Quotes by Authors - Page 286

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
Just lay down on the beach, with nothing intellectual or constructive to do , other than soaking in the sun, and listening to the refreshing sounds of the water waves and admiring the smiles of the ́near and dear ́ ones that we love.
Tina Sequeira
He exhaled in disgust. “High school is boredom punctuated by humiliation.
Katie Kennedy
Unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people's lives as a distraction from their own.
Javier Marías
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
All men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.
Søren Kierkegaard
Already a connoisseur of boredom, Tony extended his acquaintance with Salisbury's furnished lodgings and the cheap residential hotels of Andover.
Hilary Spurling
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
Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
One mood can be replaced by another, but it is impossible to leave attunement altogether. However, profound boredom brings us as close to a state of un-attunement as we can come.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
Animals can be understimulated, but hardly bored.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
Boredom comes simply from ignorance and lack of imagination.
Susan Ertz
Boredom, that traitorous devil that posseses us to do things sometimes useless, and often stupid.
Apol Lejano-Massebieau
Something doing every minute' may be a gesture of despair--or the height of a battle against boredom.
B.F. Skinner
A utopia cannot, by definition, include boredom, but the ‘utopia’ we are living in is boring.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.
Ian Fleming
Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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 the price one pays for not enjoying everything.
Marty Rubin
When you feel bored, pump your adrenaline!
Toba Beta
And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on.
Douglas Adams
I always think boredom is to some extent the fault of the bored.
Kate Ross
Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.
G.K. Chesterton
The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.
Bruno Schulz
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
You've already said you were going to kill me," Alex said, "but I didn't think that meant you were going to bore me to death.
Anthony Horowitz
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 is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.
Saul Bellow
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
Albert Camus
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
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
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
André Gide
They wouldn't have picked you to tell their story if you weren't the one.
N.E. Henderson
Write the masterpiece that has not been written.Sing the masterpiece that has not been sung.Paint the masterpiece that has not been painted.Create the masterpiece that has not been created.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Writer's block: when your imaginary friends stop talking to you.
Anonymous
I write because I want express
Anamika Mishra
What they failed to understand was that a creative person can never restrict himself/herself within a particular time-frame. I was no longer a school-going boy. The writer in me revolted – I started to voice my likes and dislikes.
Deepak Ranjan
Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity.
Sarah Colliver
A writer observes you far sharply than others and therefore you find your traits in a book.
Arvind Parashar