Paralysed Quotes

We become paralysed with fear and guilt, obsessed by 'labels' and become unable to question the reasoning behind our beliefs or indeed realise that it is acceptable to challenge them. Sometimes we simply need to give ourselves permission to break free from the confines of the tribe and find our own way. ~ Carole Carlton

I do not want medical men to discuss whether or not my work is valuable, because I know what it will do. I want them to tell me how best this new knowledge of rapidly restoring paralysed people to health and strength can be applied where it is needed. ~ Elizabeth Kenny

What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don't really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don't you? ~ Daphne Du Maurier

That night, I took a while falling asleep and when I did, I had a strange dream. She was sitting in my rocking chair and rocking herself, her dead eyes fixed on me. I lay on my bed, paralysed with fear, unable to move, unable to scream, my limbs refusing to move to my command. The room was suddenly freezing cold, the heater had probably stopped working in the night because the electricity supply had been cut and the inverter too had run out. At one point, I was uncertain whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that strange space between dreaming and wakefulness, where the soul wanders out of the body and explores other dimensions. What I knew was that I was chilled to the bones, chilled in a way that made it impossible for me to move myself, to lever myself to a sitting position in order to switch the bedside lamp on and check whether this was really happening. I could hear her in my head. Her voice was faint, feathery, and sibilant, as if she was whispering through a curtain of rain. Her words were indistinct, she called my name, she said words that pierced through my ears, words that meshed into ice slivers in my brain and when I thought finally that I would freeze to death an ice cold tiny body climbed into the quilt with me, putting frigidly chilly arms around me, and whispered, 'Mother, I'm cold.' Icicles shot up my spine, and I sat up, bolt upright in my bed, feeling the covers fall from me and a small indent in the mattress where something had been, a moment ago. There ~ Kiran Manral

The English remained paralysed by their own rivalries until the following April, at which point Aethelred made an invaluable contribution to the war effort by dropping dead, clearing the way for Edmund to succeed him. ~ Marc Morris

A small girl became increasingly paralysed by her parents' frequently violent rows.
Sometimes she would spend hours standing completely still in the toilet, simply
because that was where she happened to be when the fight began.
Finally, in moments of calm, she would take bottles of milk from the fridge or
doorstep and leave them in places where she may later become trapped. Her
parents were unable to understand why they found bottles of sour milk in every
room in the house. ~ Sarah Kane

The problems of this world are so gigantic that some are paralysed by their own uncertainty. Courage and wisdom are needed to reach out above this sense of helplessness. Desire for vengeance against deeds of hatred offers no solution. An eye for an eye makes the world blind. If we wish to choose the other path, we will have to search for ways to break the spiral of animosity. To fight evil one must also recognize one's own responsibility. The values for which we stand must be expressed in the way we think of, and how we deal with, our fellow humans. ~ Beatrix Of The Netherlands

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. ~ C.S. Lewis

He undressed, lay down, put out the light. Two names he whispered into his pillow, the few chaste northern syllables that meant for him his true and native way of love, of longing and happiness; that meant to him life and home, meant simple and heartfelt feeling. He looked back on the years that had passed. He thought of the dreamy adventures of the senses, nerves, and mind in which he had been involved; saw himself eaten up with intellect and introspection, ravaged and paralysed by insight, half worn out by the fevers and frosts of creation, helpless and in anguish of conscience between two extremes, flung to and fro between austerity and lust; raffiné, impoverished, exhausted by frigid and artificially heightened ecstasies; erring, forsaken, martyred, and ill -- and sobbed with nostalgia and remorse. ~ Thomas Mann

Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself. ~ Fredric Jameson

My world falls apart, crumbles, "The centre cannot hold." There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom - I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go. ~ Sylvia Plath

Change, of course, is growth, and anything that is not growing is either paralysed or it's not alive, because that's life; we always change and we grow. ~ Isabel Lucas

As the new year began, [Patricia Highsmith] felt completely paralysed, incapable of reading or picking up the phone. 'I can feel my grip loosening on my self,' she wrote. 'It is like strength failing in the hand that holds me above an abyss.' She wished there was a more awful-sounding word for what she was feeling than simply 'depression'. She wanted to die, she said, but then realised that the best course of action would be to endure the wretchedness until it passed. Her wish was, 'Not to die, but not to exist, simply, until this is over'. ~ Andrew Wilson

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed. ~ Steven Soderbergh

I have always known that there were spellbinding evil parts for women. For one thing, I was taken at an early age to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Never mind the Protestant work ethic of the dwarfs. Never mind the tedious housework-is-virtuous motif. Never mind the fact that Snow White is a vampire
anyone who lies in a glass coffin without decaying and then comes to life again must be. The truth is that I was paralysed by the scene in which the evil queen drinks the magic potion and changes her shape. What power, what untold possibilities! ~ Margaret Atwood

