Wallowing Quotes

Somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. ~ Harper Lee

Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement - colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism Excuse me. ~ Thomas Pynchon

I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away. ~ Iain M. Banks

But would it be that easy? To adjust my lens a little? To stop wallowing in all this murky sorrow? To change my attitude, let the sunlight in, fix myself? ~ Lauren Fox

Wallowing on the smooth surface of their self-satisfaction, many are merely counting the shadows on the wall of their ennui, adding up the numerous illusions and indulging in the comforting lies and ignoring the unpleasant truths. ("Bread and Satellite") ~ Erik Pevernagie

It was an old hunter in camp and the hunter shared tobacco with him and told him of the buffalo and the stands he'd made against them, laid up in a sag on some rise with the dead animals scattered over the grounds and the herd beginning to mill and the riflebarrel so hot the wiping patches sizzled in the bore and the animals by the thousands and the tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual square miles of ground the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot loose at the tang and their shoulders were yellow and blue to the elbow and the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twenty-two ox teams and the flint hides by the hundred ton and the meat rotting on the ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror of snarling and feeding with the wolves half-crazed and wallowing in the carrion.

I seen Studebaker wagons with six and eight ox teams headed out for the grounds not hauling a thing but lead. Just pure galena. Tons of it. On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there were eight million carcasses for that's how many hides reached the railhead. Two years ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of eight animals and we killed them and come in. They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if ~ Cormac McCarthy

write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers. Title ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Poor me. There's nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The Drunken Fisherman"

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.

A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot--
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout--
The fisher's fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.
Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls
Its bloody waters into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and Creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.

Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher's sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when ~ Robert Lowell

John Delany had slowly evolved into a working class hero from days of wallowing in the primordial ooze of petty crime ~ Candice Fox

If we have a relationship with Jesus Christ and believe the Bible to be the Word of God, then we have no room for wallowing in the swamp of self-pity. ~ Lois Mowday Rabey

We have bigger things to brood on and enormous reasons for wallowing in terminal craziness until we finally hit bottom. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Oh, honey," she says when I'm done with my wallowing, "it's like my grandma used to say: Just when you think life's got you in a gutter, a tornado will come along and destroy your house."
"And then you rebuild?" I ask.
"Well, she never mentioned that part, but I suppose it could happen."
I am not cheered up. ~ David Levithan

The greatest gift ... is the realization that life does not consist either of wallowing in the past or of peering anxiously at the future; and it is appalling to contemplate the great number of often painful steps by which one arrives at a truth so old, so obvious, and so frequently expressed. It is good for one to appreciate that life is now. Whatever it offers, little or much, life is now-this day-this hour. ~ Charles Macomb Flandrau

What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don't I ever learn? Why don't I ever do anything different? ~ Charles Yu

We are not quite conscious of the reason for our disdain when we refer to the illiterate past as wallowing in ignorance ... What divides us from them is the column of print. Theirs was a total culture involving all the senses, while ours is a culture concentrated in the literate eye. ~ Nick Joaquin

Indecision is fatal. It is better to make a wrong decision than build up a habit of indecision. If you're wallowing in indecision, you certainty can't act - and action is the basis of success ~ Marie Beynon Lyons Ray

Theatre is castigated for wallowing in self-indulgence, but it's curiously unsentimental. You simply have to move on. Everything passes. Something in me likes that. ~ Richard Eyre

Life is much too short to waste time wallowing in the past especially when the future hands you a second chance.

Chakotay Talking to B'Ellana (When she asks him why he isn't mad her for lying about her and Miral being dead)
Book:Unworthy: pg. 121 ~ Kirsten Beyer

Dostoevky's lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity - all this is difficult to admire. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

And maybe if I can find a way to stop being scared, I'll actually figure out how to make friends. To be strong. To stop wallowing in my own problems. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies ... despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level. ~ Paul Shepard

Reformers should aim at delivering men from the temptations of sloth no less than from the temptations of ambition, avarice and the lust for power and position. Conversely, no reform which leaves the masses of the people wallowing in the slothful irresponsibility of passive obedience to authority can be counted as genuine change for the better. ~ Aldous Huxley

