Being Suspicious Quotes & Sayings

For 'wellness', naturally is no cause of complaint
people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill
not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness' or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'. — Oliver Sacks

Do you like to read?" I asked, pointing at my little shelf.
Moses eyed my books. "Yes."
His answer surprised me. Maybe it was his reputation as a gang banging delinquent. Maybe it was because of the way he looked. But he didn't seem like the type who enjoyed sitting quietly with a book.
"What's your favorite book?" I sounded suspicious and his eyes tightened.
"I like Catcher in the Rye. The Outsiders, 1984, Of Mice and Men, Dune, Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings. Anything by Tom Clancy or JK Rowling."
He said JK Rowling quickly, like he didn't want to admit to being a Potter fan. But I was stunned. — Amy Harmon

Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself. — Wislawa Szymborska

You obviously don't know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is. It is not a fat purse and time to spend it. Its owner finds himself beset on every side, at every hour, wherever he goes, by persistent pleaders, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth. He becomes suspicious of honest friendship
indeed honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could have been his friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to risk being mistaken for one. — Robert A. Heinlein

The Taster to his highness the Prince of Wales was there also, prepared to taste any suspicious dish upon requirement, and run the risk of being poisoned. He was only an ornamental appendage at this time, and was seldom called upon to exercise his function; but there had been times, not many generations past, when the office of taster had its perils, and was not a grandeur to be desired. Why they did not use a dog or a plumber seems strange; but all the ways of royalty are strange. — Anonymous

My Selection wasn't a farce, but it wasn't that far off. My father chose all the
contestants by hand, picking young women with political alliances, influential families, or enough
charm to make the entire country worship the ground they walked on. He knew he had to make it
varied enough to seem legit, so there were three Fives thrown into the mix but nothing below that.
The Fives were meant to be little more than throwaways to keep anyone from being suspicious."
I realized my mouth was gaping open and shut it immediately. "Mom?"
"Was meant to be gone almost immediately. Truth be told, she barely made it past my father 's
attempts to sway my opinion or remove her himself. And look at her now." His whole face changed.
"Though it was hard for me to imagine, she is even more beloved as queen than my mother. She has
made four beautiful, intelligent, strong children. And she has been the source of every happiness in
my life. — Kiera Cass

There's something profoundly intense and intoxicating about friendship found en route. It's the bond that arises from being thrust into uncomfortable circumstances, and the vulnerability of trusting others to navigate those situations. It's the exhilaration of meeting someone when we are our most alive selves, breathing new air, high on life-altering moments. It's the discovery of the commonality of the world's people and the attendant rejection of prejudices. It's the humbling experience of being suspicious of a stranger who then extends a great kindness. It's the astonishment of learning from those we set out to teach. It's the intimacy of sharing small spaces, the recognition of a kindred spirit across the globe.
It's the travel relationship, and it can only call itself family. — Lavinia Spalding

In a lot of Western science fiction, you need some form of conflict, whether it's aliens or robots. I think in Western culture, being more suspicious of science, and hubris, you'll see a lot of fear of creating something that goes out of control. — Cynthia Breazeal

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It soon transpired, however, that the unicorn only approached youthful maidens, paying absolutely no attention to older ones. Being a wise creature, the unicorn indubitably knows that remaining too long in the state of maidenhood is suspicious and counter to the natural order. Physiologus — Andrzej Sapkowski

Politics and self-interest have been so uniformly connected, that the world, from being so often deceived, has a right to be suspicious of public characters. — Thomas Paine

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. — Thomas Jefferson

Now, if laughter is proper to the human being, then the human being who does not laugh invites the charge of inhumanity, or at least makes us somewhat suspicious. — Simon Critchley

A refugee is not just someone lacking in money and everything else. A refugee is vulnerable to the slightest touch: he has lost his country, his friends, his earthly belongings. He is a stranger, sick at heart. He is suspicious; he feels misunderstood. If people smile, he thinks they ridicule him; if they look serious, he thinks they don't like him. He is a full-grown tree in the dangerous process of being transplanted, with the chance of possibly not being able to take root in the new soil. — Maria Franziska Von Trapp

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them. — Aldous Huxley

I invite you, from my sentiments, my convictions and my responsibilities, to work together in the construction of a Uruguay where being young is not suspicious, where aging is not a problem. — Tabare Vazquez

It struck me as particularly suspicious that Yahweh was described as being remarkably human. I mean, seriously; this God is, at times, almost too human. — Michael Vito Tosto

