Quotes About Staying Out Of My Life

“India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of political intrigue and economic corruption, a place occupied by real people with their incessantly human needs, desires, ambitions, and aspirations, and not the exotic, spiritual, mysterious entity that was a creation of the Western imagination.”

— Thrity Umrigar

“One life, one death. For all of us. Those are the numbers. I'm going to die and there's no avoiding it. I can go looking for it early by driving smashed out of my skull or swimming with sharks, sure, but staying with you isn't like that. It wouldn't be stupid and reckless and dumb, it wouldn't be me missing out on part of my life and skipping to the middle of the book. It'd just be me finding the guy I love early. It'd me hitting the jackpot. I'm not walking away from a piece of luck like that. I'm not walking away from you.”

— Jane Davitt

“Sitting on the train I watch the scenery speeding by, notice a cobweb in the top corner of the window, undulating with a gentle breeze I can't feel. I lean back in my seat and take my book out of the carrier bag. Turning it over in my hand, it feels warm. It feels how I want to feel; full of knowledge, full of the future.
The time I've spent staying in bed smoking dope I've been hibernating, recuperating and gaining strength. I'm weak socially, but being away from other drug users has made me resilient. It's allowed my mind and body to heal and mend. As if the winter is over, I've come out stronger now. I'm on my own. I have the choice of what to do with my life.
I'm going to stay clean. I'm going to be the woman I can be.”

— Christine Lewry

“Now, I learned a long time ago how to be quiet on the outside while I'm freaking on the inside. How to turn away like I don't see all the things that need to be seen, just to keep peace. How to lie low and act like I want nothing, expect nothing, and hope for nothing so I don't become more trouble than I'm worth. I'm five months short of eighteen and I know how to be cursed and ignored and left behind, how to swallow a thousand tears and ignore a thousand delibarate cruelties, but it's two in the morning on New Year's Eve and I'm mad and scared and bone tired and really, really sick of acting like I'm grateful to be staying on a hairy, sagging, dog-stained couch in a junky, mildewed trailer with a fat, dangerous, volatile drunk who sweats stale beer and wallows in his own wastewater, and who doesn't think there's one thing wrong with taking his crap life out on his dog, who comes bellying back for forgiveness every single time, no matter how rotten the treatment-”

— Laura Wiess

“I am miserable now-not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me-resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me,-the tenderness I never had. I don't want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I've carried around in me all my life.”

— Allen Ginsberg

“He can't understand people who long to retire. How can anyone spend their whole life longing for the day when they become superfluous? Wandering about, a burden on society, what sort of man would ever wish for that? Staying at home, waiting to die. Or even worse: waiting for them to come and fetch you and put you in a home. Being dependent on other people to get to the toilet. Ove can't think of anything worse. His wife often teases him, says he's the only man she knows who'd rather be laid out in a coffin than travel in a mobility service van.”

— Fredrik Backman

“I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and a washcloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them. A third possibility is, of course, that all these tensions were just tensions that lived their own lives in my head.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“It's about having an active lifestyle, staying healthy, and making the right decisions. Life is about balance. Not everybody wants to run a marathon, but we could all start working out and being active, whether you walk to work or take an extra flight of stairs.”

— Apolo Ohno

“She shrugged, looking as baffled by it as he felt. "I don't know. I wonder sometimes if people even know what love is anymore. Some days, when I'm watching my friends change lovers as unperturbedly as they change shoes, I think the world just got filled with too many people, and all our technological advances made things so easy that it cheapened our most basic, essential value somehow," she told him. "It's like spouses are commodities nowadays: disposable, constantly getting tossed back out for trade on the market and everyone's trying to trade up, up
like there is a 'trading up' in love." She rolled her eyes. "No way. That's not for me. I'm having one husband. I'm getting married once. When you know going in that you're staying for life, it makes you think harder about it, go slower, choose really well.”

— Karen Marie Moning

“There was a time when I was a hothead, and my temper wreaked havoc in my life until I learned to take myself out of the center of the circle. The real key to staying cool and calm is to relinquish selfishness and always consider the feelings of others.”

— Ben Carson

“Pleasant experiences don't make up for painful ones. No child, once painfully burned, would agree to be burned again, however enticing the reward. For all our talk and good intentions, there is much more stick than carrot in school, and while this remains so, children are going to adopt a strategy aimed above all else at staying out of trouble. How can we foster a joyous, alert, wholehearted participation in life if we build all our schooling around the holiness of getting 'right answers'?”

— John Holt

“Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny's whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this. Unexpected stuff could hit him like the thing at first: a girl he'd forgotten giving his number to suddenly calling up out of the blue, a friend with some genius plan for making money, better yet a person he'd never heard of who wanted to talk. Danny got an actual physical head rush from messages like these, but as soon as he called back and found out the details, the calls would turn out to just be about more projects, possibilities, schemes that boiled down to everything staying exactly like it was.”

— Jennifer Egan

“Hadn't I wanted this? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life. So why didn't I see myself in any of it? The only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't wanna hurt anybody, I wanted to slip quietly out the back door and not stop running until I reached Greenland. Instead I made a decision: to pray.. you know ... like ... to God. And it was such a foreign concept to me that I swear I almost began with: I'm a big fan of your work.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“Expeditions are escapism. The stuff that we're normally concerned about just doesn't matter out there. Tax returns, gas bill, none of it. Life becomes very simple, it's about moving in a certain direction - north if you're going north - staying warm and not getting eaten. That's it.”

