Quotes About Torpor

Kenzo had become a military medic. He had survived the war with limbs and faculties intact, although even after he was repatriated from the Philippines a sort of tropical torpor seemed to linger in his mind.

Giselle would rouse herself from her torpor occasionally (she moved like a particularly lazy cat) in order to despise something.

Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.

Boredom is the deadliest poison.

He lay on the bed and he felt he might never rise from it. He lay in an enormous torpor. The world was too heavy to bear and it was settling itself onto his chest. He felt old, old. Civilizations had risen and fallen in the brief time that he had lived. He felt that when the old man's head exploded across the snow he should have turned the gun on himself.

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

There is only the one like me, the companion man or woman, who can wake me from my torpor, set off the poetry, hurl me against the limits of the old desert for me to triumph over it. No other. Neither sky nor privileged earth, now things which set you to trembling. Torch, I only waltz with that one.

She felt all right. Her heart was like a drum hanging from piano wire in her chest, slowly, slowly beaten. Her hands and feet were numb, not with cold but with a sultry torpor. Thoughts moved with a tranquil lethargy, her brain a leisurely machine imbedded in swaths of woolly packing. She felt all right.

For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor... To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

It needs to be stated again and again that all opiates without exception are fundamentally depressants, so that the normal pattern, as dosage is increased, is from torpor to sleep to coma (ending in death, if there is an overdose).

For leveling really to come about a phantom must first be provided, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage -- this phantom is the public . Only a passionless but reflective age can spin this phantom out, with the help of the press when the press itself becomes an abstraction ... [and] the only thing that can keep life going in the prevailing torpor.

Nature had combined in him the features of a degenerate pope and the torpor of a crocodile, and to these had added a voice of unconscionable harshness.

O doce sopro da primavera, Que jardins e campos regenera! Será que agora todo prazer Me é estranho e tudo que anima, Tudo que brilha, alegra e sublima Só traz tédio, torpor, desprazer À minha alma, há muito já morta, À qual tudo é vão e nada importa?

Boredom is the deadliest poison.

Many nights, I would begin the evening fueled by caffeine and nicotine, which I needed to propel me out of torpor and hopelessness - only to overshoot into quaking, quivering anxiety.

La "fiaca" en el dialecto genovés expresa esto: "Desgarro físico originado por la falta de alimentación momentánea". Deseo de no hacer nada. Languidez. Sopor. Ganas de acostarse en una hamaca paraguaya durante un siglo. Deseos de dormir como los durmientes de Efeso durante ciento y pico de años

The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the 'I,' under another form, continues the task of existence.

Toys and fooleries at home, wars abroad: sometimes terror, sometimes torpor, or stupid sloth: this is thy daily slavery.

In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination.

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

But a good Government is well worth a great deal of social dullness. The dignified torpor of English society is inevitable if we give precedence, not to the cleverest classes, but to the oldest classes, and we have seen how useful that is.

Canst thou comprehend, my poor beloved Tried-one, that unless the torpor and the veils of sleep had wrapped thee, such sights would rend and bear away thy mind as the whirlwinds rend and carry into space the feeble sails, depriving thee forever of thy reason? Dost thou understand that the Soul itself, raised to its utmost power can scarcely endure in dreams the burning communications of the Spirit?

The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work.

Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will.