Fixation Quotes

Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back, however improbable that might seem to him. Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls. Until now, all the women in his life have been more or less his own age. Pilar therefore does not represent an embodiment of some ideal female type for him
she is merely herself, a small piece of luck he stumbled across one afternoon in a public park, an exception to every rule. ~ Paul Auster

With your desire defined, quietly go within and shut the door behind you. Lose yourself in your desire; feel yourself to be one with it; remain in this fixation until you have absorbed the life and name by claiming and feeling yourself to be and to have that which you desired. When you emerge from the hour of prayer you must do so conscious of being and possessing that which you heretofore desired. ~ Neville Goddard

(P58) It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on "great leaders," Churchill's worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler. ~ Ralph Raico

Here are 3 stylistic quirks from Joe's repertoire:
1. noticing of smells
2. fixation on mouth/teeth
3. the use of lists ~ Sam Riviere

Human existence begins when the lack of fixation of action by instincts exceeds a certain point; when the adaptation to nature loses its coercive character; when the way to act is no longer fixed by hereditarily given mechanisms. In other words, human existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable. Freedom is here used not in its positive sense of "freedom to" but in its negative sense of "freedom from", namely freedom from instinctual determination of his actions. ~ Erich Fromm

When we forgive someone, we don't pretend that the harm didn't happen or cause us pain. We see it clearly for what it was, but we also come to see that fixating on the memory of harm generates anger and sadness. ~ Sharon Salzberg

A fixation is very stubborn: it burrows into the brain and breaks the heart. There are many fixations, but love is the worst. ~ Isabel Allende

The part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of all control let's call our 'unconscious'. Since it's free of control, it's our only defense against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgement, prison.

Ten years ago, it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language that normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning.

But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions.

What is the language of the 'unconcious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: simply pretend that it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, for all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of language or languages that are which aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a series of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes. ~ Kathy Acker

Then, as they began to decline, they all experienced some peculiar similarities: an inordinate emphasis on sports and entertainment, a fixation with lifestyles of the rich and famous, political corruption, and the loss of a moral compass. ~ Ben Carson

EFFERVESCE AND OBSESSION

Under the influence of this sensational climax I am reminded of the inundated calm before the storm as I find my mind to see through those same eyes that I have before. The curving slippage of her dynamic vehemence hums over me in a refreshing fixation that imbues this inseparable bond of the eternities. Her single touch sends shock waves down my entire vessel sending our bodies into a confluence of luscious allure. Her hips begin weaving in and out gently oscillating against me in a balmy nubile urge of effervesce and obsession. Again I occlude her recumbent orifice with the soft clasp of my wet lips, satiating my guest with an all-stimulating and interplanetary escape. In a largo samba-like motion I simultaneously absorb and alleviate the tension lingering beneath her plum fuselage as an overflowing ovulation of seismic and fulminating convulsage travels through the apex of her feminous core, following the crevice between her legs like the gentle waters that flow through the shaded gorge. As she levitates into a liberating reflex of celestial zest her panting grip begins to measure the odometer of our obsession. ~ Luccini Shurod

People don't really care all that much about their own death. What they really worry about, their one real fixation, is how to avoid physical suffering as much as possible. ~ Michel Houellebecq

There's no harm in reviewing the past from time to time; knowing where you've been is part of knowing where you are, and all that happy horse shit. But the American media have an absolute fixation on this. They rob us of the present by insisting on the past. If they were able, I'm sure they would pay equal attention to the future. Trouble is, they don't have any film on it. ~ George Carlin

What is with this campy fixation on all things Ronald Reagan? They talk about him the way gay people talk about Barbra Streisand. I think they just want him on a stamp so they can lick his ass. I think they only named an airport after him so they can say, I'm coming into Reagan! ~ Bill Maher

As the result of some observations I have made in recent years, I propose to add two new and previously undescribed varieties to the various forms of insanity with fixed ideas, whose underlying phenomenology is essentially phobic. The two new terms I would like to put forth, following the nomenclature currently accepted by leading clinicians, are dysmorphophobia and taphephobia.

