Immobilized Quotes

“Nothing speeds brain atrophy more than being immobilized in the same environment: the monotony undermines our dopamine and attentional systems crucial to our brain plasticity.”

“The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitelyadapted to the ecology of the animal. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep.”

“Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.”

“One dead body required two men either to bury it or to transport it to the rear. A wounded soldier, on the other hand, immobilized five men for an indeterminate amount of time; and who knew whether it was even worth the effort.”

“Immobilized in marriage, since long ago, she was taken as rightful property under wedlock. As a side note, I am urged to comment, the curious nature of these terms property and wed-lock; as if doomed to be firmly kept under latch and key, a padlocked yard? Pastures lain fallow occasionally?”

“Jaden felt their boredom, their tired eternity. Beyond that, she felt their dying essence. They were immortal—all-powerful beings—and yet they were powerless against the onslaught of ever-changing time. They were lost in a modern world, one they didn’t have the energy to understand. And, in being lost, they were immobilized against it. Not even their judgments could assuage their exhausted wisdom of forever.”

“I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it must always happen "here" before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves.”

“But I was immobilized—less by another’s static imposition than by my own static will. For the enemy had in thrall my power to choose, which he had used to make a chain for binding me. From bad choices an urge arises; and the urge, yielded to, becomes a compulsion; and the compulsion, unresisted, becomes a slavery—each link in this process connected with the others, which is why I call it a chain—and that chain had a tyrannical grip around me. The new will I felt stirring in me, a will to 'give you free worship' and enjoy what I yearned for, my God, my only reliable happiness, could not break away from the will made strong by long dominance. Two wills were mine, old and new, of the flesh, of the spirit, each warring on the other, and between their dissonances was my soul disintegrating.”

“I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.”