Quotes & Sayings About Consternation

To his consternation, her nearness made him slightly out of breath. — Ken Follett

Eye blocking is a very powerful display of consternation, disbelief, or disagreement. — Joe Navarro

Lots of people have expressed consternation that I haven't gotten rid of Southern accent, but I just never saw any reason to lose the flavor that I grew up with. I enjoy saying some things with a Southern accent. — Roy Blount Jr.

The terror and consternation of the Presidential couple may be imagined by anyone who has ever loved a child, and suffered that dread intimation common to all parents, that Fate may not hold that life in as high a regard, and may dispose of it at will. In "Selected Civil War Letters of Edwine Willow," edited by Constance Mays. With — George Saunders

Where, where for shelter shall the guilty fly, When consternation turns the good man pale? — Edward Young

The video forum for me has been a source of great consternation because once you start projecting a look to a song, it robs the listener of their ability to adopt that song and make the lyric their own. — Sheryl Crow

It is not a look of horror, consternation, or even distress. More often than not, the last visage of a murdered man resembles that of a flustered schoolchild to whom the logic of a simple equation has just been revealed. — David Simon

I paid the cabman exactly his fare. He received it with an oath; upon which I instantly gave him a tract. If I had presented a pistol at his head, this abandoned wretch could hardly have exhibited greater consternation. He jumped up on his box, and, with profane exclamations of dismay, drove off furiously. Quite useless, I am happy to say! I sowed the good seed, in spite of him, by throwing a second tract in at the window of the cab. — Wilkie Collins

he returned to the bath-room, and there made a discovery which filled him with consternation. He saw in the brick wall, what at first had escaped his attention, a gaping hole, large enough to allow the passage of a man's body. — Cleveland Moffett

One cup poured into another makes different waters; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another's eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man's smile would be consternation on another's mouth. — Djuna Barnes

It was now twenty minutes past four in the morning, allowing for the fact that the clock in the library of his town house was four minutes slow, as it had been for as far back as he could remember.
He eyed it with a frown of concentration. Now that he came to think about it, he must have it set right one of these days.Why should a clock be forced to go throught its entire existence four minutes behind the rest of the world? It was not logical.The trouble was though, that if the clock were suddenly right, he would be forever confused and arriving four minutes early
or did he mena late?
for meals and various other appointments. That would agitate his servants and cause consternation in the kitchen.
It was probably better to leave the clock as it was. — Mary Balogh

Waltz back into our lives as if nothing had happened. We were dealing with Dad's death and I wasn't about to take on her problems, too." "I'm not going to argue with you, sweetheart. Like I said, you did the right thing." "I have to wonder," she murmured, her brow furrowed with consternation. "Karen ... " "I know, I know. It doesn't do any good to rehash this over and over. What's done is done. When I spoke to Nichole about the inheritance, she was adamant we did everything we should have. Cassie wasn't — Debbie Macomber

Each week we usually have one person who's never done the show before. Last year we had close to 60 who'd never done the show before. We're constantly booking new people, sometimes to the consternation of people who live here who do the show regularly. — Scott Aukerman

Zach looked at Carey in consternation, obviously wondering if we were using the rare good cop/loony cop interrogation technique. — Ben Aaronovitch

Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic ... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish. — Gottlob Frege

Nothing causes more consternation in a group of hypocrits than one honest man. — Albert Einstein

Take the matter as you find it ask no questions, utter no remonstrances; it is your best wisdom. You expected bread and you have got a stone: break your teeth on it, and don't shriek because the nerves are martyrised; do not doubt that your mental stomach - if you have such a thing - is strong as an ostrich's; the stone will digest. You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation; close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob. — Charlotte Bronte

He was one of those people whose ideas are too lively to be confined
in their brains and spill out into the world to the consternation of
passers-by. He talked to himself and the expression on his face
changed constantly. Within the space of a single moment he looked
surprized, insulted, resolute, and angry
emotions which were
presumably the consequences of the energetic conversation he was
holding with the ideal people inside his head. — Susanna Clarke

Count Ayakura's abstraction persisted. He believed that only a vulgar mentality was willing to acknowledge the possibility of catastrophe. He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes. However precipitous the future might seem, he learned from the game of kemari that the ball must always come down. There was no call for consternation. Grief and rage, along with other outbursts of passion, were mistakes easily committed by a mind lacking in refinement. And the Count was certainly not a man who lacked refinement.
Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura's version of political theory. — Yukio Mishima

While my seemingly compulsive school-hopping has raised some eyebrows among my peers and caused my parents understandable consternation, I do not regret it. — Alexandra Adornetto

In the irresistible logic of guilt, one evil leads to another, one sin is developed out of another. There is nothing abrupt, nothing casual in the process. The road to sin is smooth, because an army of transgressions has passed over it. When such a development takes place, the community is filled with consternation. Men meet each other and say, "Have you heard what has happened? Mr. A. has turned out a defaulter. Mr. B. has been robbing his bank. How could he have done it?" Alas! he did it long ago, when he took the first step, when he diverged a very little way from the path of right. After that, every other step was easy, natural, and logical. — James Clarke

Am I religious? I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Consternation." We are as celibate as fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy. — Kurt Vonnegut

This particular event had been somewhat more raucous than usual as Derek Jameson had just lost an arm wrestle with Ann Diamond. The match was the second semi-final of the morning after Belinda Carlisle had been pipped at the post by Rusty Lee. Carlisle had caused some consternation after, upset at losing and forfeiting the chance to compete for the first prize of a quarter of midget gems, she had spat port in Lee's handbag. Carlisle had been asked to leave and, after a brief tussle, had been ejected from the building whilst screaming and spitting in Simon Parkin's face. — St John Morris