The first condition consists of the sudden appearance and fixation in the consciousness of the idea of one's own deformity; the individual fears that he has become deformed (dysmorphos) or might become deformed, and experiences at this thought a feeling of an inexpressible disaster… The ideas of being ugly are not, in themselves, morbid; in fact, they occur to many people in perfect mental health, awakening however only the emotions normally felt when this possibility is contemplated.

But, when one of these ideas occupies someone's attention repeatedly on the same day, and aggressively and persistently returns to monopolise his attention, refusing to remit by any conscious effort; and when in particular the emotion accompanying it becomes one of fear, distress, anxiety, and anguish, compelling the individual to modify his behaviour and to act in a pre-determined and fixed way, then the psychological phenomena has gone beyond the bounds of normal, and may validly be considered to have entered the realm of psychopathology.

The dysmorphophobic, indeed, is a veritably unh ~ Enrico Agostino Morselli

The firstdown team for this planet must have had a fixation on animals. Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we were creeping down the east coast of Equus over an irregular coastline called the Mane. We've spent the last day making the crossing of a short span of the Middle Sea to a large island called Cat Key. Today we are offloading passengers and freight at Felix, the "major city" of the island. ~ Dan Simmons

I know that everyone in this room, Bernie Fain included, thinks I'm some kind of a nut with my so-called fixation on this vampire thing. OK, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he only thinks he is. But there are things here that can't be explained away by so-called common sense. Not even Bernie's report can explain some of them.

'I was at the hospital yesterday.' I looked directly at Butcher. 'Your own people fired maybe fifty or sixty rounds at him, some at point-blank range. How come this man never even slowed down? How come a man seventy years old can outrun police cars for more than fifteen blocks? How come when he gets clubbed on the head he doesn't bleed like other people? Look at these photos! There's a gash on his forehead... and whatever is trickling down from the cut is clear... it isn't blood.

'How come three great, big, burly hospital orderlies weighing an estimated total of nearly seven-hundred fifty pounds couldn't bring one, skinny one-hundred sixty pound man to his knees? How come an ex-boxer, a light-heavyweight not long out of the ring, couldn't even faze him with his best punch, a right hook that should have broken his jaw?

'Face it. Whether it's science, witchcraft or black magic, this character has got something going for him you don't know anything about. He doesn't seem to feel pain. Or get winded. And he doesn't seem to be very frightened by guns, or discouraged by your efforts to trap him.

'Look at these photos! Look ~ Jeff Rice

The more consciousness there is in such a sufferer who in despair wills to be himself, the more his despair intensifies and becomes demonic. It usually originates as follows. A self that in despair wills to be itself is pained in some distress or other that does not allow itself to be taken away from or separated from his concrete self. So now he makes precisely this torment the object of all his passion, and finally it becomes a demonic age. By now, even if God in heaven and all the angels offered to help him out of it- no, he does not want that, now it is too late. Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony, but he was kept waiting; now it is too late, now he would rather rage against everything and be the wronged victim of the whole world and of all life, and it is of particular significance to him to make sure that he has his torment on hand and that no one takes it away from him- for then he would not be able to demonstrate and prove to himself that he is right. This eventually becomes such a fixation that for an extremely strange reason he is afraid of eternity, afraid that it will separate him from his, demonically understood, infinite superiority over other men, his justification, demonically understood, for being what he is. ~ Søren Kierkegaard

Gratitude" is about letting go of desired outcomes and fully embracing the privilege and process of pursuing goals and dreams. "Believe" refers to the confidence that arises naturally through this process, a self-trust that is the antithesis of the doubt-fueled fixation on goals and dreams expressed in Siri's nightly fantasy of having the perfect race at the 2000 Olympics. Siri ~ Fitzgerald Matt

The giving of undue prominence to one fact brings others inexorably on the head of the student to avenge his neglect of them, ~ Thomas Hughes

