unfeeling QUOTES

1 " I’m super fucking sensitive. I love this about myself only slightly more than I can’t stand it. Sometimes I wish I were an unfeeling stone who didn’t take everything so personally and didn’t need so much space all the time. Feeling can get exhausting fast. Mostly, though, I know my sensitivity is a superpower, perhaps my greatest, and it’s the thing that keeps me loving our world in a profound way, when I’m not too busy hiding from it, that is. "

― Scott Stabile

2 " Clara shrugged and immediately knew her betrayal of Peter. In one easy movement she'd distanced herself from his bad behavior, even thought she herself was responsible for it. Just before everyone had arrived, she'd told Peter about her adventure with Gamache. Animated and excited she'd gabbled on about her box and the woods and the exhilarating climb up the ladder to the blind. But her wall of words hid from her a growing quietude. She failed to notice his silence, his distance, until it was too late and he'd retreated all the way to his icy island. She hated that place. From it he stood and stared, judged, and lobbed shards of sarcasm.

'You and your hero solve Jane's death?'

'I thought you'd be pleased,' she half lied. She actually hadn't thought at all, and if she had, she probably could have predicted his reaction. But since he was comfortably on his Inuk island, she'd retreat to hers, equipped with righteous indignation and warmed by moral certitude. She threw great logs of 'I'm right, you're an unfeeling bastard' onto the fire and felt secure and comforted. "

― Louise Penny , Still Life (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #1)

3 " Slowly, gently night unfurls its splendor. Grasp it, sense it, tremulous and tender. Turn your face away from the garish light of day, turn your thoughts away from cold, unfeeling light, and listen to the music of the night... Close your eyes and surrender to your darkest dreams, purge your thoughts of the life you knew before. Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and live, as you never lived before! "

― Andrew Lloyd Webber , The Phantom of the Opera: Piano/Vocal

4 " The feminist story, she reminded me, is a counternarrative, a narrative of disobedience, a chronicle of battle, nto of surrender. Women who do not fit the mold are too often maneuvered, manipulated, and mangled into some culturally safe archetype. The makers of history transformed perpetua intoa cold, unfeeling mother - a villan of sorts. But who is to say that becoming a mother didn't also push Perpetua to become a martyr, didn't cause her to passionatley uphold her religious ideals because she wanted to offer her son the greatest gift she could - an ideal? Maybe, in the end, Perpetua's maternal instincts were precisely what gave her the strength to confront the burliest Roman gladiator and the to lie down with dignity? "

5 " A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent. "

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6 " Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: ‘Quick! Quick! Quick!’ And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed. "

― Guy de Maupassant , The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One

7 " (...) “to have a hairy heart” has passed into everyday wizarding language to describe a cold or unfeeling witch or wizard. "

― J.K. Rowling , The Tales of Beedle the Bard (Hogwarts Library)

8 " I don't pay much attention to the distinction between fantasy and science fiction–or between “genre” and “mainstream” for that matter. For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors-which is the logic of narratives in general–over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves–they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency “the narrative fallacy” doesn’t mean it doesn’t also touch upon some aspect of the truth.

Some stories simply literalize their metaphors a bit more explicitly. "

― Ken Liu , The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

9 " The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose. "

― Jacques Monod , Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

10 " Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny. "

― Sigmund Freud , New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

11 " Out in the cold I stand,Looking on at the world sitting tight,With its people in their nice little worlds,And the friends who don’t even know me.It really makes no difference to their world where I am.If I'm there, it keeps going.If I’m not, it goes on.While I walk around, wandering, wondering,My mind a mass of mixed-up machinery,Clashing with conflicts and unanswered questions.I don’t ask the world if it is real-It sits up there on its foundations,Secure, concrete, hard, stone and real.But maybe I’m not realOr if I am, maybe I shouldn’t be.They answer, ‘Smile, God loves you’,But I can’t smile.I’m numbed by cold inside and out.Even the heat in the square brick buildingsWould only warm my body, nothing else.I’m alone in a world full of people,Apart, shut up inside myself,Cold, unfeeling, in a cold unfeeling world. "

12 " The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among their equals, are regarded as humane and generous. "

― Solomon Northup , Twelve Years a Slave

13 " A mannequin? An unfeeling heartless bitch who feeds on others' misery and is physically incapable of crying, unless it's tears of blood? "

― Alexandra Bracken , Never Fade (The Darkest Minds, #2)

14 " To what nadir of paltriness , pettiness, and squalor a man can sink! How could he change so! But is this really true to life? ---It is, it's all true to life, for anything can happen to a man. Your ardent youth of today would recoil in horror if you were to show him his own portrait as an old man. Once you set off on life's journey, once you take your leave of those gentle years of youth and enter the harsh, embittering years of manhood, remember to keep with you all your human emotions, do not leave them by the wayside, for you will not pick them up again! Grim and terrible is the old age which awaits us, and nothing does it give in return! The grave itself is more merciful than old age, for at least on the gravestone you will find written the words: 'Here a man lies buried!' but in the cold, unfeeling features of inhuman old age you can read nothing. "

― Nikolai Gogol , Dead Souls

15 " That’s because it is cruel, Obi-Wan,” Anakin snapped. “Cruel and unfeeling and unworthy of the Jedi Order.” He was so like Qui-Gon. This was like arguing with a ghost. "

― Karen Miller , Stealth (Star Wars: Clone Wars Gambit, #1)

16 " His father, that austere, unfeeling and untutored man, had insisted his sons polish their boots every evening. Flett has learned to be grateful for this early discipline. It kept him breathing as a boy, provided a pulse, gave order to vast incomprehension. Later he found other ways. "

― Carol Shields , The Stone Diaries

17 " What in God's name did he want me to say? That I agreed with him completely at how our kiss had been successful? That it had meant as much as a kiss I'd drop on top of a child's head before bed to him? Well I wouldn't lie for the sake of lying. I'd rather stay silent and realize that the kind, gentle, passionate person I'd fallen for didn't exist and in his place was a cold, unfeeling fool who wouldn't know romance even if it had slapped him in the face. "

― Lauren Cagliola Green , The Visitors (Tensley Home Series, # 2)

18 " We should try to bring to any power what we have as women. We will destroy it all if we try to imitate that absolutely unfeeling driving ambition that we have seen coming at us across the desk. "

19 " Asian American success is often presented as something of a horror - robotic, unfeeling machines psychotically hellbent on excelling, products of abusive tiger parenting who care only about test scores and perfection, driven to succeed without even knowing why. "

20 " Not the torturer will scare me, nor the body's final fall, nor the barrels of death's rifles, nor the shadows on the wall, nor the night when to the ground the last dim star of pain, is hurled but the blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world. "

― Roger Waters

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