Quotes & Sayings About Shutting Down

Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940) — Virginia Woolf

In their infinite wisdom, the Admiralty approved Alek's medal for bravery in the air on the very same day the United States entered the war.
The timing seemed suspicious to Deryn, and of course the medal wasn't for anything useful, like shutting down Tesla's weapon to save the Leviathan. Instead Alek was to be decorated for blundering about on the ship's topside during a storm, and for his great skill in falling over and knocking himself silly. That was the Admiralty for you. — Scott Westerfeld

Megaupload was a dual-use technology. You can use it for good things, and you can use it for bad things. If someone sends something illegal in an envelope through your postal service, you don't shut down the post office. If someone speeds with the car he just bought, you don't go to the car manufacturer and say, 'Hey, we're shutting you down.' — Kim Dotcom

Do you know this feeling? When you're in an aero speeding up through a blue spiral, the window open, the wind whistling, and there's no earth, you've forgotten the earth, the earth is just as far from you as Saturn or Jupiter or Venus? That's how I'm living now. The wind is in my face and I've forgotten the earth, I've forgotten about dear rosy O. But earth exists all the same, and sooner or later I've got to glide down and land on it and I'm just shutting my eyes to the day on my Sexual Table with O-90's name on it... — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Life is a balance of hanging on and letting go.In the moment, shut down the mind and let intuition give you the answer. Have no regrets. — Matthew Donnelly

It's insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window. But sanity — Charles Stross

The process of transforming the heart can be difficult because as we open it, we inevitably encounter our own pain and become more aware of the pain of others. In fact, much of our personality is designed to keep us from experiencing this suffering. We close down the sensitivity of our hearts so that we can block our pain and get on with things, but we are never entirely successful in avoiding it. Often, we are aware of our suffering just enough to make ourselves and everyone around us miserable. Carl Jung's famous dictum that "neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering" points to this truth. But if we are not willing to experience our own hurt and grief, it can never be healed. Shutting out our real pain also renders us unable to feel joy, compassion, love, or any of the other capacities of the heart. — Don Richard Riso

Education Secretary Arne Duncan spurned the opportunity to condemn thousands of Wisconsin public school teachers for lying about being 'sick' and shutting down at least eight school districts across the state to attend capitol protests (many of whom dragged their students on a social justice field trip with them). Instead, Duncan defended teachers for 'doing probably the most important work in society.' Only striking government teachers could win federal praise for not doing their jobs. — Michelle Malkin

Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in a clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood. — William S. Burroughs

But, once you get a taste for shutting people up, it's hard to stop. Why bother winning the debate when it's easier to close it down? — Mark Steyn

We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda. — Alan Greenspan

I also worry that my reporting will become this deluge of tragedy for people, who like myself, unable or uncertain of what to do, let it wash over them. Some African journalists call it poverty porn - stories or images of intense suffering designed solely for emotional impact, but often have the effect of shutting people down rather than helping them step up. — Kevin Sites

That's because success convinces us that we are doing things the right way. There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right. — Ed Catmull

The owners don't win by having a lockout. Shutting down your business is not good for anybody and it's certainly not good for the players, it's certainly not good for the fans. And that's most important to us. — Roger Goodell

While July read, Tom listened with his eyes closed. This was a trick of his whenever he wanted to concentrate on what he heard. By shutting down one information flow he thought to heighten his attention on the other. However, he was never known to put his fingers in his ears when he wanted to see something clearly. — Michael Flynn

It's Curt Schilling and his bloody sock staring down the Yankees in the Bronx. It's Derek Lowe taking the mound the very next night to complete the most improbable comeback in baseball history - and then seven days later clinching the World Series. It's Pedro Martinez and his six hitless innings of postseason relief against the Indians. Yes, it is also Cy Young and Roger Clemens, and the 192 wins in a Red Sox uniform that they share - the perfect game for Young, the 20 strikeout games for Clemens - but it is also Bill Dinneen clinching the 1903 World Series with a busted, bloody hand, and Jose Santiago shutting down Minnesota with two games left in the season to keep the 1967 Impossible Dream alive, and Jim Lonborg clinching the Impossible Dream the very next day, and Jim Lonborg again, tossing a one-hitter and a three-hitter in the 1967 World Series, and Luis Tiant in the 1975 postseason, shutting out Oakland and Cincinnati in back-to-back starts. They are all winners. — Tucker Elliot