Even if your inner voice is friendlier, the dialogues you have with yourself often have to do with what's weighing on you - things like relationship problems, professional disappointments, health concerns, and the like. Human beings are by nature problem solvers, so in quiet moments, this is where our minds go. Our fixation on what needs to be fixed is why some people can't abide downtime and always have to have something to do so they won't think about what's wrong. However, trying to suppress your inner voice only gives it more power. It gets louder and more insistent, which makes some people get even busier and overscheduled to drown it out. It never works, though. Your inner voice is always there and, if it can't get your attention during the day, it will roust you at 4:00 a.m. Hello! Remember me? ~ Kate Murphy

I have a slight oral fixation. ~ Julie James

The Scripture was given to us to teach and to uplift. To provide a path to God. Occasionally a person fixates on a certain portion, a portion that many of us would consider narrative history
such as the book of Daniel. It is a record of Daniel's experience in exile, in the court of Babylon. We can see God's sovereignty over kings, in this case Nebuchadnezzar." Tate jingled the change in his pocket, unsure where Mitch was headed. "In addition to the historical aspects, there are spiritual lessons to be found within this portion of the Scripture
God's faithfulness to his people and his omnipotence." "But ... " "But when someone fixates on one portion versus the Scripture as a whole, confusion sets in. They pick and choose certain words and use them to justify almost any action." Tate hesitated, then asked, "Even murder?" "Especially murder. ~ Vannetta Chapman

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They're trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by. ~ Maureen Dowd

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly
natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most
of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or
incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);
obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to
believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an
apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness
for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper
respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying
over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation
or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking,
smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and
neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes);
remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual
feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange
admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness,
the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings
for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of
cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness,
and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable
addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. ~ John Gardner

Emotional reactivity flips us into a different mode of attention, one where our world contracts into fixation on what's upsetting us. ~ Anonymous

Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he found himself suddenly accosted by some kind of synaesthetic fixation with the woman: hearing the colour of her hair in the mosque, smelling the touch of her hand on the tube, tasting her smile while innocently walking the streets on his way to work; and this in turn led to a knowledge of every public convenience in London, led to the kind of masturbation that even a fifteen-year-old boy living in Shetlands might find excessive. ~ Zadie Smith

I'm sure Vera would be happy to help you with any research."
He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. "Vera, the librarian? I think I'd like to avoid her as much as possible, although that was some fascinating stuff she shared the other day about bats."
I tried to recall which stuff she'd said about bats. I'd heard it all so many times, it was simply back-ground noise. "She has a long-standing and well-intentioned fixation on the island's bat shortage, but sometimes she's a little, um… tedious."
"Oh, I don't know about tedious," he said casually. "Personally, I found all that stuff about how fruit bats perform fellatio to be quite educational. ~ Tracy Brogan

Holy shit! I think this man has an insatiable oral fixation and I am the grateful recipient! ~ Adler And Holt

I've come to believe in my bones that children - especially children in poverty - are desperate for an education to help them discover a sense of meaning and purpose. Yet, we have decided to narrow our focus to academic achievement, which creates an unhealthy fixation on grades as a sole indicator of self-worth. ~ Shanna Peeples

The proof that the One Stone Solution is political lies in what women feel when they eat 'too much': guilt. Why should guilt be the operative emotion, and female fat be a moral issue articulated with words like good and bad? If our culture's fixation on female fatness of thinness were about sex, it would be a private issue between a woman and her lover; if it were about health, between a woman and herself. Public debate would be far more hysterically focused on male fat than on female, since more men [40 percent] are medically overweight than women [32 percent] and too much fat is far more dangerous for men than for women ...
... But female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women's bodies are not our own but society's, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community. ~ Naomi Wolf

Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed:
1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer;
2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind. ~ Eric Hoffer

There's something about love that resembles faith. It's kind of blind trust, isn't it? The sweetest euphoria. The magic of connecting with a being beyond our limited, familiar selves. But if we get carried away by love- or by faith- it turns into a dogma, a fixation. The sweetness becomes sour. We suffer in the hands of the gods that we ourselves created. ~ Elif Shafak

