Stalled In Life Quotes & Sayings

From what Natalie could observe, by middle age, every person's life had rolled some distance downhill, even if it was a very gentle slope, coming to rest at a place of disappointment. Some spheres of an individual's life might have gone spectacularly well but there would always be an obstinate slab of disappointment in another department - a stalled career, inability to have kids, a dismal marriage, whatever. — Debra Oswald

Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books. — Guy Browning

I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down. — Flannery O'Connor

Next, the stalled cars had their windows opaqued with a cheap commercial compound used for etching glass, and slogans were painted on their doors. Some were long: THIS VEHICLE IS A DANGER TO LIFE AND LIMB. Many were short: IT STINKS! But the commonest of all was the universally known catchphrase: STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME! — John Brunner

It really kind of looks like now that John Kerry is on his way to the presidential nomination. The only thing that can sink John Kerry now is an Al Gore endorsement. — Jay Leno

Dreams must be chased, for if we wait for them to chase us we will live a life of waiting. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Awareness means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing in one's own way and not the way one was taught. — Eric Berne

Note to self: If you can't hear God when you pray, shut up. — Mark Hart

Viscosity and velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of
disinclination, velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and
still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy. — Susanna Kaysen

We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide. — Octavio Paz

Don't worry about wearing the sign; be the sign. You don't have to wear a sandwich board saying, "I am religious and spiritual and know what you should do." You do have to be the best of the mystical presence that your tradition brings. Certainly in Christianity, that means that you begin to go through life putting on the mind of Jesus, trying to see the world as Jesus saw the world. — Joan D. Chittister

Before water generates steam, it must register two hundred and twelve degrees of heat. Two hundred degrees will not do it; two hundred and ten will not do it. The water must boil before it will generate enough steam to move an engine, to run a train. Lukewarm water will not run anything.
A great many people are trying to move their life trains with lukewarm water - or water that is almost boiling - and they are wondering why they are stalled, why they cannot get ahead. They are trying to run a boiler with two hundred or two hundred and ten degrees of heat, and they cannot understand why they do not get anywhere.
Lukewarmness in his work stands in the same relation to man's achievement as lukewarm water does to the locomotive boiler. No man can hope to accomplish anything great in this world until he throws his whole soul, flings his force to his whole life, into it. — Orison Swett Marden

I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with other or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn't so hard and risky and didn't need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I've already said, becoming someone else
but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt. — Richard Ford

Perhaps it's only the vehicle that won't start, but it feels like it's my life that won't start. Yes, this Yugo with the passenger-side seat metal coming through the torn seat fabric, scratching against the back of my thigh, this Cold War relic that won't respond to Nick's turn of the ignition key is like the fucking metaphor for my sorry-ass life: STALLED. — Rachel Cohn

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning. — Sue Monk Kidd

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all. — Stendhal

It's the soul's eye which stares at your beauty and knows you well. And from it's vantage point you're as visible as a sunny day — Leandra J. Kalsy

The Tory party is the enemy of democracy. — Tony Benn

We are designed for harmony, an ebb and flow that's almost inconceivable it's so flawless. So when things go wrong and our cells can't communicate with each other, or there is miscommunication, there is a direct biological link to why we don't think clearly, we don't feel right, and our lives get stalled.
It happens when a child gets abused.
It happens when a brain gets physically wounded.
It happens when fear or pain is so great it overrides everything else.
It happens during times of prolonged stress.
It happens in the throes of depression.
It happens when the brain gets pounded with negativity.
And sometimes we just don't know why the wires in our brains get crossed. — Toni Sorenson

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is. — John D'Agata

The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad. — Thomas Carlyle

Ah, gym class. Remember it? Institutionally sanctioned torture for society's misfits. — Lisa Unger

Without creation, what are we but stalled in life? — Dhani Jones

Isabelle!" he called again. "Let down your raven hair!'
"Oh my God," Clary muttered. "There was something in that blood Raphael gave you, wasn't there? I'm going to kill him. — Cassandra Clare

Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt. — Lester Bangs

I'd like to be in a play with Mark Rylance. — Julian Ovenden