I'm never sad when a friend goes far away, because whichever city or country that friend goes to, they turn the place friendly. They turn a suspicious-looking name on the map into a place where a welcome can be found. Maybe the friend will talk about you sometimes, to other friends that live around him, and then that's almost as good as being there yourself. You're in several places at once! In fact, my daughter, I would even go so far as to say that the further away your friends, and the more spread out they are the better your chances of going safely through the world ... — Helen Oyeyemi

Treaties are like marriage: they aren't entered in to with the thought of betrayal, and once they're concluded one shouldn't be suspicious. And if that doesn't suit somebody, they shouldn't get married. Because you can't become a cuckold without being a husband, but you'll admit that fear of wearing the horns is a pitiful and quite ridiculous justification for enforced celibacy. — Andrzej Sapkowski

Eighty two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD.15 Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive they now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as "oppositional defiant disorder," meaning "This kid hates my guts and won't do anything I tell him to do," or "disruptive mood dysregulation disorder," meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick. — John Hurt

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness? — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If he's a poet, why's he in jail?" demanded a suspicious voice.
Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders.
"Perhaps he writes free verse," she suggested cunningly.
A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed form their eternal task of cheering prisoners--so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread. — Margery Sharp

I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a democratic society. It's a challenge for school reformers, like reformers in any realm, to build a popular constituency for their work. If the people it's supposed to benefit vote against it, that tells me that the person pushing reform lacks political skill. And political skill is a good thing. — Nicholas Lemann

I'd be very suspicious of anybody that seems to have to move to the next level of expression. I distrust that: now I'm writing a book, now I'm being an actor. It should be a natural thing. I think it's a natural thing for you to act. But I think that people that feel that, because they've written one maybe quite beautiful love song that equips them to play Romeo, is probably misguided. — Elvis Costello

It's kind of depressing, if you think about it. I mean, me being so young, and yet so cynical and suspicious. — Meg Cabot

I've hung out at dozens of playgrounds, bored out of my mind, with not even a look of comfort from disapproving mothers all around me. Either they think I'm a pedophile or a deadbeat dad. That's what I get for being a single dad - suspicious looks at the playground. — Dominic West

It is difficult to picture the rich, hard-nosed advisors of James I being overly concerned about the rights of vagabonds and felons. But this was a period that was especially suspicious of arbitrary acts by the Crown against individuals. There was no law enabling the crown to exile anyone, including the baser convict, into forced labour. According to legal scholars, the Magna Carta itself protected even them. The Privy Councillors therefore dressed up what was to befall the convicts and presented the decree authorising their transportation as an act of royal mercy. The convicts were to be reprieved from death in exchange for accepting transportation. (71-71) — Don Jordan

Most people are squeamish about saying how much they earn, but in medicine the situation seems especially fraught. Doctors aren't supposed to be in it for the money, and the more concerned a doctor seems to be about making money the more suspicious people become about the care being provided. — Atul Gawande

Keep behind me, Metatron - wait here - Asriel is suspicious - let me lull him first. When he's off guard, I'll call you. But come as a shadow, in this small form, so he doesn't see you - otherwise, he'll just let the child's daemon fly away. The Regent was a being whose profound intellect had had thousands of years to deepen and strengthen itself, and whose knowledge extended over a million universes. Nevertheless, at that moment he was blinded by his twin obsessions: to destroy Lyra and to possess her mother. He nodded and stayed where he was, while the woman and the monkey moved forward as quietly as they could. — Philip Pullman

I'm always suspicious of people, especially being in a weird realm of people kind of knowing me ... and not knowing what people's motives might be. — Amanda Seyfried

The servant wasn't amused. He still looked stern and suspicious, but Rupert had given his improvised explanation while walking toward the man and was within reach by the last word. He tried a punch first, grabbing the servant's shirtfront as he did so the man wouldn't land out in the hall. If that didn't work,he wasn't sure what would. He certainly didn't want to seriously harm the fellow,just knock him out and dump him out the window for the time being.
Half of that plan worked. The man did drop immediately and Rupert's hold on him kept him from falling loudly to the floor. He even got him to the window with ease, but the plan ended there. Priceless. The window frame was nailed shut for the cold months to minimize drafts. Bloody hell,it wasn't that cold yet. There were no large pieces of furniture to stick the man behind either. As a last resort, he dragged him back to the hall wall and just laid him down alongside it, so he'd be less noticeable to anyone passing by the room — Johanna Lindsey