Have you ever felt your destiny unfolding, beloved? Have you experienced the intensity of the hunt, the fixation of attention that only fate can explain? Have you ever told yourself your feelings were
excessive, but known that something huge and pivotally important was carrying you along like a riptide? You can fight that current all you want; you know it will still have its way with you. Or you can
try swimming along with it, and grow amazed by your own power - until you pause and realize that you aren't moving but being moved. You're not in control, not at all, and that's what makes the feeling so
exquisitely exciting. ~ Martha N. Beck

Oversized houses, like oversized cars, seem to be a particularly American fixation. ~ Susan Orlean

There is a fixation in the human mind for structures, because in a structured life one feels secure, one knows where one is, one knows where one stands in relationship to the other. It seems that because man is born in the womb of the mother and for nine months remains in a structure, that continues deep down in the psyche - and man is always trying to find a structure somewhere. ~ Rajneesh

The fixation of the theater in one language
written words, music, lights, noises
betokens its imminent ruin. ~ Antonin Artaud

I had the fixation that comes with being a Kennedy to be a great man on the big stage. ~ Mark Shriver

Detach from emotions and desires; get rid of any fixations. ~ Zhuge Liang

Start with a girl whose blood has been steeped in Korea for generations, imprinted with Confucianism and shamanism and war. Extract her from the mountains. Plant her in wheat fields between the Red River and the Mississippi. Baptize her. Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real.
See what happens.
Witness a love affair with freaks, a fascination with hermaphrodites and conjoined twins, a fixation on Pisces and pairs of opposites. Trace a dream that won't die: a vision of an old woman slumped on a bench, her spirit sitting straight out of the body, joined to the corpse at the waist. ~ Jane Jeong Trenka

I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream ... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination. ~ Bell Hooks

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history. ~ Thomas Lynch

You see, my version of why anyone would want to become an actor is that it's some psychological fixation, something that happened in puberty that you didn't outgrow in time, which is normal. Nevertheless, if you make it a profession, it can be really neurotic. ~ Christoph Waltz

I didn't ever want to leave Manhattan. I have an abnormal fixation. ~ Charles B. Rangel

Dialogue with Catholics and other nonevangelical Christians offered some correction to the Church Growth movement's fixation on cultural accommodation and baptism rates. However - save for those few who converted - evangelicals attracted to other Christian traditions have made those traditions their own. They assemble do-it-yourself liturgies from a hodgepodge of monastic prayers and mystics' visions. They lionize medieval dissenters - Celtic monks, or renegade Franciscans - but don't understand their broader Catholic context. Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions. History becomes a sidekick to one's twenty-first-century journey with Jesus. ~ Molly Worthen

Get your emotions under control and your life under control. Work really hard and don't make a big deal out of yourself. Have humility. Believe in yourself. Don't get a fanatical fixation on a teacher. ~ Frederick Lenz

Now I help you find her." He stood up from behind the table, smoothed down his tie. "I sit for too long. My leg goes to bed."
"To sleep?"
"Thank you, small person. At rare time, I am making mistake in English-language speaking, so thanks for accurate fixation. Now we find Sarah. You follow. Stay near. There are trivial beings everywhere. ~ Tom Rachman

Fixation is the way to death. Fluidity is the way to life. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

In Old Zen, the Zen Master would do literally anything to break down the concept of what the study was. He would present conflicting codes all the time, just to shake this fixation people had on how to attain liberation. ~ Frederick Lenz

His hate wasn't professional; it was an obsession, a fixation, as if unrequited love had grown awful, twisted into something ugly. ~ Tom Rob Smith

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing. ~ Sarah Manguso

Tradition, long conditioned thinking, can bring about a fixation, a concept that one readily accepts, perhaps not with a great deal of thought. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat. As mouths multiply, food resources dwindle. Land is a limited quantity, and the land that will grow wheat is absolutely dependent on difficult and capricious natural phenomena ... I hope to point a way out of the colossal dilemma. It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities. It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty ... The fixation of atmospheric nitrogen is one of the great discoveries, awaiting the genius of chemists. ~ William Crookes