The Birmingham campaign was a repeat of SCLC's 1961 campaign in Albany, Georgia, which turned out a complete failure. King was banking on being able to fill up the jails and still have recruits willing to engage in civil disobedience, shutting the system down, but the authorities simply made their jails "bottomless" by shipping detainees elsewhere. A couple years later, black residents of Albany rioted, suggesting what they thought about their experience with nonviolence (these riots are not mentioned in most chronologies of the movement). — Anonymous

Try and withhold your judgment, because as soon as you think you know something, you're shutting down. — Cate Shortland

If it were a choice between putting ads on Wikipedia or shutting down Wikipedia, we would then very reluctantly consider putting ads on Wikipedia. — Sue Gardner

After forty-odd years you stop asking," she says. "Want some free advice?"
I nod.
"Don't trip over yourselves trying to be a perfect couple, love. Get out of each other's way; don't be afraid of falling out, shutting up, or telling little porky pies; do your share of the cleaning; don't leave your dirty undies inside out on the carpet; leave the seat down; buy her flowers once a month; and pinch her bum once a week - the rest's up to you. — Andy Jones

I'm proud of it. Apart from marking the first occasion when I used my talent on behalf of other people without being asked and without caring whether I was rewarded
which was a major breakthrough in itself
the job was a pure masterpiece. Working on it, I realized in my guts how an artist or an author can get high on the creative act. The poker who wrote Precipice's original tapeworm was pretty good, but you could theoretically have killed it without shutting down the net
that is, at the cost of losing thirty or forty billion bits of data. Which I gather they were just about prepared to do when I showed up. But mine ... Ho, no! That, I cross my heart, cannot be killed without DISMANTLING the net. — John Brunner

Men may sail the seas for a lifetime and seldom, if ever, come in contact with the nightmare monsters that inhabit the caves and cliffs of the ocean floor. Gazing down at the slightly muddy water, the men of The Unicorn saw a squirming mass of interwoven tentacles resembling enormous snakes, immensely thick and long and tapering at their free ends to the size of a man's thumb. It was a foul sight, an obscene growth from the dark places of the world, where incessant hunger is the driving force. At one place, down near the bulge of the hull, appeared a staring gorgon face with great lidless eyes and a huge parrot beak that moved slightly, opening and shutting as though it had just crunched and swallowed a meal of warm flesh.
("Fire In The Galley Stove") — William Outerson

The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul - and ambiguity, for that matter - out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse. — Charles Baxter

While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit. — Patricia Hickman

Like a beleaguered castle her mind was husbanding its resources, boarding every window, locking every door, shutting down unnecessary functions. — Susan Kay

When an experience is so powerful that it motivates people to change the whole pattern of their lives, we call that a breakthrough, or an epiphany. The value of an epiphany doesn't lie just in some new or exciting insight. You might be walking down the street and pass a stranger. Your eyes meet, and for some reason there is a connection. It isn't sexual or romantic or even a suspicion that this person could mean something in your life. Instead, the epiphany is that you are that stranger - your experiencer merges with his. Call this a feeling or a thought, it doesn't matter which - it's the sudden expansion that counts. You are flung outside your narrow boundaries, if only for a moment, and that makes all the difference. You have tasted a hidden dimension. Compared to the habit of shutting yourself behind the walls of ego, this new dimension feels freer and lighter. You have a sense that your body can't contain you anymore. — Deepak Chopra

We have no intention of shutting down plants. We have always said there will be no redundancies or lay-offs as a result of this merger. — Lakshmi Mittal

Instead of planning the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, America should be preparing the shuttles for their next step in space: evolving, not shutting them down and laying off thousands of people. — Buzz Aldrin

The idea that the United States of American might shut down its government over abortion and funding to an organization that is 0.01% of the U.S. budget seems completely insane. Anyone looking at this debate around the world is thinking 'What is this country doing? They have three wars going on, they're trying to manage major problems and they're thinking of shutting down their government over abortion?' — Katty Kay

Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of Drink
as if drink could be a problem. When people have come to call the problem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink, and to talk about curing it by attacking the drink traffic, they have reached quite a dim stage of barbarism. The thing is an inverted form of fetish worship; it is no sillier to say that a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle is a devil. The people who talk about the curse of drink will probably progress down that dark hill. In a little while we shall have them calling the practice of wife-beating the Problem of Pokers; the habit of housebreaking will be called the Problem of the Skeleton-Key Trade; and for all I know they may try to prevent forgery by shutting up all the stationers' shops by Act of Parliament. — G.K. Chesterton

