief, but not necessarily lacking the belief to believe. — Ian Rankin

Lee's face changed and his eyes became warm.

"Are we together?"

Oh crap.

I started thinking fast.

"We're not not together."

"I'm not entirely certain what to do with that."

I explained, "We're not exactly together and were not not together. We're in together limbo. We're test driving together to see if we want to buy it."

"We go to your dad's late, I could convince you to buy it. — Kristen Ashley

The best of causes ruins as quickly as the worst; and the road to Limbo is paved with writers who have done everything I am being sympathetic, not satiric for the very best reasons. — Randall Jarrell

Lie down beside these waters
That bubble from the spring;
Hear in the desert silence
The desert sparrow sing;

Draw from the shapeless moment
Such pattern as you can;
And cleave henceforth to Beauty;
Expect no more from man.

Man, with his ready answer,
His sad and hearty word,
For every cause in limbo,
For every debt deferred,

For every pledge forgotten,
His eloquent and grim
Deep empty gaze upon you, -
Expect no more from him. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Which seemed to hover in a limbo between creation and decay ... — Thomas Mann

The real truth is that the war didn't have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop. — Meg Rosoff

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you learn how to trust your feelings then you'll know how to recognize it - That part of you that needs no healing is like a swollen river rising. So choke me with a violent passion and drown me in a deep emotion. You've got to help me build this feeling. I'm swimming in a stagnant ocean. Been blinded by smoke and mirrors and crippled by a fear of tomorrow. If you don't help me shake this feeling, then I'll be marking time in Limbo. — Tim Finn

Then might ye see
Cowls, hoods, and habits with their wearers tost
And flutter'd into rags; then reliques, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,
The sport of winds; all these upwhirl'd aloft
Fly to the rearward of the world far off
Into a limbo large and broad, since called
The paradise of fools. — John Milton

The moral authority in the Western world is gone. And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record
everybody's record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you're doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call "now," waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything. — James Baldwin

We are trapped here up on this wall by an evil beyond comprehension. It is here that we are damned to remain for all eternity, under the grime of centuries, beyond time. When even the paint falls off and these prison-canvases are bare again ... well, then we are in limbo, the poor man opened his eyes wide giving them a ghostly look. — Nathalie M. Leblanc

Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining. — Andrew Lang

Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness - myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me. — Luisa A. Igloria

'Limbo' has been one of the greatest hits of my career. A great response all over the world, not just Latinos but people in Europe and America. — Daddy Yankee

And please watch over the babies trapped in limbo. In the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. — Sierra Simone

The mind effortlessly and automatically takes in new ideas, which remain in limbo until verified or rejected by conscious, rational analysis. — Rene Descartes

She sat in a secluded room, she was mad, but she could not accept it; so she was neither sane nor insane. She could not be either until she knew herself, so in limbo she must die. She kept stuffing toilet roll into her mouth. They found her choked to death! — Stephen Richards

Jupiter instead cooled down below the threshold for fusion, but it maintained enough heat and mass and pressure to cram atoms very close together, to the point they stop behaving like the atoms we recognize on earth. Inside Jupiter, they enter a limbo of possibility between chemical and nuclear reactions, where planet-sized diamonds and oily hydrogen metal seem plausible. — Sam Kean

For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you're some place that's already interesting. You're not just between places. Things are happening. — Rebecca Solnit

It's better to make a decision, even the wrong one, than to be in limbo. — Seth

Panky thinking: We had nuclear holocaust on our lips, Big Brother on our minds, 1984 was just around the corner and we were shit scared about the future - George Orwell and Margaret Thatcher had a lot to answer for. — Peter L Masters

For Uncle Giles had been relegated by most of the people who knew him at all well to that limbo where nothing is expected of a person, and where more than usually outrageous actions are approached, at least conversationally, as if they constituted a series of practical jokes, more or less enjoyable, according to where responsibility for clearing up matters might fall. The curious thing about persons regarding whom society has taken this largely self-defensive measure is that the existence of the individual himself reaches a pitch when nothing he does can ever be accepted as serious. — Anthony Powell

Do your own thing. Others own their own thing. If you copy too much, you'll find yourself in late night cocktail lounge cover band limbo. — Kurt Cobain

Somewhere in Limbo, all the old devices and appliances and costumes are lined up, waiting their turn for reentry. — Margaret Atwood

We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places. — John McGahern

People say when something stops growing, it dies; I don't think it's the same with love. Even when love stops growing because there's nothing to nurtures it, it doesn't die; it just stays somewhere in a limbo. — Tayo Emmanuel