I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it. I say, in earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that a
peculiar sort of enjoyment
the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but in
despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And when one is slapped in the face
why then the consciousness of being rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Downers some people grind away making their unhappiness the ultimate factor of their existence until finally they are just automatically unhappy, their suspicious upset snarling selves grinding on and at and for and through their only relief being to meet another unhappy person or to create one. — Charles Bukowski

Even after three hundred maps have been handed out, Ama and I still melt the moment people switch from being suspicious that we want to sell them something
"Hey? What do you want? Money? Directions?
to realising that we just want to know their stories, their memories, what they love
"Oh, in that case, thanks, sweeties! — Becky Cooper

My existence is such that "I" do not really exist. At the end of understanding so much I understand that I know nothing. I suffer for being surrounded by intense suffering and yet I'm deeply suspicious if first of all there is indeed any consciousness except me. I strive to find the artist who might have fathered this great universal art but feel myself to be too feeble to accomplish this seemingly unattainable mission. Yet I have every respect for life, and it is this sheer respect that makes me live. — Kedar Joshi

Today, man has been mired in invalidness up to such an extent, that being suspicious about reality isn't in his hand. — M.H. Rakib

He who had known the ceaseless worship of angels came to be a slave to men. Preaching, teaching, healing the sick, and raising the dead were parts of his ministry, of course, and the parts we might consider ourselves willing to do for God if that is what He asked. He could be seen to be God in those. But Jesus also walked miles in dusty heat. He healed, and people forgot to thank Him. He was pressed and harried by mobs of exigent people, got tired and hungry, was "tailed" and watched and pounced upon by suspicious, jealous, self-righteous religious leaders, and in the end was flogged and spat on and stripped and had nails hammered through His hands.
He relinquished the right (or the honour) of being publicly treated as equal with God. — Elisabeth Elliot

Ah, now,' the count said casually, 'you must do as you wish, Viscount, because this is your business and you are in charge; but I must say that in your place I should say nothing of all these adventures. Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels bound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum, even when they are as gilded as you are capable of being. Allow me to point out this difficulty to you, Monsieur le Vicomte, which is that no sooner will you have told your touching story to someone, that it will travel all round society, completely distorted. You will have to play the part of Antony, and Antony's day has passed somewhat. You might perhaps enjoy the reputation of a curiosity, but not everyone likes to be the centre of attention and the butt of comment. It might possibly fatigue you. — Alexandre Dumas

We hesitate to call liars out in professional environments because we feel guilty for being suspicious. Calling someone a liar for no good reason is a frightening proposition for most. — Travis Bradberry

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States memorably stated in a letter in 1807: 'nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle...Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the first, Truths; second, Probabilities; the third, Possibilities; the fourth, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.' If that was true as far back as 1807 when the technologies supporting the mass media were markedly less advanced - how much more true it is today. The — Jason Carter

Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France seems to have realised that books are its real enemies. — Stendhal

Fear is a dangerous thing. Once it is sanctioned by the state there is no telling where it might lead. It is always a short path to walk from being suspicious of our fellow citizens to taking actions to restrict their liberty. — Justin Trudeau

People being nice for no apparent reason always made me suspicious. People being nice to me with no apparent reason made me even more suspicious. — Maggie Stiefvater

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new. — Robert Morgan

Success on a cosmic level completely eludes me. I'm deeply suspicious of things being too good. It's part of my superstition, I think, to generate pain in order to give the illusion of gain. I'm not saying I reject success, but honestly, I don't quite know how to deal with it. It's an old feeling: As soon as you have the thing you've been going after all your life, that reasonable degree of security, you start kicking against it, doubting it. — Hugh Laurie

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone. — Henry James

It's worth being suspicious of writers - or anyone! - who does that myth-making thing. There's always a tendency to retrospectively impose structures on a life. Life as it's lived has a far more complex shape. — Guy Gavriel Kay

You risk just as much in being credulous as in being suspicious. — Denis Diderot

You are always kind of suspicious that there's a better life out there for you no matter what it is - and obviously being in a band for me was always what I wanted to do, it's the only thing that I can do, it's the only thing that gets me up in the morning, but you can't help but wonder what else you'd be doing if you weren't in the band. — Ryan Jarman

I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it's because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being 'arranged.' — Ingmar Bergman

It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous. — Tana French

I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn't quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around here, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing - the opposite of my childhood - and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me. So perhaps it didn't matter what happened to you as a girl: you ended up the same. — Lorrie Moore