coolly QUOTES

1 " The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,
And his sheep are straying on the hillside,
And he didn’t even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.
No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again.
Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him.
No one had loved him, in the end.

When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:
The great valleys full of the same green as always,
The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,
All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present.
(And once again the air, that he’d missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs)
And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest.

(7/10/1930) "

― Fernando Pessoa , O Pastor Amoroso

2 " Dain kept his gaze on his plate and concentrated on swallowing the morsel he'd just very nearly choked on. She was possessive... about him.The beautiful, mad creature - or blind and deaf creature, or whatever she was - coolly announced it as one might say, " Pass the salt cellar," without the smallest awareness that the earth had just tilted on its axis. "

3 " The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower. "

― Sylvia Plath

4 " Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions. "

― Sean Carroll

5 " There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy. "

― George Eliot , Middlemarch

6 " The coolly logical part of her brain noted almost sardonically that Edilio had a superpower after all: being Edilio. "

― Michael Grant

7 " I look coolly in to the blue eyes of the person who is now my greatest opponent, the person who would keep me alive at his own expense. And I promise myself I will defeat his plan. "

― Suzanne Collins , Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2)

8 " My sisters and I stand on the deck, the shale tile cool against the soles of our feet - for a week it seems we never have to wear shoes - and take turns twirling, the matching turquoise silk skirts my mother bought us sliding coolly up our legs, our laughter flying out over the ocean. We are all light and happy and far, far away from home. "

― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich , The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

9 " These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel. "

― Ian McEwan , Sweet Tooth

10 " Like a lot of people with mental illness, I spend a lot of time fronting. It’s really important to me to not appear crazy, to fit in, to seem normal, to do the things “normal people” do, to blend in.
As a defense mechanism, fronting makes a lot of sense, and you hone that mechanism after years of being crazy. Fronting is what allows you to hold down a job and maintain relationships with people, it’s the thing that sometimes keeps you from falling apart. It’s the thing that allows you to have a burst of tears in the shower or behind the front seat of your car and then coolly collect yourself and stroll into a social engagement…

We are rewarded for hiding ourselves. We become the poster children for “productive” mentally ill people, because we are so organized and together. The fact that we can function, at great cost to ourselves, is used to beat up the people who cannot function.

Because unlike the people who cannot front, or who fronted too hard and fell off the cliff, we are able to “keep it together,” whatever it takes. "

―

11 " Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect -- the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours -- and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense. "

― H.P. Lovecraft

12 " You're not actually falling for him, are you?" he asks her one day, on one of the rare occasions he can get her alone." I'll pretend you didn't just ask that," she tells him in disgust. But Connor has reasons to wonder." On that first night here, he offered you his blanket, and you accepted it," he points out." Only because I knew it would make him cold." " And when he offers you his food, you take it." " Because it means he goes hungry." It's coolly logical. Connor finds it amazing that she can put her emotions aside and be as calculating as Roland, beating him at his own game. Another reason for Connor to admire her. "

13 " I know of an ‘older boy’ who stuck to his own path without rotting despite being a Level 0. On that day back then when he spoke with his back turned and protecting me, he clearly surpassed me and my all-too-pathetic Level 5 ability. Your actual skill doesn’t matter. Coolly calculating out all the numbers is pointless. No matter how many arguments you prepare, you have no choice but to accept defeat once he walks in from beyond the horizon. I am very familiar with a Level 0 like that☆ "

14 " Charity shook her head, struggling to get back into the flow of Lady Margaret's crisply worded presentation. Brandy brought sleep, and a temporary escape from the ache of a broken heart. But in the morning came gritty eyes, a furry tongue, and a pounding headache that made a foolish girl wince and rub her temples whenever her coolly perfect boss was looking the other way. "

― Carol Storm , Burning Captivity (The Charity Chronicles #2)

15 " Mellas was transported outside himself, beyond himself. It was as if his mind watched eveything coolly while his body raced wildly with passion and fear. He was frightened beyond any fear he had ever known. But this brilliant and intense fear, this terrible here and now, combined with the crucial significance of every movement of his body, pushed him over a barrier whose existence he had not known about until this moment. He gave himself over completely to the god of war within him. "

― Karl Marlantes , Matterhorn

16 " The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism! "

― Joyce Carol Oates , A Widow's Story