Emotional Stagnation Quotes

I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

Do you know how much thinking and feeling I’ve done? It’s terrible. And nothing’s come of it.

Emotion without action is irrelevant.

Someone who does not run toward the allure of love walks a road where nothing lives.

I was a thirteen-year-old boy for thirty years.

Many peoples' tombstones should read 'Died at 30, burried at 60.'

Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.

Depression is inertia.

When you lock everything down tight so that the pain can't get out, you also keep good stuff from getting in.

Winning and losing are both very temporary things. Having done one or the other, you move ahead. Gloating over a victory or sulking over a loss is a good way to stand still.

There are people who never experience that, who remain closed until death, from fear of change.

And if you think that you're showing your love to Catherine by suffering the way you've been doing, then somewhere along the way, I must have messed up in raising you." "You didn't mess up...." "I must have. Because when I look at you, I see myself, and to be honest, I'd rather see someone different. I'd like to see someone who learned that it's okay to go on, that it's okay to find someone that can make you happy. But right now, it's like I'm looking in the mirror and seeing myself twenty years ago.

Lack of emotion causes lack of progress and lack of motivation.

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.

Judging yourself to be full of virtue paralyses. Judging yourself to be full of guilt also paralyses.

Even a good place gets to be a rut, especially if you're standing in it alone... Alone and lonely have the same root.

So many people prefer to live in drama because it's comfortable. It's like someone staying in a bad marriage or relationship - it's actually easier to stay because they know what to expect every day, versus leaving and not knowing what to expect.

One of the things that 'Too Bright' refers to is how there's a lot of times where I see things that I could change that could make me more contented, but I usually just don't make those changes because they seem new and scary. I just stay where I'm at, even if I'm miserable, because I'm familiar with it.

I think it was Freud who said that we're all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13.

Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.

To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.

Mental inertia is death.

Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.