There's one more serious risk for America that I want to mention here - the risk we have created by shouting down and shutting up any discussion of faith in the public square. It's as if we've decided expressions or discussions of faith shouldn't qualify as free speech. What's even stranger is the way it has somehow been tied to the concept of separation of church and state, even though that concept has nothing to do with people living by or publicly discussing their faith. — Ben Carson

My highest achievement: never shutting my heart down. Even in my darkest moments - through sexual abuse, a pregnancy at 14, lies and betrayals - I remained faithful, hopeful, and open to seeing the best in people, regardless of whether they were showing me their worst. I stayed open to believing that no matter how hard the climb, there is always a way to let in a sliver of light to illuminate the path forward. — Oprah Winfrey

Any online gamblers here? Well, Congress is looking in shutting that down.There's going to be a massive congressional investigation of online gambling and they're going to shut it down. And when they get done with that, they're going to look into this North Korean thing. — David Letterman

If you squeeze and squeeze, and you don't allow the Iranians to sell any oil, then what do they have to lose by shutting the Strait of Hormuz down? And if they do that, that's 35% of all the world's oil that comes through the strait and 20% of the liquefied natural gas in the world. — Steve Hanke

I went away, after trying once more to rouse up Bashan by renewed calls and
encouragement. In vain. He cared as little for my going as for my coming. He seemed weighed down by bitter loathing and despair. He had the air of saying: "Since you were capable of having me put in this cage, I expect nothing more from you." And, actually,
had he not enough ground to despair of reason and justice?
[ ... ]
How could I explain to him we were treating him with great distinction, in shutting him up like a jaguar, without sun, air, or exercise, and plaguing him every day with a
thermometer? — Thomas Mann

We're meant to stay connected to our hearts, you see. Feeling our feelings, present in the moments we're given. But we don't do that. And that's when we get in trouble ...
We mature and take responsibility for ourselves and others, and that's a good thing. But we're never meant to lose that alive quality, to get cut off from our true hearts. Growing up isn't the same thing as shutting down ...
We can fight it. We have to fight it. Because when our hearts shut down, we become mere shells of who we once were. We don't laugh - not honestly, not from the heart. We don't dream. We don't feel our feelings or use our gifts. We end up trying to just survive instead of live. It's like we've handed our hearts over to the enemy of our souls and said, 'Here you can have it. I'm giving up. — Denise Hildreth Jones

Nature is in the process of shutting down corrupt corporations and their government minions. — Steven Magee

Many of the vicious criminals held there have been caught on the battlefield fighting against American troops and shutting down Guantanamo Bay would just require the military to move them elsewhere. — Bill Shuster

So endgames are naturally messy.

They may not be very dynamic, but when an active war is shutting down, there is still a lot of cleaning up to do. It may sound grim, but that's what it looks like. There are broken things everywhere, wounds and corpses, general messiness. Things collapsing due to zemblanity forces that have been set in motion but are too large to control. — Venkatesh G. Rao

I don't think you have a choice but to pull CO2 back that has already made it out, or is about to make it out, because we are not overnight shutting down all the coal plants. — Klaus Lackner

It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life.
Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.
Sohrab's silence wasn't the self imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under. — Khaled Hosseini

These rare mini mind-blanks always seemed to occur when he needed perking up, creative jolts as if his brain had temporarily overclocked its processor to light-speed frequency, but with the side effect of shutting his consciousness down to protect it from overheating. That theory certainly fit the observable phenomena.
Then again, the competing theories included: he was nuts; he had a brain tumour; aliens had temporarily abducted him. — Karl Drinkwater

Where I needed to go was where I ended up. I was shutting you out, like I shut everything out, and you pulled me back. You made me see what was important. What's real. You made me see you." His lips brush mine. "See me now, Sara." "I do see you." "No. You don't. You see what happened tonight and what you've decided that means for us. See me now, Sara, like you made me see you." He kisses the corner of my mouth and his lips travel down my jaw. "Really see me. — Lisa Renee Jones

But on the other hand, there are many corporations who have turned their backs on the American worker, who have said, if I can make another nickel in profit by going to China and shutting down in the United States of America, that's what I will do. — Bernie Sanders

These times are hard, but I won't walk away jaded, darker, different. I feel. I cry to heal. If you saw me in those moments, maybe you'd think I was a mess. But I don't call it a mess. I call it strength.