Do not waste time trying to overcome your weaknesses and failures. Simply raise your consciousness, transcend and free your thoughts from limitation and illusion, and find within the very center of your being a wholeness and completeness! Cease wallowing in your imperfections and never accept limitations! Aim high, and you will get there. It is only your thoughts that hold you back. ~ Eileen Caddy

Friends challenge the flaws in our thinking and the flaws in our character. When they do that, they make us better. Good friends hold us to a higher standard when we are ready to make an excuse for ourselves. Friends sympathize with our pain, but they stop us from wallowing in it. Friends point out our blind spots, and they do so not with vindictiveness or cruelty, but out of honesty, love, and a desire that we live the fullest and best life possible. ~ Eric Greitens

She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back. You couldn't cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber ... forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers ... But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter.
Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly lonely.
It was important to have a really good book. ~ Laura Florand

Valentines Day is a day we celebrate real love. A love so strong that two hearts become one. Yeah, when you're happy, she's happy. And when you're angry, she's angry. And when you start wallowing in self-pity because your hotrod shop tanks and everybody's against you so you start drinking. And then she moves out and goes and lives with her parents, pfft. Or was that the day after Valentines Day? Doesn't matter. I'll go get another one just like her. ~ Christopher Titus

Prizing elegance, sweet emotions, and fantasy more than morals and truth; wallowing in fleeting romance rather than trying to give meaning to life, when who knows what's going to happen to you anyway; ignoring virtue and conventions to cherish only the pleasures you are definitely experiencing now: this is the Cocoro of Rococo. No matter how much deep thought, hard work, and agonizing effort went into coaxing out some insight, if that insight is boring, or not beautiful, it doesn't matter. And even if something is made just for laughs, if you find it pleasing, it has value. Other people's opinions and labor do not figure into your assessment; choosing things with your own personal sense of "I like this, I don't like that" is the ultimate individualism that sustains the very foundation of Rococo. Rococo, therefore, embodies the spirit of punk rock and anarchism more than any philosophy. Only in Rococo - elegant yet in bad taste, extravagant yet defiant and lawless - can I discover the meaning of life. ~ Novala Takemoto

He who does not understand the supreme certainty of mathematics is wallowing in confusion. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Politicians seldom if ever get [into public office] by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged… Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic? Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can't fulfill - that no human being could fulfill? Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm or alienate any of the huge pack of morons who cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope?

Answer: maybe for a few weeks at the start… But not after the issue is fairly joined, and the struggle is on in earnest… They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants. They'll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable. They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money no one will have to earn. When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty, n.

In brief, they w ~ H.L. Mencken

Similarly with regard to truth, won't we say that a soul is maimed if it hates a voluntary falsehood, cannot endure to have one in itself, and is greatly angered when it exists in others, but is nonetheless content to accept an involuntary falsehood, isn't angry when it is caught being ignorant, and bears its lack of learning easily, wallowing in it like a pig? ~ Plato

I am not exactly wallowing in guilt at the moment, but guilt is guilt.It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. ~ J.D. Salinger

Get on with you, mooning about, wallowing in gooey sentiment. It doesn't change anything.
"It does, though," said Tess, a blaze igniting in her heart, a blue flame. "Maybe the world isn't really different, but I am different, and I am in the world."
Not just in it. She was it. ~ Rachel Hartman

We are not going to win because you have a new head coach, any more than you are going to fix a flat tire by changing the driver. We will win the minute all of us get rid of excuses as to why we can't win and stop wallowing in self-pity. ~ Lou Holtz

If [Sean] doesn't see me a few days or if I'm really, really busy, and I just sort of get a glimpse of him, or if I'm feeling depressed without him even seeing me, he sort of picks up on it. And he starts getting that way. So I can no longer afford to have artistic depressions. If I start wallowing in a depression, he'll start coming down with stuff, so I'm sort of obligated to keep up. And sometimes I can't, because something will make me depressed and sure as hell he'll get a cold or trap his finger in a door or something, and so now I have sort of more reason to stay healthy or bright ... ~ John Lennon

I had great memories of growing up in a working class estate. I remember it being sunny all the time. So we're putting that on screen. It's not people wallowing in degradation. ~ Ricky Gervais