Power flows to us whenever we need it. It is only the fixation of your assemblage point and your subsequent doings which preclude you from using the power that surrounds us all. ~ Théun Mares

For Aristotle the literary plot was analogous to the plot of the world in that both were eductions from the potency of matter. Sartre denies this for the world, and specifically denies, in the passage just referred to, that without potentiality there is no change. He reverts to the Megaric view of the matter, which Aristotle took such trouble to correct. But this is not our affair. The fact is that even if you believe in a Megaric world there is no such thing as a Megaric novel; not even Paterson. Change without potentiality in a novel is impossible, quite simply; though it is the hopeless aim of the cut-out writers, and the card-shuffle writers. A novel which really implemented this policy would properly be a chaos. No novel can avoid being in some sense what Aristotle calls 'a completed action.' This being so, all novels imitate a world of potentiality, even if this implies a philosophy disclaimed by their authors. They have a fixation on the eidetic imagery of beginning, middle, and end, potency and cause.

Novels, then, have beginnings, ends, and potentiality, even if the world has not. In the same way it can be said that whereas there may be, in the world, no such thing as character, since a man is what he does and chooses freely what he does--and in so far as he claims that his acts are determined by psychological or other predisposition he is a fraud, lâche, or salaud--in the novel there can be no just representation of this, for if the man were entirely free ~ Frank Kermode

When someone "can not" or will not let go of some notion, injustice or loss, a fixation can develop, which can "fix" that person in place. When a person, a soul (or a group), becomes stuck or fixated on some specific perspective or emotion to the exclusion of the bigger picture, one can get a distorted view, one can be lost for a while. I am reminded of the saying one can't see the forest for the trees, for short-sightedness, especially combined with reactive emotions, obstinacy, and even obsessiveness, can cause one to lose all proportion and perspective. One can lose one's bearings; One can get lost. ~ Stephen Poplin

People spend their entire lives fearing the very thing you apparently crave. They do anything they can to delay the process or fool themselves into believing it's farther away than it actually is. With every passing year, with every milestone, they only feel more anxiety, more inclination to defeat this inevitability of nature, only to realize that they've fostered an entire life of crippling fear, wasted on the fixation of its end. And there you sit, begging for it. ~ Luna DeMasi

Feckless Fixation [10w]
Poets worry too much about other poets instead of writing. ~ Beryl Dov

Seven billion people on earth in the early 21st century, and FAITH decided to replicate a nerd slash engineer with a Star Trek fixation. ~ Dennis E. Taylor

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form < ~ Jack Kerouac

The impulse to be looking constantly with central vision is part of a psychophysical syndrome which includes spinal fixation as another characteristic. Tunnel vision -- the use of the macula, or central portion of the retina, to the relative exclusion of the surrounding area -- is hard on/eyes and diminishes their visual potential; it accentuates selective fixation upon objects one after another, missing the whole view and seeing objects as separate from their larger context. It accompanies and fortifies a tunneling habit of mind, a tendency to, fasten onto particular issues or circumstances, to hold doggedly and sometimes with exaggerated emotionality to a point of view, and to be unable to contextualize or to find fresh responses. ~ Alexandra Pierce

Millions of people have wrecked their lives in angry turmoil, because they refused to accept the worst; refused to try to improve upon it; refused to salvage what they could from the wreck. Instead of trying to reconstruct their fortunes, they engaged in a bitter and "violent contest with experience"- and ended up victims of that brooding fixation known as melancholia. ~ Dale Carnegie