We are standing face to face with the barbarians. The enemy is no longer outside but inside the City, and the ruling ideology, paralysed, is incapable of spotting him. It stammers, overcome by its own moral disarmament, and is giving up: this is the time to seize the reins. Present society is an accomplice to the evil that is devouring it. ~ Guillaume Faye

One time I nearly experienced failure was when I was acting in 'Hum Aapke Hain Kaun' in 1994. One day, I woke up and found that part of my face was paralysed. ~ Anupam Kher

Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed and is in any case something difficult of access, bound and paralysed. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

This is its ancient soul, the quiet place, away from all its beats and rhythms. And my mind is unable to comprehend the sheer expanse of it. It's as though I've suddenly blinked and found myself standing on a tightrope strung between two skyscrapers. I am paralysed by awe. The feeling you get when confronted by something infinite and inevitable and indifferent to you. ~ Kirsty Eagar

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
- The Hollow Men ~ T. S. Eliot

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body ... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth. ~ George Orwell

Let us drink deep brothers,' he cried, leaving off his strange anointment for a while, to lift a great glass, filled with sparkling liquor, to his lips. 'Let us drink to our approaching triumph. Let us drink to the great poison, Macousha. Subtle seed of Death, - swift hurricane that sweeps away Life, - vast hammer that crushes brain and heart and artery with its resistless weight, -I drink to it.'

'It is a noble concoction, Duke Balthazar,' said Madame Filomel, nodding in her chair as she swallowed her wine in great gulps. 'Where did you obtain it?'

'It is made,' said the Wondersmith, swallowing another great draught of wine ere he replied, 'in the wild woods of Guiana, in silence and in mystery. Only one tribe of Indians, the Macoushi Indians, know the secret. It is simmered over fires built of strange woods, and the maker of it dies in the making. The place, for a mile around the spot where it is fabricated, is shunned as accursed. Devils hover over the pot in which it stews; and the birds of the air, scenting the smallest breath of its vapour from far away, drop to earth with paralysed wings, cold and dead.'

'It kills, then, fast?' asked Kerplonne, the artificial-eye maker, - his own eyes gleaming, under the influence of the wine, with a sinister lustre, as if they had been fresh from the factory, and were yet untarnished by use.

'Kills?' echoed the Wondersmith, derisively; 'it is swifter than thunderbolts, stronger than lightni ~ Fitz-James O'Brien

I've been on some very good horses which have died, and that's very tough to take. But as much as we love the horses, and care for them, human life is obviously more important. Some good friends of mine have died or been paralysed while doing a job we all love. ~ Tony McCoy

Churchill often reflected on this near-death episode and the effect of chance. 'You may walk to the right or to the left of a particular tree, and it makes the difference whether you rise to command an Army Corps or are sent home crippled or paralysed for life. ~ Phil Mason

A reasonable estimate of economic organisation must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralysed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely economic. ~ R. H. Tawney

It is well known that in exchange for visionary powers, artists often suffer with extreme sensitivity and violent changeability of temperament. A philosophical crisis, or simply boredom of inactivity, could send [Holmes] spinning into a paralysed gloom from which [I] could not retrieve him. ~ Bonnie MacBird

I die a little more, still in silence, paralysed by you, in fear, in pain. ~ Poppet

One thing that is guaranteed not to work. Doing Nothing. A goldmine when you realise it. Don't be paralysed by analysis. Don't be paralysed by fear. The one thing that is guaranteed not to work. Doing nothing achieves nothing. ~ Tony Curl

Like the bronze statue of the Angel of the Waters, those who pursue perfection find themselves paralysed by the possibility of flaw, fault or failure. ~ Jamie Le Fay

In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. ~ Karl Marx

He that was healed wist not who it was. John 5:13 Years are short to the happy and healthy; but thirty-eight years of disease must have dragged a very weary length along the life of the poor impotent man. When Jesus, therefore, healed him by a word, while he lay at the pool of Bethesda, he was delightfully sensible of a change. Even so the sinner who has for weeks and months been paralysed with despair, and has wearily sighed for salvation, is very conscious of the change when the Lord Jesus speaks the word of power, and gives joy and peace in believing. The evil removed is too great to be removed without our discerning it; the life imparted is too remarkable to be possessed and remain inoperative; and the change wrought is too marvellous not to be perceived. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Something in her chest came to life where her heart should have been; something made of living metal and current. Voltage coursed through her body. Frantic branches of lightning jumped out of her, scorching the walls. Tabitha was paralysed; ~ Andrew Hall

The lack of social support and sympathy is an additional trial: disabled, but with the nature of her disability not clear - she is not, after all, manifestly blind or paralysed, manifestly anything - she tends to be treated as a phoney or a fool. ~ Oliver Sacks

Perfectionism kills art. I find that if I criticise myself, it spoils the fun. You can get paralysed by analysis - it takes all the playfulness away. ~ Geri Halliwell

