Atavistic Quotes & Sayings

Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country. — Penelope Lively

Has it ever occurred to you that a woman, when she is powerful, is more powerful than a man?" "Powerful in a different way, perhaps." Laud said: "It's a power partly based on fear. Perhaps the fear is atavistic, memories of babyhood. Women change the nappy, give the breast or withhold it." Langton said with a faint smile: "Not now, apparently. Fathers change nappies and it's usually a bottle." "But I'm right, Hubert, about power and fear. I wouldn't say it outside these walls, but life in Chambers would be a great deal easier if Venetia fell under that convenient Number 11 bus." He paused, and then asked the question to which he needed an answer. "So I have your support, have I? Can I take it that I'm your choice to succeed you as Head of Chambers? — P.D. James

I returned to the waiting area. For the first time, I was conscious of being widowed, of lacking the prosecution of a man, it was an entirely atavistic sensation. Here in the lobby of this police station in Greece, I suddenly felt extraneous to the workings of the world, which is to say the world of men, I had grown invisible, standing at the threshold of that door. — Katie Kitamura

It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius. — Antonin Artaud

There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology; when the sight of another species in unthinkable hosts brought fears or hopes no longer applicable. — Gavin Maxwell

This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited refugees - partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only buildings; partly because the foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the estate's exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic urge to hide under leaves. — John Hersey

There are four types of husbands.
The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!
The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure. This sort always considers every pretty woman "shallow," a sort of peacock with arrested development.
Next comes the worshiper, the idolaters of his wife and all that is his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an emotional actress for a wife. God! It must be an exertion to be thought righteous!
And Anthony - a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get married to Anthony. — F Scott Fitzgerald

There is a social contract between the readers/buyers of romance novels and the novelists who write them. It's this: the girl ends up with the guy about whom and for which legions of fans have been pining. It's the reason we pick up romance novels in the first place. We want to read about a coupling so intense, it speaks to a deep place inside of us, an atavistic need to be consumed by lust, passion and love. That is the social contract. — Allison

Out of this unstable mix of technocracy and national security you have a nostalgia developing for colonialism or religion - atavistic in my opinion, but some people want them back. Sadat is the great example of that: he threw out the Russians, as well as everything else that represented Abdel Nasser, ascendant nationalism, and so forth - and said, "Let the Americans come." Then you have a new period of what in Arabic is called an infitah - in other words, an opening of the country to a new imperialism: technocratic management, not production but services - tourism, hotels, banking, etc. That's where we are right now. — Edward W. Said

Please keep abusing each other over differences of skin tone and absurdly tiny religious discrepancies. It's good for the country. Racism needs to rise in periods where slavery makes a comeback, because if all you simian-browed, atavistic gutter-plebes started cooperating, all of a sudden, you'd barbecue our prissy fannies in a hot ghetto second. Vent — Cintra Wilson

Real history was unromantic, steeped in greed and blood and abject eye-rolling stupidity. An endless parade of putative Ozymandiases marching off to glory before snapping off at the ankles in the depths of the desert: that was human history. Every now and then there would be the pretence of civilisation, but soon enough the restless, hateful, atavistic hearts of humanity would tear down the towers and slide back into barbarism, squealing with glee. Decadence loves the taste of blood, even though it is poison. — Jonathan L. Howard

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived! — Wallace Stegner

One's worth and self-regard ought to come from individual competitive performance, not from group identity. Pride based on clan or tribal connections is atavistic. It appeals to people who fear they cannot succeed as individuals, and by diverting their energies it all but ensures they will not succeed as individuals. — William A. Henry III

Love is rather impotent and pitiful: My father must have told me a million times how much he loved me, but that emotion - assuming it was even real - hardly had the strength to counter the many other acts of wrong he committed against me. Contrary to romance novels and the love-conquers-all mentality that even those of us who grow up in an era of divorce are - in response to some atavistic instinct - still raised to believe, love is always a product and a victim of circumstances. It is fragile and small. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I often yearn to regress into a state that's slightly more atavistic than my decades of conditioning generally allow, but it's difficult to let go of those reigns. — Keith Murray

In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his story through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to beat upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. — Cormac McCarthy

Atavistic resurgence, a primal urge towards union with the Divine by returning to the common source of all, is indicated by the backward symbolism peculiar to all Sabbath ceremonies, as also of many ideas connected with witchcraft, sorcery and magic. Whether it be the symbol of the moon presiding over nocturnal ecstasies; the words of power chanted backwards; the back-to-back dance performed in opposition to the sun's course; the devil's tail - are all instances of reversal and symbolic of Will and Desire turning within and down to subconscious regions, to the remote past, there to surprise the required atavistic energy for purposes of transformation, healing, initiation, construction or destruction. — Kenneth Grant

