Personal Stagnation Quotes

My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together.

Most men are essentially dead by thirty.

I had progressed on stage as a performer, but I hadn't progressed as a human being.

I don't wanna get old and stagnant and hang around.

I wrote 'Monster' and thought that it would solve a lot of my problems, that I'd have money in the bank, but I felt no different. I was still searching for something.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.

Emile Saint-Blague had been a lively, versatile painter in his youth, but he had abused his energy by painting too many pictures; so that in what might have been the ripe period of his art he had nothing left but ideas. A man who has nothing left but ideas may be of great service to his friends, but he is of no use at all to himself. Emile was certainly an inspiration to his friends.

I'm just tired and bored with myself.

It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.

Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven’t the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren’t worth a goddamned thing.

The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.

Some people are like that - closed - they can't learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can't learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.

For 15 years, I've been playing the same character - which is myself - and I'm bored with 'myself'.

Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks.

I just didn't like the idea of doing reunions, period. I could only see it as I'd just be going over the same old ground. I'm only years older and fatter and I'll just do an older, fatter version of me.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

I realized when I was 23 that I had never really tried anything.

I keep renaming my motives, but continue doing the same things.

Advancing waves of other people’s progress sweep over the unchanging man and wash him out.

When you constantly revisit things, it's hard to know if you're freezing in time or if you're a brilliant adult who's working through it. I think about that in therapy, talking about the same things over and over again.

People transform in some ways, and they remain exactly the same in others. Often, the thing you'd like to change the most about yourself is where you will forever remain stuck.

We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone.

To me it meant, just looking at it from a Maya point of view, it meant that Paul Miles is always moving laterally in his life. And she just wants him to take a couple of steps forward, you know?

It would be nice to be in one place for a while and have a social life again and get a job. But I'm not qualified to do anything. That's the problem.