Desire for Stability Quotes

Inertia is comforting, and Americans will be extremely reluctant to make any change that might affect their high standard of living.

Willy Loman: I don't want change, I want Swiss cheese!

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same.

Nostalgia is when you want things to stay the same. I know so many people staying in the same place.

There is no doubt that terrorism has been a major spur in the public’s yearning for a strong hand to bring order. People see the loss of freedom as a tax that has to be paid for security. And it’s clear that, after the traumas that have occurred, Russians are very willing to pay that price.

I have to go to her, Lucan. For my own sanity, if nothing else. If I stay here, I'm not sure what good I'd be, to tell you the truth. She's the only thing that's held me together in a very long time. I'm a wreck for this woman, my friend. She owns me now." - Rio

He wants his home and security, he wants to live like a sailor at sea.

He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B.

Two deep human desires were at war ... the longing for stability, for form, for permanence, which in its essence is the desire for death, and the opposing hunger for movement, change, instability and risk, which are life. Men came from the east and built these American towns because they wished to go no farther, and the towns they built were shaped by the urge to go onward.

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

I don't really like surprises. Not big ones anyway. Just having a pack of Revels holds enough of a surprise for me.

How wicked I was to wish that something dramatic would happen!' she thought. 'Oh, if we could only have those dear, monotonous, pleasant days back again! I would *never* grumble about them again.

I don't think all people yearn for freedom, actually. I think they yearn for stability.

I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.