You can victimize yourself by wallowing around in your own past. ~ Wayne Dyer

Change is uncomfortable and awkward at first. It has a ripping effect on those who refuse to go along with it. It is not fixed by crying, or worrying, or wallowing in self-pity and mental anguish. ~ Kcat Yarza

I'm wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It's a real enjoyment. ~ David Bowie

The inartistic methods that we use to blunt anxiety and unartful expedients that we resort to in order to escape pain and numb banality reveals what we dread most, the act of suffering from a mortal loss or the debasement that we earn by wallowing in our decadent acts of escapism. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Courage
It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap. ~ Anne Sexton

The Enemy dug his claws into Paul, but the deeper he dug, the more the apostle learned about grace. Rather than wallowing in pain to bring attention to himself, Paul rejoiced in his pain and directed the attention to God. Satan always loses when people in pain learn that God's grace is sufficient-regardless of whether He removes the pain. ~ Chuck Lawless

Beautiful' is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we're second-class citizens. ~ Jessica Valenti

Who is to say that prayers have any effect? On the other hand, who is to say they don't? I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat, mischievous as a pack of ten-year-olds with a sick cat to play with and a lot of time on their hands. 'Which prayer shall we answer today?' they ask one another. 'Let's cast the dice! Hope for this one, despair for that one, and while we're at it, let's destroy the life of that woman over there by having sex with her in the form of a crayfish!' I think they pull a lot of their pranks because they're bored. ~ Margaret Atwood

As with companions so with books. We may choose those which will make us better, more intelligent, more appreciative of the good and the beautiful in the world, or we may choose the trashy, the vulgar, the obscene, which will make us feel as though we've been 'wallowing in the mire. ~ David O. McKay

You've not been sleeping proper," Byrd said accusingly. "I can tell. You've been a-wallowing on your pillow; your hair's a right rat's nest! ~ Diana Gabaldon

Do you think peace of mind can be found in holding a grudge ... or harboring resentment ... or wallowing in thoughts of what could have been? Me neither. ~ Steve Maraboli

Optimism boosts your energy and focuses your sights on reaching your goals, rather than wallowing in your setbacks. ~ Denis Waitley

Right now, make a list of what you admire about yourself- don't stop until you've filled a page. Sit and relish each quality and accomplishment. When you remember how much you have to be proud of, you don't need to envy others. Instead of wallowing in your jealousy, use your friends' accomplishments as inspiration to pursue the life you want. ~ Phil McGraw

What do you do?" Leon leaned forward. "You left the Army and disappeared. How come?"
"Leon," Mother warned.
"Is it because of the war?" Lina asked. "People on Herald say you have PTSD and you became a hermit like a monk because of it."
"Either a hermit or a monk, not both," I corrected out of habit.
"Herald also said he was disfigured." Arabella made big eyes.
"Yes, I'm a hermit. Mostly I brood," Mad Rogan said. "Also I'm very good at wallowing in self-pity. I spend my days steeped in melancholy, looking out the window. Occasionally a single tear quietly rolls down my cheek."
Arabella and Lina snickered in unison.
"Do you also brush a white orchid against your lips?" Arabella put in.
"While sad music plays in the background?" Lina grinned.
"Perhaps," Mad Rogan said.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" Grandma Frida asked.
I put my hand over my face.
"No," Mad Rogan said.
"A boyfriend?" Grandma Frida asked.
"No."
"What about . . ."
"No," Mom and I said in unison.
"But you don't even know what I wanted to ask!"
"No," we said again together.
"Party poopers. ~ Ilona Andrews

In her glamorous quest for the darkest light and the lowest high, she now found herself wallowing on the bottom of a filthy garbage bin. ~ Terri Blackstock

In that moment, I welcomed back the light and let go of the fear, the feelings of unworthiness, the past, the loss, the wallowing, the grief and the anger. I let go of the illusion of control in our losses, of our afflictions. ~ Ariana Carruth