The untried recruits learned about fear. It wasn't some occasional leap of terror, a startled response; it was the unbearable tension of being forced to remain in a terrifying place, your mind the only thing preventing you from throwing down your rifle and running, anywhere, a flight of atavistic self-preservation. — Joanne Van Os

History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognise that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire. — Peter Ackroyd

In Italy, above all in view of the next general election, political parties, movements and new politicians continue to proliferate, naturally all inspired by the logic of the most severe, rigorous and atavistic stupidity. — William C. Brown

To appeal to contemporary man to revert, in this twentieth century, to a pagan-like nature worship in order to restrain technology from further encroachment and devastation of the resources of nature, is a piece of atavistic nonsense. — Norman Lamm

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic. — Don DeLillo

Gold has an almost atavistic lure. People feel it has a panacea effect. — Howard Blum

I'm not a very violent dude, and if something can be settled without any physicality, I'm always in favor of that. But if somebody comes near my kids, the atavistic crazy lion comes out. — Stephen Moyer

Dance, in general, has become more atavistic than artistic. — Ilana Mercer

It's amazing how sudden the effect is - it must be the result of a deep atavistic mating urge buried inside us. A glance and you think: 'Yes, this is the one, this one is right for me.' Every instinct in your body seems to sing in unison. — William Boyd

Life ... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other ... The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was the fear of the unknown — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe. — Winston Churchill

She tied him a fly, using a pattern she'd designed, one that had given her untold luck with those silvery fish, those fighting steelhead. She was anxious for his return.
"Does it have a name?" he said, when she gave it to him.
"The Predator." She smiled. A little embarrassed.
His eyes turned dark, and her heart beat faster. His voice dipped low. "It's a fine name."
He regarded her for several heavy, silent beats. She felt an atavistic pull, the hairs on her arms rising toward him, as if in electrical attraction. He leaned closer and her mouth turned dry. And he told her about the wild blueberries. Down by the bend in the river.
She took the lure.
She went in search of the berries.
She never came home. — Loreth Anne White

A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial. — James S.A. Corey

I don't think that what's going on in Bosnia is political activity. It's partly political, but it's partly atavistic as well. — John Keegan

In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help. — Neel Mukherjee

And see those metaphors 'up front' and 'out in the open' are part of a system we call atavistic purism. AP implies the existence of an ethically perfect state which not only doesn't exist and never existed but it's usually used to shore up the prejudices of whoever's making the judgments. — Jennifer Egan

And maybe it was more than that.
Maybe it was actually an unspoken instant agreement between the four women on the balcony: No woman should pay for the accidental death of this particular man. Maybe it was an involuntary, atavistic response to thousands of years of violence against women. Maybe it was for every rape, every brutal backhanded slap, every other Perry that had come before this one. — Liane Moriarty

If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair. Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imagined that they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathers and even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reason Twentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters in Arizona was their own shocking health 'way back in the days beyond recall. — P.G. Wodehouse

While some dogs existed with the paranoia that the whole world infringed on their property rights and needed furious barking to be reminded of their place, this dog wanted only to find warm places to sleep and enough canned food to eat. Any atavistic memory of wolfdom had been bred out of his ancestors centuries ago. — Thomm Quackenbush

The supernatural worldview is causing a great number of otherwise intelligent people to cling to a collection of atavistic concepts that have not, and never will serve humanity in any ultimately beneficial way. Any benefits that spirituality ostensibly provides to its adherents, can be found equally in the worldview of philosophy and ethics, communities of other kinds, and so on. It's a myth that the only morality, hope, purpose and comfort to be found, resides only in the supernatural. — Kelli Jae Baeli

No one expects a head butt. Humans don't hit things with their heads. Some inbuilt atavistic instinct says so. A head butt changes the game. It adds a kind of unhinged savagery to the mix. An unprovoked head butt is like bringing a sawed-off shotgun to a knife fight. The guy went down like an empty suit. — Lee Child

Life in the world ... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Travelling, gentlemen, is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic. — Max Frisch

Obviously it was happenstance, but it did change my opinion of human nature. I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them. It's an atavistic thing, buried deep in our DNA. — Richard Engel

Some years later, after Scott's death, we came my father and I to the Field Museum, a long dismal peristyle dwindling away into the howling distance, and inside stood before a tableau of Stone Age Man, father mother and child crouched around an artificial ember in postures of minatory quiet - until, feeling my father's eye on me, I turned and saw what he required of me - very special father and son we were that summer, he staking his everything this time on a perfect comradeship - and I, seeing in his eyes the terrible request, requiring from me his very life; I, through a child's cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate, turned him down, turned away, refused him what I knew I could not give. — Walker Percy

She should feel sick. Horrified, stunned. But the horrible truth was, she felt fine. He killed. He killed to protect her. And some
ancient, atavistic streak inside her wanted to preen and purr. She was one sick puppy. — Anne Stuart