— Ben Saunders

“I can't do any more 'Peep Show' because of my loyalties in Los Angeles to 'Two And A Half Men,' so I'm staying put there for the moment. I'm loving life is L.A. at the moment - I'm out there for work, as that is where the jobs are.”

— Sophie Winkleman

“I was 19 when I got my first passport as an adult. I had moved from California to New York City and was living out of a suitcase, staying with friends. I'd just finished filming my first movie, 'Ordinary People,' but I didn't know whether acting was what I wanted to do with my life.”

— Timothy Hutton

“There's a window in my life which is football. I try to remember that it's not going to be there forever. That's why staying humble is important; knowing who I am and the message I'm sending out. I always try to be a person first, before I'm No. 55 on the football field.”

— Junior Seau

“I promise to keep my hands, tongue, and other body parts to myself. You risk your life by staying home. It's late and we're both too wiped out to go climbing into the People's lair tonight. What do you risk by coming with me?"
"A huge migraine from being in your company.”

— Ilona Andrews

“He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left side, where gas makes a hairpin turn at the splenic flexure. He felt a mass of phlegm wobbling in his throat but he didn't want to get out of bed to expel it, so he swallowed the whole nasty business, a slick syrupy glop. This was the texture of his life. If someone ever writes his true biography, it will be a chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath, with detailed descriptions of Bill leaving his desk to walk to the bathroom and spit up mucus, and we see photographs of ellipsoid clots of cells, water, organic slimes, mineral salts and spotty nicotine. Or descriptions just as long and detailed of Bill staying where he is and swallowing.”

— Don DeLillo

“The question is, are you going to grow or are you going to just stay as you are out of fear and waste your precious human life by status quo-ing instead of being willing to break the sound barrier? Break the glass ceiling, or whatever it is in your own life? Are you willing to go forward? I suggest finding the willingness to go forward instead of staying still, which is essentially going backward, particularly when you have a calling in some direction. That calling needs to be answered. And it's not necessarily going to work out the way you want it to work out, but it is taking you forward, and you are leaving the nest. And that never can be a mistake-to fly instead of staying in the nest with all the poop and everything that's in there. TS:”

— Deirdre Blomfield Brown

“Prayer and staying positive is certainly a good start toward a happier a life, but it is not enough. The way out of Egypt requires packing up, moving on and wandering around until you find Canaan.”

— Shannon L. Alder

“It is awful to contemplate this sort of life, in which one would always be forced into motion by a variety of mysterious and powerful forces, never staying anywhere for long, never finding a safe place one could call home, never able to turn the tables for very long, just as the Baudelaire orphans found it awful to contemplate their own lives [ ... ] just when it seemed they might break out of the tedious cycle of unfortunate events in which they found themselves trapped.”

— Lemony Snicket

“Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation.
The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks's mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer.”

— Richard Flanagan

“Positive. In other news, Marcie's throwing a Halloween party here at the farmhouse."
Patch smiled. "Grey - Millar family drama?"
"The theme is famous couples from history. Could she be any less original? Worse, she's roped my mom into this. They went shopping for decorations today. For three whole hours. It's like they're suddenly best friends." I picked up another apple slice and made a face at it. "Marcie is ruining everything. I wanted Scott to go with Vee, but Marcie already convinced him to go with her." Patch's smile widened.
I aimed my best sulky look at him. "This isn't funny. Marcie is destroying my life. Whose side are you on anyway?"
Patch raised his hands in surrender. "I'm staying out of this.”

— Becca Fitzpatrick

“I have been moving around all my life. Going to different schools, living in different houses, shedding old roles, assuming new ones. This way of life is as natural to me as staying in one place is for other people. I do variations on the theme. I return to places where I used to be. I find my old personas. I try them on. If they still fit, I wear them out to a party or a show. If they begin to restrict my movements, I take them off. I am a human being, capable of mimicking anything I see or remember or can imagine.”

— Ellen Gilchrist

“I just want the songs to have the staying power as my favorite songs. If you listen to any Hank Williams song, when you're in a good mood, it's going to put you in a better mood. If you happen to be bummed-out, you're going to feel maybe a little more bummed-out and better at the same time. At any time in my life, his music has had meaning and value to me. If a song can shape-shift in that way, that's a sign of success.”

— M. Ward

“Living a happy life is my main priority. You guys may think I am selfish for "wasting my talent" by staying away from events for a bit, but I am finally at a comfortable place where I can honestly say, if you guys see me out on tour again it's because I am there to win, and I'm going to go 100%.”

— Andy Irons

“The moment you know that this is the person with whom you want to spend the rest of your life, you should start the engagement process. Once you know this, the nature of the relationship changes. You view actions differently, the pressure to have sex increases, and your relationship with others is affected. If you're considering getting engaged, write out the sentence Staying married is hard work fifty times ... Though I say this with some humor, I think these points bear repeating: Don't underestimate the work involved, but don't panic either.”

— Kay Coles James

“By staying active & learning to control negative emotions and thoughts, you can live out the rest of your life on a good note.”

— Jude Bijou

“I'm willing to explore what that's supposed to look like. I want to be intentional. I want it to show up in my life every day. I really try to live out my values and be consistent. Another things that has helped has been staying connected to a community of believers. It's important to be around others that share your beliefs and share your values and people that can encourage you.”

— Kelly Clark

“The secret to living a full life with no regrets and to staying young is to figure out what you believe in and fight for it. If you lose, don't give up. If you win, raise the bar, and then rare back and do something else. And remember that, with the accumulation of years, our responsibilities to the future grow greater, not less.”

— William J. Clinton