I thought. I thought of the slow yellow autumn in the swamp and the high honey sun of spring and the eternal silence of the marshes, and the shivering light on them, and the whisper of the spartina and sweet grass in the wind and the little liquid splashes of who-knew-what secret creatures entering that strange old place of blood-warm half earth, half water. I thought of the song of all the birds that I knew, and the soft singsong of the coffee-skinned women who sold their coiled sweet-grass baskets in the market and on Meeting Street. I thought of the glittering sun on the morning harbor and the spicy, somehow oriental smells from the dark old shops, and the rioting flowers everywhere, heavy tropical and exotic. I thought of the clop of horses' feet on cobblestones and the soft, sulking, wallowing surf of Sullivan's Island in August, and the countless small vistas of grace and charm wherever the eye fell; a garden door, a peeling old wall, an entire symmetrical world caught in a windowpane. Charlestone simply could not manage to offend the eye. I thought of the candy colors of the old houses in the sunset, and the dark secret churchyards with their tumbled stones, and the puresweet bells of Saint Michael's in the Sunday morning stillness. I thought of my tottering piles of books in the study at Belleau and the nights before the fire when my father told me of stars and butterflies and voyages, and the silver music of mathematics. I thought of hot, milky sweet coffee in the mo ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Silently, wallowing in the pleasures of conspiracy, ~ Truman Capote

The people who ultimately reach their goals are those who don't give up. Instead of wallowing in self-pity or frustration - or throwing in the towel altogether - they explore what didn't work and course-correct. ~ Lauren Mackler

Those who hate, are merely wallowing in self pity. Those who lie about someone to destroy his or her spirit, are simply trying to hide their fragile egos. ~ Emma Paul

Sometimes, you know, I cry. And sometimes I scream. And I get really angry. And I get really upset, you know, into wallowing in self-pity sometimes. And I think that it's all part of the healing. ~ Christina Applegate

< I'd take a cold beer, a hot shower, and a good night's sleep.> He smirked.
< No beer, and I've slept all day - thanks to you. But I have a shower. And I know from experience that it fits one patient and one nurse with minimal cramping.>
< Mmm. Sounds great. A hot shower with a hot guy.>
I laughed, a harsh wheeze that grated my ears. I ignored it. I'd done enough wallowing, and after the day he'd had, I only wanted to be strong and happy for Luke.< That's bold, Nurse. Where's that innocent angel who so expertly sucked my cock yesterday?>
He laughed, too. I loved it. I wished I could get him to break down and actually talk to me, but I was getting pretty good at making him share his laughter. It warmed me from inside.
< Sorry, muffin. Exhausted. My filter must be broken.>
Muffin? I decided I loved it. From him, at least. I reached out, taking his hand. He squeezed, his thumb pressing into the meat of my palm, reminding me of our first real conversation. It did nothing to bank the flames that had distracted me all day. I wondered if there was, in fact, something I could do to help Luke feel good at the end of a shitty shift.
< I wasn't 100% kidding about the shower.>
He grinned.
< But you're cute when you're being tempted.>
He rolled his eyes. < And you're tempting when you're being cute.> ~ Peter Styles

God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment. ~ Aldous Huxley

You need not spend your life wallowing in failure, ignorance, grief, poverty, shame and self-pity. There is a better way to live. ~ Og Mandino

He'd never experienced hate before. It was like an ulcer growing on a tumor, festering and stinking. Late at night or between dreams and sleep, he'd get into it, bathing in the venom, wallowing in thoughts of revenge. In a way, the hate felt good. You were righteous, godlike, the dispenser of justice. Hate dispelled your fears and forged every disappointment, setback, loss, humiliation, and failure that ever happened to you into one massive steel sledgehammer of rage, poised to obliterate, and for one brief, purifying moment, give you relief. ~ Joe Ide

The human race is a letdown, Ernest - a bad, bad letdown. And I'm disgusted with it. It thinks it's progressed, but it hasn't. It thinks it's risen above the primeval slime, but it hasn't. It's wallowing in it. It's still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and to our eyes and to our souls. We've invented a few things that make noises, but we haven't invented one big thing that creates quiet. Endless, peaceful quiet. Something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown, something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions. ~ Noel Coward

And your actual job isn't to educate the public; it's to stroke the collective clit of our consciousness until we all become so cum-numb to the world that we just chase the high and can't see the lows we're all wallowing in. ~ K.I. Hope

