Paralysing Quotes & Sayings

When I first thought about becoming Jane Austen I had to forget about the fear, or at least choose something else to focus on because it was becoming paralysing, I couldn't focus. I felt frightened, not so much by her fans' reaction to my performance but that I would be playing someone who I think is a legend, who I respect and admire so much. I didn't want to fail, so I was putting a lot of pressure on myself. — Anne Hathaway

It is thus more potent, as well as more economical, to disarm the enemy than to attempt his destruction by hard fighting ... A strategist should think in terms of paralysing, not of killing. — B.H. Liddell Hart

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such
a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. — Oscar Wilde

Tal's combinations often exert a sort of paralysing influence on the opponent's play. It would seem that the element of surprise plays a big part in this. — Mark Taimanov

But the words die away on his lips, as he is caught in a smile as sudden and bright and paralysing as a prison searchlight ...
God, those eyes! Just looking at them is like being kissed - or, no, like being magicked off to another world, where it's just the two of them alone, the rest of the universe mere tinselled scenery, orbiting in a slow waltz around them- — Paul Murray

If you're an extraordinarily gifted woman, the door is open. What women are fighting for is the right to be as mediocre as men. — Grace Hartigan

When you get real stage fright, it comes like a sledgehammer out of the blue in the middle of something that you know you've done too many times before, and there's no rhyme or reason for it. It's something quite different from being nervous. It's almost paralysing. — Billie Whitelaw

You can overspend money but you never can over spend love, so spend it without any thought. — Debasish Mridha

By love, she probably meant she would die without being in love. By in
love, she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a
particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested
friendship one is suddenly stunned by the lungs' longing for more and
more breath in the presence of that friend, or nearly drowned to the
knees by the salty spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal
shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great
spiritual energy for months and, when luck follows truth, years. — Grace Paley

I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people's eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree. — Nicholson Baker

The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. — Alain De Botton

The US is the most wretchedly villainous state of all times. Anyone aware of global issues can easily imagine how vast the hatred for the United States - a corrupted, swollen, paralysing and suffocating political entity - must be across the Third World - and among the thinking minority of the West too. — Pentti Linkola

It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now
but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. — H.P. Lovecraft

Let positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones. — Swami Vivekananda

The need of politeness is at its maximum in speaking with foreigners, and is so irksome as to be paralysing to those who are only accustomed to compatriots. — Bertrand Russell

I have an ulcer. It has an IQ of 185. — Paul Lynde

Cottage of content was better than the Palace of cold splendour, and that where love was, all was. — Charles Dickens

Regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption. — B.H. Liddell Hart

I have certain rules that I've established for myself that took a while post-day job to figure out. Everyone says people who freelance or are writers struggle with the structure of it. I'm not allowed to check email before a certain hour. I'm not allowed to run errands during the day. I have to write a certain amount every day. — Sloane Crosley

I'd gone from being this art student messing about with music to this girl with a record deal, magazine front covers and all this hype. In many ways, it was everything I ever wanted, but when it happened all I felt was total, paralysing fear. — Florence Welch

The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread. — Adam Parfrey

The Alexander Technique has helped me to undo knots, unblock energy and deal with almost paralysing stage fright — William Hurt

In America, here is how we operate: We work for what we want, and we get ahead. We never take no for answer, and we deserve the rewards of our perseverance. — E. Lockhart

I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading. — Dwight Yoakam

The balance between the paralysing hurt of losing the people you love and the absolute glorious revelation of finding the one person that makes you happier than you've ever been. Someone who makes you so happy that you stare into your future and finally look forward to it. — Beckie Stevenson

The truth is, I've always been wracked with self-loathing and terrible, paralysing depression. — Shirley Manson

I'd say that we dream primarily the same way that we have consciousness of the world for the same reason. Basically, that our brains evolve to simulate reality and to control what's happening around us. — Stephen LaBerge

Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma, have given birth to a baby boy. He posted a photo of the new baby on Twitter, but people are afraid to open it. — Jay Leno

To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralysing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar. — Desmond Tutu

How merciful a thing is man's ignorance of his immediate future! What a ghastly, paralysing thing it would have been if all those present could have known what was about to happen within a matter of seconds! For nothing short of pre-knowledge could have stopped the occurrence, so suddenly it sprang upon them. — Mervyn Peake

I realised I really was shy. And once I was in it, I couldn't escape. I'd go to talk and find my face was made of cement. Nothing would come out. On winter days, I'd feel myself turning grey at the edges and fading into the walls.

Was this defensive strategy? It was paralysing. And it went on for years. — Janet E. Cameron

The release of 'Lungs' was so hard. It was terrifying, because it was the first time doing everything. The first experiences of media exposure were almost paralysing. I spent a lot of time crying on the floor of the studio - it sent me a bit mad. — Florence Welch