So we climb," Meg announced.
"Hello?" I said miserably. "Paralysed former god here."
Grover grimaced at Meg. "Duct tape?"
"Duct tape," she agreed.
May the gods defend me from heroes with duct tape. And heroes always seem to have duct tape. Meg produced a roll from a pouch on her gardening belt. She propped me into a sitting position, back-to-back with Grover, then proceeded to loop tape under our armpits, binding me to the satyr as if I were a hiking pack.
With Meg's help, Grover staggered to his feet, jostling me around so I got random views of the walls, the floor, Meg's face and my own paralysed legs manspreading beneath me. ~ Rick Riordan

The image of a teenage boy dressed in a black uniform, his babyish face partly obscured by an official looking cap, paralysed every muscle and nerve in her body. The pink telegram loomed large in her line of sight... ~ Michael J. Murphy

There's never been a game plan, and I suppose I've had an uneasy relationship with my ambition. Someone who had been in my year at drama school once said to me that I was terrifyingly ambitious back then. Which was not at all what I felt at the time - I felt paralysed with shyness, though that evaporated. ~ Jennifer Ehle

He started touching me. 'How old are you?' He ran his hands over my nose, my mouth, my eyes. I was paralysed. 'Nine. What about you?' 'Nine.' 'When's your birthday?' 'The twelfth of September. And yours?' 'The Twentieth of November.' 'What's your name?' 'Michele. Michele Amitrano. What year are you in at school?' 'The fourth. What about you?' 'The fourth.' 'Same.' 'Same' 'I'm thirsty.' I gave him the bottle ~ Niccolo Ammaniti

The problems were too evident, they sat together eyeing them in silence. The stage now belonged to the young people, there would be happenings. Yet nothing happened; and Clement felt as if a magic spell had paralysed them all. ~ Iris Murdoch

If I have to spend prolonged periods of time in a trailer, I go mad. Stuck in a metal box doing nothing, I lie there paralysed with boredom. ~ Romola Garai

The state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these mistakes occurs, a decline in collective enthusiasm is reflected by a resulting quantitative decrease of the contribution of each individual, each of the elements forming the whole of the masses. Work is so paralysed that insignificant quantities are produced. It is time to make a correction. ~ Che Guevara

A warrior of light, once he has done his duty and transformed his intention into gesture, need fear nothing else: he has done what he should have done. He did not allow himself to be paralysed by fear. Even if the arrow failed to hit the target, he will have another opportunity, because he did not give in to cowardice. ~ Paulo Coelho

Attacking or fleeing are part of the struggle; being paralysed by fear is not. ~ Paulo Coelho

Through these days Bunny made increasingly frequent and protracted visits to the bathroom, beating off with a single-minded savagery intense even by Bunny's standards. Now, sitting on the sofa with a large Scotch, his cock feels and looks like something that has been involved in a terrible accident - a cartoon hotdog, maybe, that has made an unsuccessful attempt to cross a busy road.
The boy sits beside him and the two of them are locked in a parenthesis of mutual zonkedness. Bunny Junior stares blankly at the encyclopedia open in his lap. His father watches the television, smokes his fag and drinks his whisky, like an automaton.
After a time, Bunny turns his head and looks at his son and clocks the way he stares at his weird encyclopedia. He sees him but he can't really believe he is there. What does this kid want? What is he supposed to do with him? Who is he? Bunny feels like an extinct volcano, lifeless and paralysed. Yeah, he thinks, I feel like an extinct volcano - with a weird little kid to look after and a mangled sausage for a dick. ~ Nick Cave

And what little she allowed herself to say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity paralysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech. ~ Marcel Proust

I was a telemarketer in my senior year at high school. I had to sell prosthetic limbs to paralysed veterans. I was making 150 bucks a week and it was horrible. ~ Big Sean

Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was by Socrates, the model of loved objects, of captivating images, or again converted by an apparition, nothing distinguishing the path of enamoration from the Road to Damascus; subsequently ensnared, held fast, immobilised, nose stuck to the image (the mirror). In that moment when the other's image comes to ravish me for the first time, I am nothing more than the Jesuit Athanasius Kirchner's wonderful Hen: feet tied, the hen went to sleep with her eyes fixed on the chalk line, which was traced not far from her beak; when she was untied, she remained motionless, fascinated, "submitting to her vanquisher," as the Jesuit says (1646); yet, to waken her from her enchantment, to break off the violence of her Image-repertoire (vehemens animalis imaginatio), it was enough to tap her on the wing; she shook herself and began pecking in the dust again. ~ Roland Barthes

I think a reason that a lot of people feel politically paralysed is that it used to be clear how power was organised. But those who have their hands on the levers of popular culture today have great power - and it isn't even clear who they are. ~ Susan Faludi

He was totally in thrall to the face of the girl in front of him. She stunned him. She paralysed him. Just being in the presence of that face made him pause, his tongue tied with self-consciousness. But she made it easy for him ~ Tony Parsons