Stasis Quotes

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I don't know. I just feel stuck, like I'm afraid to take any steps, in case they're the wrong ones.”
― Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

“I didn't want the sun to rise. I didn't want the world to continue turning. I wanted the whole planet put into stasis until I could catch up.”
― Anna Sheehan, A Long, Long Sleep

“Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time.”
― William S. Burroughs, Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs

“A stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,
I shall have, till my single body grows
        Inaccurate, tired;
Then I shall start to feel the backward pull
Take over, sickening and masterful —
        Some say, desired.

And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink,
As if at pain; for it is pain, to think
        This pantomime
Of compensating act and counter-act,
Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,
        My ablest time.

- Maturity”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“It wasn't exactly like I'd sold out on my life and dreams and all that other bullshit, because the truth was I'd never actually had anything to sell. It was more like I slowly froze in place, inside my little office at the museum; more like some part of me just fell asleep one day and never woke up.”
― Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon

“When I was little, she thought, I wanted nothing except to stop travelling. I wanted time for each new thing, each new feeling, to be held properly in suspension until it could be joined by the next. Given the chance I could easily hold all those beautiful things together. I could be like a box in which they would be held new forever. Instead, everything aged and changed. People too.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“If you stand still you fall backwards,
You cannot stand still, because the world moves away from you if you stand still.
And there is no stasis. Only backwards.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.”
― Oli Anderson, Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

“Progress might be inevitable, but there was no reason they should knuckle under without a fight.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North

“Treating ‘life’ as an object to which we are more or less adequate excises crucial elements from life just at the very time that we are living it: such elements as sleep, rest, laziness, and the absence of labour, energy, and work. To say that these kinds of stasis are not living is not only to limit the plurality of life but to make it lopsided, tipping it towards the stresses that we find in modernity’s cult of perpetual activity.”
― Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals

“Nobody has ever been so much themselves over a span of three thousand years as the ancient Egyptians,”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“For humanity everything passes without a trace. Of course, it’s possible that by randomly pulling chestnuts out of this fire, we’ll eventually stumble on something that will make life on Earth completely unbearable. That would be bad luck. But you have to admit, that’s a danger humanity has always faced [...] You see, I’ve long since become unused to discussing humanity as a whole. Humanity as a whole is too stable a system, nothing upsets it.”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“The moment stasis is achieved in my life, it begins to shift. Biologically speaking, stasis is death.”
― S.D.G., Naked