Quotes by American Authors - Page 261

I truly believe that the boredom of illness is parlous to one's health
Tyne O'Connell
Employment was better than idleness for men, because it kept the enemy guessing.
H.W. Brands
I am stuck in traffic in a taxicabwhich is typicaland not just of modern life
Frank O'Hara
We're dying of boredom, Corporal, that's the problem.' [Blend] 'If boredom was fatal there wouldn't be a soldier alive on this whole world, Blend.' [Picker]
Stephen Erickson
What was boring was somehow more elegant, more perfect, for it was incontrovertible. The boring was everything that certainly was. The boring was everything that had stood the test of time. The boring was that set of truths that were so long fixed that erosion had begun to sand them down. The boring was geological; the boring was universal. The boring, therefore, was preferable.
Rick Moody
Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever — by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,” of “Denmark’s a prison.
Saul Bellow
I always like routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring.
John Green
This is what a place like this does to you. It makes you put words in the beaks of chickens.
Danielle Paige
Boredom is a form of evil; perhaps one of Kierkegaard's characters was more correct when he said, "Boredom is the root of all evil." Boredom is a preview of death, if not itself a form of death, and when trapped in prolonged boredom, even the most saintly of us will hope for, pray for, or even engineer relief, however demonic.
Fred B. Craddock
There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things—her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation—I think of it as 'whole person conversation'—if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness.
Sherry Turkle
Before I shall have become a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness.
Henry Miller
Boredom – the psychological state that we experience whenever we are uninterested in what we are currently doing – is one of the defining traits of humanity. Time is the psychological nemesis of humankind. Tedium, a fundamental angst of humankind, arises from human beings’ ability to perceive time and our attempts to derive meaning from our personal existence.
Kilroy J. Oldster
And besides, I couldn't stay at the party. It was too dangerous. I nearly died.""From what?""Boredom.
Jennifer Donnelly
By dinnertime, Amanda had managed to pick off all of her red nail polish purely out of habit. She was disappointed and silently cursed at herself when she remembered not having anymore to put on. She stared at her fingernails for about twenty minutes for lack of something better to do.
Jason Medina
And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.
Maria Semple
Boredom is that agitated space between relaxation and action; dialed down, it can become a pleasant kind of inertia or a meditative stillness, where it feels good to sit quietly with your own thoughts; cranked up a notch, it can produce creative release. But that middle place is the boredom itself – restlessness with no movement. A dull and desperate longing for something else. From Catastrophic Happiness.
Catherine Newman
She said: “I’m so sick of this joint.”“Why?”“No freedom. I can’t go out. I can’t get drunk or gamble or wear swell clothes…”“They look swell to me.”“Shut up, honey. I’m trying to tell you something. I like to dance. I like good restaurants and night clubs, and movies. Here all I’m supposed to do is think about God. It’s getting me down.”“You don’t like God?”“I can take him or leave him.”I laughed.
Jonathan Latimer
Boredom can be just another construct of the mind....There is always something new to notice.
Ellen Langer
All men, reaching back to Adam in the Garden, plead Ignorance as their defence; when, if we were but honest, we would admit that the apple was hedged with every warning imaginable. So I too fell; perhaps all sins are not causes but effects, being the result of that first sin, Boredom.
K.W. Jeter
He exhaled in disgust. “High school is boredom punctuated by humiliation.
Katie Kennedy
Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which anyhow are larger than you. No doubt you'll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don't think you've goofed somewhere along the line, don't try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as the poet said, "Believe your pain." This awful bear is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won't finally unclasp.
Joseph Brodsky
She would not tell him the truth for some weeks, but she would eventually confess that she had left with him because the fear had gone out of her daily leaps. Her hours were filled with confident, minor feats and toothless dangers. She would not call it such, but Adam would later name it for her: it was boredom that had driven her from her mother’s side and a secure home.
Josiah Bancroft
That thing some people call boredom, in the correct if elusive dosage, can be a form of inoculation against itself. Once you struffle through that swamp of monotony where time bogs down in excruciating ticks from your wristwatch, it becomes possible to break through to a state of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy.
Philip Connors
Boredom is a flight from what is important. Like workaholism and perfectionism, it is a way of distracting yourself from inner experiences. It occurs when you look outward and do not find anything to engage your attention. Instead of feeling your emotions - becoming aware of the functioning of your energy system - you become bored. Boredom ... is a flight from your higher potential. It is fear of the transformation that wants to occur, and will occur in you, when you explore your emotions. It is your resistance to spiritual growth.
Gary Zukav
What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!
Saul Bellow
Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.
Susan Ertz
Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair--or the height of a battle against boredom.
B.F. Skinner
Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine ― that is, activity ― which could solve it, is seen as odious.Archery? It is too cold, and besides, the butts need re-covering; the rats have been at the straw.Music? To hear it is tedious; to compose it, too taxing. And so on.Of all the afflictions, boredom is ultimately the most unmanning.Eventually, it transforms you into a great nothing who does nothing ― a cousin to sloth and a brother to melancholy.
Margaret George
Boredom is your mind and body’s way of telling you you’re not living up to your potential.
Hal Sparks
Boredom is the price one pays for not enjoying everything.
Marty Rubin
Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.
William Inge
I always think boredom is to some extent the fault of the bored.
Kate Ross
You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.
Andy Warhol
Well, if you weren't flirting with him"-his voice had now grown a little plaintive-"who was he, and what did you want with him anyway?""If you are so determined to bore me, I may just have to go home." Astrid sighed carelessly, "What a shame, when I am wearing such a pretty dress.
Anna Godbersen
Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
David Foster Wallace
When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.
Eric Hoffer
Boredom comes from a boring mind.
Metallica
We all want to break our orbits, float like a satellite gone wild in space, run the risk of disintegration. We all want to take our lives in our own hands and hurl them out among the stars.
David Bottoms
When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.
Joseph Brodsky
Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
Saul Bellow
That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll be.
Maria Semple
She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.
Zelda Fitzgerald
If rejections were cash, I'd be rich
Buffy Andrews
I am so over you, Rejection. You can't get to me like that anymore. I won't let you squash my hopes and dreams. (Slams door) So there!
Buffy Andrews
Trying to get an agent is like standing in line to be picked for kickball. Pick me! Pick me! ...Dang, last again.
Buffy Andrews
Today like yesterday and the day before that, I will strive to achieve what tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, I have tried!
Leslie Austin
Airport bars are more like film sets, the bathrooms reminiscent of dormitories. Everyone is waiting to go somewhere, suspended in nowhere...
Christy Hall
Be what you are, all that you are. Wear yourself proudly. It will require that you draw a line, but that line in the sand is your courage.
Christy Hall
Wear yourself proudly.
Christy Hall
That moment when a knot forms in your throat, but you choose to throw your head back and laugh instead.
Christy Hall
I close my eyes and think of what might be possible. And, in my mind, I see fireworks over the Hudson.
Christy Hall
Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.
Truman Capote
you don't have to be great to get started but you have to to get started to be great
Les Brown
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader–not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” -
E.L.Doctorow
They wouldn't have picked you to tell their story if you weren't the one.
N.E. Henderson
Writing isn't only about a completed piece of work.It’s about the writer you’re becoming while creating
T.N. Suarez
Write until your idea becomes reality.
T.N. Suarez
Writing isn't only about a completed piece of work. It's about the writer you're becoming while writing.
T.N. Suarez
Write for a cause,NOT APPLAUSEWrite to express,NOT TO IMPRESS.Writing isn’t just about being noticed…IT'S BEING REMEMBERED
T.N. Suarez
In the writers mind, even a backstory has a backstory.
Terry a O'Neal