One of the mistakes many of us make is that we feel sorry for ourselves, or for others, thinking that life should be fair, or that someday it will be. It's not and it won't. When we make this mistake we tend to spend a lot of time wallowing and/or complaining about what's wrong with life. "It's not fair," we complain, not realizing that, perhaps, it was never intended to be. ~ Richard Carlson

[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered. ~ Iain M. Banks

There is no point in wallowing as this life is as happy as you allow it to be. ~ Avina Celeste

Wallowing in the metaphorical mud of life helps pass time but doesn't really achieve much of any lasting value. ~ Steven Redhead

This was all an excuse, I think. I was doing fine. I had a 93 average and I was holding my head above water. I had good friends and a loving family. And because I needed to be the center of attention, because I needed something more, I ended up here, wallowing in myself, trying to convince everybody around me that I have some kind of ... disease. I don't have any disease. I keep pacing. Depression isn't a disease. It's a pretext for being a prima donna. Everybody knows that. My friends know it; my principal knows it. The sweating has started again. I can feel the Cycling roaring up in my brain. I haven't done anything right. What have I done, made a bunch of little pictures? That doesn't count as anything. I'm finished. My principal just called me and I hung up on him and didn't call back. I'm finished. I'm expelled. I'm finished. ~ Ned Vizzini

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye ~ Robert Lowell

For if after the have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they had known it, to turn from the holy commandment given unto them. But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned unto his own vomit again: and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire. 2 Peter 2:20-22 KJV ~ Robert M. Price

A song has a life of its own. It's an autonomous thing, separate from your own experience, almost. And the mere repetition of it means it's subject to change; it means approaching it differently, expressing different emotional aspects of it. It doesn't feel like wallowing. ~ St. Vincent

I was too busy wallowing in pain and bitterness. Too busy being tragic. ~ Joe Abercrombie

If you suffer misfortune ... do you damnedest to ignore it. Wallowing in what-might-have-beens and what-could have-happeneds will only keep your emotional wounds festering. ~ Shelly Branch

You can kill the spell of identification just as easily as you
can create it - if you lose the readers' sympathy for the character.
You can lose reader sympathy by having your character commit
acts of cruelty to another character with whom the readers identify
more strongly or for whom they have strong sympathy. You
can lose reader sympathy by having the character make dumb
choices - acting at less than maximum capacity. The idiot in
the horror story who responds to creepy noises by going into
the attic armed only with a candle is an example. You can lose
reader sympathy when a character seems too ordinary, is stereotyped,
or doesn't struggle hard enough. The reader wants to
cheer a fighter, not witness a milquetoast wallowing in, say, selfpity. ~ James N. Frey

I was wallowing in a small, but beautifully decorated pity party, complete with imaginary streamers.... ~ Alicia Buck

I felt like I could get away with calling it Black Hours. That could easily be the most depressing record ever written, but because there is this sense of fun throughout the whole thing I felt like I could get away with it. Like "5 A.M."; that song's in a minor key and I'm just wailing away and it could have been just wallowing depression, but it's not. ~ Hamilton Leithauser

The Lord is not serious. In fact, it is a little hard to know just what else He is except loving. And love has to do with humor, doesn't it? For you cannot love someone unless you put up with him, can you? And you cannot put up with someone constantly unless you can laugh at him. Isn't that true? And certainly we are rediculous little animals wallowing in the fudge bowl, and God must love us all the more because we appeal to his humor. ~ Ray Bradbury

I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now. I suppose life always ends badly for almost everybody. We must have long fingers and catch at whatever we can while it is passing near us. ~ Tennessee Williams

It would be wise to define 'living' as walking in the fullest expression of who I am, verses wallowing in the confines of who I'm not. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

But I think it is so important to not rush the process of grief- & I do not mean moping & wallowing. There's a difference, & often the three get mixed into the same cake & presented as- SELFISH (& often times self-inflicted) AGONY.
Not the same thing. ~ Ashley Nikole