Most of this fixation was easy to explain. Brady was a midfield player, a passer, and Arsenal haven't really had one since he left. It might surprise those who have a rudimentary grasp of the rules of the game to learn that a First Division football team can try to play football without a player who can pass the ball, but it no longer surprises the rest of us: passing went out of fashion just after silk scarves and just before inflatable bananas. Managers, coaches and therefore players now favour alternative methods of moving the ball from one part of the field to another, the chief of which is a sort of wall of muscle strung across the half-way line in order to deflect the ball in the general direction of the forwards. Most, indeed all, football fans regret this. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we used to like passing, that we felt that on the whole it was a good thing. It was nice to watch, football's prettiest accessory (a good player could pass to a team-mate we hadn't seen, or find an angle we wouldn't have thought of, so there was a pleasing geometry to it), but managers seemed to feel that it was a lot of trouble, and therefore stopped bothering to produce any players who could do it. There are still a couple of passers in England, but then, there are still a number of blacksmiths. ~ Nick Hornby

Tantra is for the person who has self control but doesn't care anymore. It is for the person who is able to abandon self-control and its fixation. ~ Frederick Lenz

Symptoms of Amor Deliria Nervosa

PHASE ONE:
-preoccupation; difficulty focusing
-dry mouth
-perspiration, sweaty palms
-fits of dizziness and disorientation
-reduced mental awareness; racing thoughts; impaired reasoning skills

PHASE TWO:
-periods of euphoria; hysterical laughter and heightened energy
-periods of despair; lethargy
-changes in appetite; rapid weight loss or weight gain
-fixation; loss of other interests
-compromised reasoning skills; distortion of reality
-disruption of sleep patterns; insomnia or constant fatigue
-obsessive thoughts and actions
-paranoia; insecurity

PHASE THREE (CRITICAL):
-difficulty breathing
-pain in the chest, throat or stomach
-complete breakdown of rational faculties; erratic behavior; violent thoughts and fantasies; hallucinations and delusions

PHASE FOUR (FATAL):
-emotional or physical paralysis (partial or total)
-death

If you fear that you or someone you know may have contracted deliria, please call the emergency line toll-free at 1-800-PREVENT to discuss immediate intake and treatment. ~ Lauren Oliver

But I sometimes think we have too much of a fixation about 2012. ~ Linford Christie

A woman with an extraordinary oral fixation is a rarity, a blessing, a righteous investment. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game. ~ V.S. Pritchett

The couple in the Skyline came to mind. Why did I have this fixation on them? Well, what else did I have to think about? By now, the two of them might be snoozing away in bed, or maybe pushing into commuter trains. They could be flat character sketches for a TV treatment: Japanese woman marries Frenchman while studying abroad; husband has traffic accident and becomes paraplegic. Woman tires of life in Paris, leaves husband, and returns to Tokyo, where she works in Belgian or Swiss embassy. Silver bracelets, a memento from her husband. Cut to beach scene in Nice: woman with the bracelets on left wrist. Woman takes bath, makes love, silver bracelets always on left wrist. Cut: enter Japanese man, veteran of student occupation of Yasuda Hall, wearing tinted glasses like lead in Ashes and Diamonds. A top TV director, he is haunted by dreams of tear gas, by memories of his wife who slit her wrist five years earlier. Cut (for what it's worth, this script has a lot of jump cuts): he sees the bracelets on woman's left wrist, flashes back to wife's bloodied wrist. So he asks woman: could she switch bracelets to her right wrist?

"I refuse," she says. "I wear my bracelets on my left wrist. ~ Haruki Murakami

Greatness needs courage (above all) and willpower, charisma, intelligence and creativity but it also demands characteristics that we often associate with the least admirable people: reckless risk-taking, brutal determination, sexual thrill-seeking, brazen showmanship, obsession close to fixation and something approaching insanity. In other words, the qualities required for greatness and wickedness, for heroism and monstrosity are not too far distant from each other. The Norwegians alone have a word for this: stormannsgalskap – the madness of great men. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

It was just like a digital fixation with cards and math and science and then I started to look at images of great magicians from Houdini down the line. ~ David Blaine

We often confuse determination with its evil twin: fixation. While determination is our ability to stand our ground while pursuing our goals. Fixation, on the other hand, is an unhealthy attachment to an ideal. ~ Venugopal Gupta

The first time I watched him fight, I got hard. My heart pounded in my chest, and I chewed on my lip until it bled. I vowed then I would make him mine. ~ Kasia Bacon

