25 Quotes & Sayings By Evan Sutter

Evan Sutter is a writer, musician, and director. His debut novel, "The Siren" (2014), was a finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and the Amazon Book of the Month. He's also a contributing writer to "The Rumpus." Sutter's music has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and other outlets. He serves as a contributing editor to "Spinetingler" magazine and is a member of both The Verbs and The Ex-Vengers.

1
We all need a technological detox; we need to throw away our phones and computers instead of using them as our pseudo-defence system for anything that comes our way. We need to be bored and not have anything to use to shield the boredom away from us. We need to be lonely and see what it is we really feel when we are. If we continue to distract ourselves so we never have to face the realities in front of us, when the time comes and you are faced with something bigger than what your phone, food, or friends can fix, you will be in big trouble. . Evan Sutter
2
I think success might be one of the most overused words in the western world, and maybe if we changed success for happiness we would be better off, because when you get this ‘success’ will it make you happier? Are we chasing money, fame, power, ego, success, or are we chasing happiness, freedom and the feeling of being content? Evan Sutter
3
How can we expect to be happy when we have no peace of mind, when our mind is constantly jumping from the present to the past? When your mind is constantly running and filled with anxiety and fear, where is the freedom? You are stuck in the prison of your mind, stuck in thoughts and feelings from yesterday, from five years ago. There comes a time when everyone has to stop, look deep, breathe and let go. Evan Sutter
4
It’s easy to put the links between the increases in mental illness, depression, ADHD, and the like, with the speed of the modern world. People never get the chance to do nothing, or when they do, they lack the control to prevent their mind from racing off in a thousand different directions. So much so that their doing nothing becomes a thousand different things and the thousand different things becomes stress, anxiety, worry and fear. Left untreated these simple everyday things become well entrenched in our psyches and start to dominate our lives. We have a chronic addiction with doing and we love to use our busyness as a stamp of our hard work and hectic lives and we get stuck in this busy trap of always doing. Evan Sutter
5
We live in a world where it is completely the norm to worry about what we put in our bodies but worry very little about what we throw in our minds. We think a hamburger is bad but a celebrity gossip magazine is completely harmless. As children you never hear “don’t put that garbage in your mind, ” but for our body counterpart it is common thread. There is something very wrong with this scenario. . Evan Sutter
6
Concentration is like a leash for our mind, keeping it under control and obedient and not giving it too much room to move as it wishes. Evan Sutter
7
How many relationships would be better if they were born out of something genuine rather than merely a petty desire? Divorce would drop because people would know why they started doing something in the first place. Teen pregnancy would almost be eradicated because for the first time we wouldn’t need to simply succumb to our desires and cravings pushed onto us from the media and society in general. Prostitutes would be searching for redundancy packages and brothel owners for new careers, and the whole shallow and superficial nature of sex would be under the spotlight. Evan Sutter
8
I think if our new direction in all our relationships is friendship, compassion, and enjoyment, we will easily be able to break our old cycle of bad habits and develop something deeper and more meaningful Evan Sutter
9
If you can’t be happy and content by yourself then you shouldn’t be in a relationship. Evan Sutter
10
If everyone could spend some time self analysing, spend some quiet time with nothing to do and nowhere to go, then without a doubt the world would be an infinitely better place to live and play. It would probably be the cause of the end of bullying, teen suicide, anxiety, depression, stress, and fear and the start of a more genuine and authentic world. I have found that my tranquillity and peacefulness grew significantly stronger as I began to live comfortably with my desires and cravings. Evan Sutter
11
We grow up in a world where satisfying our cravings seems to be the number one objective, every advertisement on television and the newspaper calls for one craving or another to be dealt with. When it comes to sex we are bombarded every which way, so much so, that we think solving our cravings is the only way and the right way. Evan Sutter
12
I was a puppet on the strings to my cravings and desires. Evan Sutter
13
We consume so we never have to answer the hard questions. When we are bored we eat. When we are lonely we watch a movie, read the newspaper, jump on social media. Each time we do we cover up our real emotions and keep throwing another layer of confusion and anxiety on top, making it almost impossible to dig ourselves out of the hole, or at least see which way is up. Evan Sutter
14
It’s sad to see how many relationships start as just a distraction from boredom, a cover up so they don’t have to ever deal with the true pain below Evan Sutter
15
We do not know how to just do nothing; this is a bigger problem than we care to think about. In the west we are taught to seek our answers in external things and, as a result, we never need to take the time to look within. We have a poor connection with ourselves because our whole lives we have been looking outward; we are a society bent on distraction, and the modern world is only amplifying this. Evan Sutter
16
Mental illness is a bigger problem than obesity and cardiovascular diseases in the modern western world but still we pay no homage to the philosophy of watching what we watch. We only worry about what we put in the body in the form of food and care very little, if at all, with what we consume in our minds. Evan Sutter
17
Its little wonder anxiety, depression and other mental illness is at such a high point at this time in the world; people have little control over the mental capacities, of their thoughts, perceptions, feelings and emotions. People never get a moments silence from the constant bombardment and when they do they don’t know how to manage their thoughts so the endless barrage of noise simply continues giving them no time or space for clarity. Evan Sutter
18
Attachment strangles freedom and clarity and makes us a puppet to our desires and cravings; attachment is the root of suffering, a root that if left unattended grows into a tree which drops the fruits of anger, greed, envy, dispersion, competitiveness, ego and pain Evan Sutter
19
When you don't know yourself, who you are and what you want, you just become a product of your environment - a leaf that gets blown each and every way until it just lands, in a big pile of mud, and gets stuck. Evan Sutter
20
What is it you really want? Are you really going to be happy when you get the object? What will it bring you? Is what you’re telling yourself really true? You have the choice, you can keep on getting hit by the wave or you can get the courage to run towards it and dive right through it - everything starts with you. Evan Sutter
21
This inability to just do nothing is a direct result of our habit of externalisation. As children we are never taught in schools, or in social settings, to look within ourselves for answers. Whether it is that our answers are found in some sort of religion, or another person, or in something else, we start to make this common practice. We are indecisive in life looking to friends, family, counsellors, teachers, and even strangers for advice. We are never taught or, better yet, shown how to look after our number one relationship in life, which is the relationship with one’s self. Evan Sutter
22
The worlds high on doing and distracting and as result we need to keep doing and it doesn’t really matter what we are doing, as long as it is distracting. Evan Sutter
23
We become more devoted to pleasing other people than establishing a relationship with ourselves. We believe we are what we have and what we do and we believe we are what other people think we are. Ego is in many ways the primary cause of most of our misconception and woe. Evan Sutter
24
When we have simplicity we have so much more freedom in every single aspect of our lives. Maybe it's a classic case of less is more? Less stress, less worries, more time, more happiness. Evan Sutter