Real strength isn't about building walls. Real strength is about staying open, no matter what. It's about taking life - with all the pleasures that fade and all the pain that sticks around for too long - and not shutting down, not closing down, not building up those walls.

Resilience isn't hard, impenetrable, iron. Resilience is flexible, soft, warm.

Stay strong. The real kind of strong. Don't let your automatic mind reflexes make you jump away from pain and towards pleasure. Make choices. See clearly. And never, ever, stop feeling.

Don't go numb. The world, even with all its horror, is too beautiful to miss. — Vironika Tugaleva

I think that every young person is a little mentally ill, you know? If we're not totally shutting down, we're all a little bit mentally ill in our twenties and maybe into our early thirties. — Gaby Hoffmann

Suddenly all the sky is hid As with the shutting of a lid, One by one great drops are falling Doubtful and slow, Down the pane they are crookedly crawling, And the wind breathes low; Slowly the circles widen on the river, Widen and mingle, one and all; Here and there the slenderer flowers shiver, Struck by an icy rain-drop's fall. — James Russell Lowell

Everyone wants to be called an outsider so I'm a proud insider. If I was young I'd be in my parents' house shutting down the government on my computer. The new delinquent is the hacker. — John Waters

Unless you can point to something that I have done or said that has changed the course of the public opinion in a negative way, you've got to check yourself sometimes and say, "Maybe I don't like the way that this thing is said, but it's expanding tolerance." If I said something that was shutting down something that was positive, call me out, but I don't really see me doing that. — Lizz Winstead

He tried to remember Moon Child's eyes, but was no longer able to. He was sure of only one thing: that her glance had passed through his eyes and down into his heart. He could still feel the burning trail it had left behind. That glance, he felt, was embedded in his heart, and there it glittered like a mysterious jewel. And in a strange and wonderful way it hurt.
Even if Bastian had wanted to, he couldn't have defended himself against this thing that had happened to him. However, he didn't want to. Oh no, not for anything in the world would he have parted with that jewel. All he wanted was to go on reading, to see Moon Child again, to be with her.
IT never occurred to him that he was getting into the most unusual and perhaps the most dangerous of adventures. But even if he had known this, he wouldn't have dreamed of shutting the book. — Michael Ende

Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. — Khaled Hosseini

Others will always show you exactly where you are stuck. They say or do something and you automatically get hooked into a familiar way of reacting - shutting down, speeding up, or getting all worked up. When you react in the habitual way, with anger, greed, and so forth, it gives you a chance to see your patterns and work with them honestly and compassionately. Without others provoking you, you remain ignorant of your painful habits and cannot train in transforming them into the path of awakening. — Pema Chodron

So many state Republican governors and legislators are defunding Planned Parenthood and shutting down clinics that not only provide a safe abortion but HIV testing, cancer screenings, and so much else that women have every right to access, which is harder if you are unemployed or you are a low-income woman that's part of the real service that Planned Parenthood provides. — Hillary Clinton

I think that's a really important role that people sometimes forget about, especially with all these newspaper shutting down and having trouble, where are all these stories going to go? I think you have something really great with all those stories waiting to be told, but I just don't know how it shapes up exactly. I don't think there are going to be a lot of newspaper reporters sitting around not writing. — Biz Stone

I was in end stage heart failure, liver and kidneys shutting down, and on an emergency basis they went in and planted a pump in my chest. It was battery operated. That kept me alive for 20 months and that got me to the transplant. And I wake up every morning now with a smile on my face, thankful for the gift of another day I never expected to see. — Dick Cheney

Isolating, shutting down, and feeling guilt about pain makes it linger so much longer. Reconnecting, trusting, and being open and honest is really the only cure. Reaching out and talking to loved ones and friends is a must. — Jaime Murray

I've delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, 'Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don't be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.' So he was partially right wasn't he? But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you're not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman's body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. — Phil Gingrey

I always liked that time of day, when people were shutting up their shops, putting the town to bed for the night, going home to do normal stuff with their normal families. I wonder if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air? Sometimes I got so pissed off at how easy the normal people had it that I just wanted to walk down the street shaking them and screaming into their squishy self-satisfied faces. — John Barnes

Calais took all of a fraction of a second - I've yet to learn how to gauge his speed - to appear beside me, taking the alarm clock and shutting it down. Then he worked on my bonds, leaving my gag for last because he wanted to sneak in a kiss. Which he did. Too bad I was too annoyed and cramped to respond, so I just made like a limp doll that made a face at him while he got all Romeo on me. — Hayden Thorne