The real enemy of happiness is the mind's fixations and delusions ... If you have the right mind, you can overcome anything - you can be happy, no matter what. ~ Dalai Lama

Help. We can be freed from a damaging insistence on forward thrust, from a commitment to running wildly down a convenient path that might actually be taking us deeper into the dark forest. Praying "Help" means that we ask that Something give us the courage to stop in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems. We stop the toxic peering and instead turn our eyes to something else: to our feet on the sidewalk, to the middle distance, to the hills, whence our help comes - someplace else, anything else. Maybe this is a shift of only eight degrees, but it can be a miracle. It may be one of those miracles where your heart sinks, because you think it means you have lost. But in surrender you have won. And if it were me, after a moment, I would say, Thanks. ~ Anne Lamott

THE SELF IS THE ROOT of the mental poisons. Our mind fabricates, projects, and attaches concepts to people and things. Egocentric fixation reinforces the qualities or defects that we attribute to others. From ~ Dalai Lama XIV

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. ~ Mary McCarthy

Favorite sexual position?""My face. Between your legs." My laughter choked off as heat flushed my cheeks. Right. Oral fixation. "Um…" I swallowed. "Isn't that more of a foreplay position? ~ Jaine Diamond

The first trip I remember taking was on the train from Virginia up to New York City, watching the summertime countryside rolling past the window. They used white linen tablecloths in the dining car in those days, and real silver. I love trains to this day. Maybe that was the beginning of my fixation with leisurely modes of travel. ~ Billy Campbell

Suddenly everything became clear. Tella understood why Legend showed up in her dreams but kept his distance, refusing to touch her until tonight, right before making an offer to change her. Last night she'd thought Legend had real feelings for her – that he could love her. But it was the opposite. Legend wasn't changing – he was hoping to change her.
And she didn't believe it was so that she wouldn't die. Legend wanted to make her immortal so that he wouldn't die.
He didn't love her. He was afraid of falling in love with her, because love was his one weakness. If Legend loved her, he'd lose his immortality and become human. But he wouldn't have to worry about it if she was immortal, because immortals couldn't love each other.
Immortals felt obsession, fixation, lust, possession. And Legend was clearly experiencing those things. ~ Stephanie Garber

One resourceful mom took her son's fixation on the video game Minecraft and made real wood "Minecraft" blocks for her son and the neighborhood kids to play with. This provided a connection between building things in the virtual world and building structures in the real world. ~ Rich Weinfeld

In the dark jaws, where all things tumble, where societies crumble and old men stumble, love is the air we breathe, the earth we walk on, the economy we function in. It's not a passion or a fixation or a desire or a guilt. Love should have been a conduct, a process of life, an axiom, a grandeur we evolve ... Its connective nature, its transferal powers, make utter sense. ~ Arthur Nersesian

To be fixated on Sahaja Samadhi is to be fixated. To be fixated on the idea of being not fixated is fixation too. All these ideas and definitions about enlightenment become silly. ~ Frederick Lenz

It's hard for your mom to tell you she has an oral fixation and has to have something in her mouth. My step dad is in the kitchen winking at me. You down with OPP, yeah you know me. Exciting is and a special ... What? Easy, and why do you know all the words? That's weird. ~ David Spade

The mice were furious."
[...]
"Oh yes," said the old man mildly.
"Yes well so I expect were the dogs and cats and duckbilled platypuses, but..."
"Ah, but they hadn't paid for it you see, had they?"
"Look," said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
[...]
"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we've got to build another one."
Only one word registered with Arthur.
"Mice?" he said.
"Indeed Earthman."
"Look, sorry - are we talking about the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming in early sixties sit coms?"
Slartibartfast coughed politely.
"[...] These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyperintelligent pandimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front."
The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued.
"They've been experimenting on you, I'm afraid. ~ Douglas Adams

She has a fixation on love. Strong trouble. The girl left her window open one clear night and it crawled into her body while she was asleep. There's no spell can cure it. ~ Isabel Allende