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. ~ Aldous Huxley

I could not even imagine any place of secondary importance for myself, and for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the most insignificant one in real life. Either a hero or dirt - there was no middle way. That turned out to be my undoing, for while wallowing in dirt I consoled myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero overlaid the dirt: an ordinary mortal, as it were, was ashamed to wallow in dirt, but a hero was too exalted a person to be entirely covered in dirt, and hence I could wallow in dirt with an easy conscience. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Guilt is a huge player in the way blacks and whites relate to each other. It's huge and deadly when it is denied. It's huge and deadly when it is wallowed in. It's huge and deadly when it is exploited. There is no deliverance and no relief and no healing in any of those ways of dealing with guilt. Denial drives it below the surface where it creates endless illusions and self-justifications. Wallowing in it produces phony humility and obsequiousness and moral cowardice. Exploiting it gives a false sense of power that turns out to be only the weapon of weakness. If guilt is not dealt with more deeply, there will be no way forward. ~ John Piper

Mother's intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don't imagine that she troubled herself to feel very guilty. But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all, was all he had to cling to-especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his "love" of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his "belief" was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldn't leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing.

But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death. ~ John Irving

Wallowing in self-pity was only warranted on rainy, dismal days. ~ Jenni James

Being a writer means I sit in a dark (and pretty dank) room off my garage for many hours a day, and in my wallowing moments I can feel as if I'm already on the outside of society, peering wistfully in. ~ Lauren Groff

Have you ever watched a baby learning to walk? He totters, arms stretched out to balance himself. He wobbles - and falls, perhaps bumps his nose. Then he puts the palms of his little hands flat on the floor, hikes his rear end up, looks around to see if anybody is watching him. If nobody is, usually he doesn't bother to cry, just precariously balances himself - and tries again. Well, the baby can teach us. What you've undertaken ... isn't a state of perfection to be arrived at all of the sudden. It's a WALK, and a walk isn't static but ever-changing. We Friends say that all discouragement is from an evil source and can only end in more evil. Wallowing in self-condemnation or feeling sorry for yourself is worse than falling on your face in the first place ... So thee is human. ~ Catherine Marshall

Initially when our foundations are rocked, when we lose our external security, we feel very fragile. In that moment, we have a choice. Am I the Phoenix and rise from the ashes or do I just keep wallowing in the ashes? ~ Isha Judd

Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat out denial of the gospel of grace. ~ Brennan Manning

Life is filled with unanswered questions, but it is the courage to seek those answers that continues to give meaning to life. You can spend your life wallowing in despair, wondering why you were the one who was led towards the road strewn with pain, or you can be grateful that you are strong enough to survive it. ~ J.D. Stroube

What will a Hillary Clinton presidency look like? The answer by now seems obvious: It will look like her presidential campaign, which in turn looks increasingly like the first Clinton presidency. Which is to say, high-minded ideals, lowered execution, half truths, outright lies (and imaginary flights), take-no prisoners politics, some very good policy ideas, a presidential spouse given to wallowing in anger and self-pity, and a succession of aides and surrogates pushed under the bus when things don't go right. Which is to say, often. ~ Carl Bernstein

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in. ~ Katherine Mansfield

Choice! The key is choice. You have options. You need not spend your life wallowing in failure, ignorance, grief, poverty, shame, and self-pity. But hold on! If this is true then why have so many among us apparently elected to live in this manner? The answer is obvious. Those who live in unhappy failure have never exercised their options for a better way of life because they have never been aware that had any choices ~ Og Mandino

How good it must feel to stand for something. To commit oneself to a lost cause. To gather with other like-minded souls and lock arms and sing songs under the stars. Wallowing in futility. Championing it, actually. How wonderful it must be to fight only losing battles. How safe and how comfortable. To posit yourself squarely on the side of peace and good. How brave the sand on an eroding beach. ~ Chuck Hogan

I don't know, I'm kinda busy. I've got a pity party scheduled for eight o'clock followed by wallowing at nine. ~ Mia Sheridan

Wallowing is sex for depressives. ~ Jeanette Winterson

When we consider that each of us has only one life to live, isn't it rather tragic to find men and women, with brains capable of comprehending the stars and the planets, talking about the weather; men and women, with hands capable of creating works of art, using those hands only for routine tasks; men and women, capable of independent thought, using their minds as a bowling-alley for popular ideas; men and women, capable of greatness, wallowing in mediocrity; men and women, capable of self-expression, slowly dying a mental death while they babble the confused monotone of the mob? ~ Neil Gaiman