Shutting down governments on your computer is just as much as fun as going to a riot at Yale. — John Waters

Ozone and climate are global issues, and it's hard to find a way in which the benefits of shutting down carbon emissions are going to pay for themselves for any given power-plant, say. — Ramez Naam

Ah, here's my SUV." He made sure her dress was tucked into the car before shutting her door. "I'll wait for you just down the road and then you can follow me home. Oh, and Jack? This is a one night only invitation. If you're not okay with that keep on driving. — Mary J. Williams

Rabid's pink eyes lose their shimmer, hazy like cotton candy. Before the door closes he mutters, "Zombies in Toyland?"
Dad pauses shutting him out and exchanges a worried glance with Mom.
I giggle. "It's a game on my phone. Rabid beat my high score a few weeks ago." I smirk at my little advisor. "We'll play it again soon. I have to get my title back."
His eyes brighten. "Generous are you! Cookies, too? Rabid White hungry be. Always."
I laugh. "Yeah, always. I'll have Mom make you some cookies."
He grins, then hops away down the hall, looking more like a rabbit than a demented otherworldly being. — A.G. Howard

Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. — Khaled Hosseini

Keep your options open, his parents told him, but they didn't tell him that growing older is about your options shutting down, one by one. — Lauren Beukes

How many examples do we have of these bodies [of the state] set up to eliminate a problem, actually eliminating it, shutting down their operations and going home? — Greg Sams

Travis' mouth fell open. "Oh, hell no. Are you trying to get me killed? You've gotta change, Pidge."
"What?"
"Get a t-shirt on ... and some sneakers. Something comfortable."
"What? Why?"
"Because I'll be more worried about who's looking at your tits in that shirt instead of Hoffman," he said, stopping at his door.
"I thought you said you didn't give a damn what anyone else thought?"
"That's a different scenario, Pigeon." Travis looked down at my chest and then up at me. "You can't wear this to the fight, so please ... just ... please just change," he stuttered, shoving me into the room and shutting me in. — Jamie McGuire

Egypt has responded to hundreds of thousands of protesters by shutting down the Internet. Just a word of advice: If you want people to stay at home and do nothing, you should turn the Internet back on. — Conan O'Brien

In the distance, they begin shutting down the rides and turning off lights. There's something beautiful and eerie about a darkened, unmoving Ferris wheel. — Becky Albertalli

Shutting down the government is not how you make government work. — George Clooney

The E.U.'s Eastern Partnership programme is designed to bind the so-called focus states tightly to itself, shutting down the possibility of co-operation with Russia. — Sergei Lavrov

One of the great errors organizations make is shutting down what is a natural, life-enhancing process-chaos. We are terrified of chaos. As a manager, it signals failure. But if you move out of control and into an appreciation of natural order, you understand that the only way a system changes is when it is far from equilibrium, when it moves from the 'quiet' we treasure and is confronted with the choice to die or reorganize. And you can't reorganize to a higher level unless you risk the perils of the path through chaos. — Margaret J. Wheatley

a country can be too small, too socially knitted, too tightly tied for its own good. Strong social networks can, in certain circumstances, turn to incestuous corruption and the shutting down of democratic discourse. You — Michael Booth

Airbnb is a much more effective protest than shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge. — Jason Calacanis

He takes the coffee from her, needing fresh air because if he doesn't get out of this room, he'll suffocate from memories. He's felt like that for more than a month now. There's no particular reason for it, but sometimes he feels like he can't breathe, like his body is shutting down. — Melina Marchetta

I understood at once, I am not living, but actively dying. I am smoking, living unhealthily. I'm shutting down. I need to go the other way, inside. And it was so clear to me what I was doing. It was suddenly perfectly clear.
I understood, I need to write. Live here, in my words, and my head. I need to go inside, that's all. No big, complicated, difficult thing. I just need to go in reverse. And not worry about what to write about, but just write. Or, if I'm going to worry about what to write, then do this worrying on paper, so at least I'm writing and will have a record of the anxiety. — Augusten Burroughs

However, traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.