The only time I set the bar low is for limbo. — Michael Scott

What has always puzzled me is the flexibility of God's word. For instance, Catholics can now eat meat on Fridays. And limbo has been abolished. How does this work? Who tells them? — Simon Hoggart

Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? — Haruki Murakami

Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante's scheme, Limbo is to Hell. — Irving Layton

If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place. — Salman Rushdie

A limbo large and broad, since call'd The Paradise of Fools to few unknown. — John Milton

What if I've forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? ... the thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. — Haruki Murakami

Sometimes limbo is a tolerable place to be stuck. — William Boyd

Limbo is the state where there are only questions. That was as far as I'd gotten. — David Levithan

Being on tour is like being in limbo. It's like going from nowhere to nowhere. — Bob Dylan

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. — Diane Setterfield

Funny thing, your brain,
how it always functions on one
level or another. How, even stuck in
some sort of subconcious limbo, it works
your lungs, your muscle twitches, your heart,
in fact, in symphony with your heart, allowing it
to feel love. Pain. Jealousy. Guilt. I wonder if it's the
same for people, lost in comas. Is there really such a thing — Ellen Hopkins

Curiosity was a mild irritant, but nothing in the face of fear like this. By doing nothing, I determined that nothing would change, and it didn't. People moan about being in limbo, but actually, I found limbo the safest place to be. — Anna Maxted

MASTERED, the Poem Weary of secrets, Of shame and denying, A lifetime of stories, Excuses, and lying, Dark nights lying awake, Frightened and crying, With society's eyes Judgmental and prying. Existing in limbo, No peace in her soul Just shadow and smoke, And a vast gaping hole. Submissive by nature, Now taking its toll, Shan't ever confess, Yearns a Master's control — K.L. Silver

My mother always told me if I really didn't wan to do something, if I was really tired, but if I had helped someone and I really went out of my way for them but I asked nothing for it, that I should donate my energy to the souls in purgatory-meaning that to give my goodness to those who are trapped. This is purgatory/limbo. This is a very Catholic thing that very few people really understand. — Peter Steele

The camera observed me, but there was nothing in my bag except a pashmina, purse, and Lorazepam. I carried emptiness. Doors opened. Another camera recorded my progress. Doubtless there were thousands of my days repeated thus, interred digitally in limbo. I ascended two steps with nothing to look forward to, — Peter Carey

Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity ...
Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo. — Edith Wharton

There's no a lot of laughs in an underworld. This one used to be called Limbo, ya ken, 'cause the door was verra low. — Terry Pratchett

Sometimes chaos is the very thing that deliberately shakes up our neatly ordered world's in order to get us out of the neatly ordered ruts that have kept us stuck. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

When it is dark, the objects and I will come out of limbo — Jean-Paul Sartre

It was time to raise the bar higher, or lower if you're doing limbo. — Tre Cool

I just set the bar, niggas fall under it like a limbo — Drake

Something had broken inside her. No past or future, no sense of time, each day as endless as it was to a child. Linh had been right about her being a tourist of the war in the beginning, but with that detachment there had also been a kind of strength. As Darrow had said, there was a price to mastery. Now she was in limbo, neither an observer of the country, nor a part of it. For the first time since she was a child, she considered praying, but it seemed small and cowardly this late in the game. — Tatjana Soli

Perhaps Eurydice wants to remain marginal, a shade insubstantial ... the mute waste in a limbo without light and without depth are a style of anima fascinations in which the absence of significance is the significance. — James Hillman

I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless. — Richard Rodriguez

I am leaning back and running with it and staring at the stars and I'm eleven, I'm sixteen, I'm eighteen, I'm a newborn I'm everyone everywhere with you without you unbound set free in limbo lost at sea. — Bryan Lee O'Malley

Limbo is worse than hell. — Marty Rubin

[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

We've been dead for thousands and thousands of years. Dead or sleeping, depends on how you feel about it at any given moment. But that's okay. The trouble starts when you are born, then everything becomes taxing and temporary. When they pulled us into awareness, they killed us. Then we get saddled with a seven minute relay, at best. A soft limbo that's only palliative and comforting in theory. A momentary respite that's a cosmic joke of course and still resented by the divine. A petty haggling of which we weren't even a part of. When forced into an existence, we turned into the ward of all that breathes, subjected to the known universe, and though always partial to the unknown, which wasn't really found and never understood, is lost to us. — Asghar Abbas

One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott's heroes still may strut, Dickens's delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray's worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated. — Arthur Conan Doyle