The more people try to push away and ignore internal warning signs, the more likely they are to take over and leave them bewildered, confused, and ashamed. People who cannot comfortably notice what is going on inside become vulnerable to respond to any sensory shift either by shutting down or by going into a panic - they develop a fear of fear itself. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Ten salespeople, all young, all dressed in generic cotton casual, looked up from their conversations, spotted the money in her hand, and simultaneously stopped breathing-their brains shutting down bodily functions and rerouting the needed energy to calculate the projected commissions contained in Jody's cash. One by one they resumed breathing and marched toward her, a look of dazed hunger in their eyes: a pack of zombies from the perky, youthful version of The Night of the Living Dead. "I wear a size four and I've got a date in fifteen minutes," Jody said. "Dress me." They descended on her like an evil khaki wave. — Christopher Moore

But as much as life is sometimes about knowing what you want and going after it and finishing, maybe other times it's about slowing down and shutting up and waiting. There's not always a clear beginning and obvious end. Sometimes we're in the middle . . . and it's okay to camp out there for a while. — Melissa Tagg

In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts. — Carl Honore

I feel myself shutting down, closing off, like I should tell people, No, we don't use this heart anymore. It's too fragile. — Courtney C. Stevens

The government is shutting down the coal industry, they say it's cheaper to draw nuclear power off the French grid and cheaper to buy coal from Colombia. — Martin Cruz Smith

Shutting down is denial. When you deny the past, you will repeat it. — Patricia Cornwell

I can just imagine myself sitting down at the head of the table and pouring out the tea," said Anne, shutting her eyes ecstatically. "And asking Diana if she takes sugar! I know she doesn't but of course I'll ask her just as if I didn't know. — L.M. Montgomery

LEGO has announced that they are shutting down their U.S. factory and moving it to Canada. LEGO employees say it's their fault because they made the factory too easy to take apart and rebuild somewhere else. — Conan O'Brien

Dr Victoria Kahn, Chief Medical Officer, Saint Bartholomew's Hospital, from her article The Virus: Humanity's Natural Archenemy The most successful virus in the world will be one that keeps its host alive while simultaneously shutting down the body's self-defences. It won't be long before we have such a specimen on our hands. — Perrin Briar

Shutting down discussion is self-defeating and impedes progress. We need to talk and listen and debate and refute and instruct and learn and evolve. — Sheryl Sandberg

The more we make friends with ourselves, the more we can see that our ways of shutting down and closing off are rooted in the mistaken thinking that the way to get happy is to blame somebody else. — Pema Chodron

I feel vulnerable a lot interacting with human beings and being honest with people, and if I read their energy kind of not getting or shutting me down or this feeling of where we're not connecting, that's kind of a vulnerable place for me. — Matt Nathanson

Your mind is filled with ample secret abilities not known to you, keep it active by shutting down disbelieve. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Shutting people down creatively often doesn't get the best performance out of them. — Seth Rogen

It's hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I'm sad to say that this method works. If you don't give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you. I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do. — Alan Cumming

You may have succeeded in shutting down the attack simulation, girl, but it was by luck alone, not skill. I would die of shock if you managed to do anything useful again for a long time
This is the Marcus that Tobias knows. The one who knows right where to hit to cause the most damage. — Veronica Roth

In a global race, can we really justify the huge number of expensive peripheral European institutions? Can we justify a commission that gets ever larger? Can we carry on with an organisation that has a multibillion pound budget but not enough focus on controlling spending and shutting down programmes that haven't worked? — David Cameron

Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it's captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you're done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, "Shutdown complete"). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it's safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day. — Cal Newport

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir — Khaled Hosseini

Sometimes what you lose in the time it takes to let an actor do something that you don't like as a director, you gain in not shutting them down creatively by telling them their idea sucks. — Seth Rogen

He told me once that the devil dwells in you." "No doubt he does believe it. And what do you think, Mariana Farr?" He did look faintly devilish, smiling down at me with his dark clothes and his dark hair and those glinting eyes the color of the forest that surrounded us, shutting us off together from the wider world. I studied him closely, and shrugged in my turn. "I am no simple chit in hanging sleeves, my lord. I have eyes of my own to judge with, and I see no horns. — Susanna Kearsley

Too cold even to snow - that winter presents a strange and haunted season during which Werner prowls the static like he used to prowl the alleys with Jutta, pulling her in the wagon through the colonies of Zollverein. A voice materializes out of the distortion in his headphones, then fades, and he goes ferreting after it. There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot. Sometimes days pass after hearing a first transmission before Werner snares the next; they present a problem to solve, something to wrap his mind around: better, surely, than fighting in some — Anthony Doerr

Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It's about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting
your fate entirely to someone else. It's about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a
warm bath. It's about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you. — Anthony Bourdain