It's not about Obama, it's about the Democrats and their policies that cause consternation on the right. — Elizabeth A. Sherman

It was in fact during the month of May 1889 that Carnegie was finishing up a magazine article to become known as "The Gospel of Wealth," in which he said, and much to the consternation of his Pittsburgh associates, "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." The gist of the article was that the rich, like the poor, would always be with us. The present system had its inequities, certainly, and many of them were disgraceful. But the system was a good deal better than any other so far. The thing for the rich man to do was to divide his life into two parts. The first part should be for acquisition, the second for distribution. At — David McCullough

The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat
which meant precisely the same then as it does now
but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. — Bill Bryson

When it came to choice of subjects, science was obvious - since I was uninterested in anything else - but a decision that caused consternation in some eyes was my demand to take biology for A-level. — John Sulston

My best life advice:Take the high road.No matter how much stress, or strain, or consternation you are facing, take the high road.You will never regret it. — Tim Gunn

I mean, these are kids that are getting on rail cars, riding the top of rail cars all the way up through Mexico. I mean, the danger that they're put in, the sexual assaults that are occurring - I mean, all of this is a great consternation, I think, for any of us. But when they come here and then they're dumped on our cities and our counties and our state is expected to pick up the costs, there's a point in time where you say, 'Quit giving these individuals incentives to come up and then be resettled in the United States'. That's the real issue for me. — Rick Perry

Keep your eye on the end of the course. Victory is secured already. Do not let the hurdles cause thee consternation. Stay in the running. Verily, I am at thy side. According to each day shall thy strength be; and the race is not to the swift, but the obedient shall receive the prize. — Frances J Roberts

Pleasure, scarcely in one instance, is ever able to reach ecstasy and rapture; and in no one instance can it continue for any time at its highest pitch and altitude. The spirits evaporate, the nerves relax, the fabric is disordered, and the enjoyment quickly degenerates into fatigue and uneasiness. But pain often, good God, how often! rises to torture and agony; and the longer it continues, it becomes still more genuine agony and torture. Patience is exhausted, courage languishes, melancholy seizes us, and nothing terminates our misery but the removal of its cause, or another event, which is the sole cure of all evil, but which, from our natural folly, we regard with still greater horror and consternation. — David Hume

I drove home, selected and marked my first series of readings, and drove back to Montagu Square, with a dozen works in a carpet-bag, the like of which, I firmly believe, are not to be found in the literature of any other country in Europe. I paid the cabman exactly his fare. He received it with an oath; upon which I instantly gave him a tract. If I had presented a pistol at his head, this abandoned wretch could hardly have exhibited greater consternation. He jumped up on his box, and, with profane exclamations of dismay, drove off furiously. Quite useless, I am happy to say! I sowed the good seed, in spite of him, by throwing a second tract in at the window of the cab. The — Wilkie Collins

I heard his hasty footsteps on the dock. I kept my head down. I heard the thump and felt it as he leaped down into the cockpit. I heard his grunt of consternation. He would have to find out, and find out quickly. — John D. MacDonald

Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singular mild, firm voice, replied, I would prefer not to. — Herman Melville

Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted as an essential part of the children's literary canon. — Jeff Kinney

[John Jarndyce] rubbed his head so constantly that not a single hair upon it ever rested in its right place — Charles Dickens

Creativity, innovation, and nontraditional ways of solving problems are feared by noncreative, uninnovative, and traditional people. It causes them apprehension and consternation. They cope with their fear by criticizing people who do things differently. If nothing can ever change, nothing can ever get any better. If you don't create new ways to solve old problems, you'll always be stuck with the old problems. — Maggie Righetti

My kind [vampires] does not surprise easily," he said. "You surprised me, this morning. I have thus used up my full quota of shock and consternation for some interval."
I stared at him. "You made a *joke*."
"I have heard this kind of thing may happen ... — Robin McKinley

The terror and the consternation of the Presidential couple may be imagined by anyone who has ever lived a child, and suffered that dread intimation common to all parents, that Fate may not hold that life in as high a regard, and may dispose of it at will.
- In "Selected Civil War Letters of Edwine Willow", edited by Constance Mays — George Saunders

But if we had to trade with a Europe dominated by the present German trade policies, we might have to change our methods to some totalitarian form. This is a prospect that any lover of democracy must view with consternation. — Wendell Willkie

Jesse must have heard me because she stuck her head out of her bedroom and then rushed over. "Can I help?"
I looked down to see what caused the consternation in her face. It wasn't my nakedness. She'd grown up with werewolves, and shapeshifters can't afford too much modesty. [ ... ]
No, it wasn't my nakedness; it was the blood. I was covered with it.
Appalled, I looked behind me at the carpet that was stained with my blood all the way up the stairs. "Darn it," I said. "That's going to be expensive to clean. — Patricia Briggs

You truly are the most astonishingly beautiful hobbit I've ever seen," he said, and Tamsyn froze.
"Hobbit??"
"Um, yes?" he said, and Tamsyn looked down at herself in panic. Her suit had disappeared and been replaced by a straight dress in a rustic homespun fabric of a drab, brownish grey. Her hair still looked the same, she established when she grabbed a handful and held it up in front of her face, but when she scrabbled up and caught a glimpse of her feet, her legs immediately lost their strength again. She thudded back down hard and grabbed her left leg, yanking her foot up to her eyes.
It was bare, large and very, very hairy.
She checked her other foot as well, hoping against all laws of probability that it would be different, and groaned in consternation when it looked the same as the left one.
"This can't be true!" she wailed, scrambling to get up again. "I'm a hobbit! — Erica Dakin

The construction of a new body of knowledge always bears direct connection to the ideology in which it operates. Historical insights that diverge from the narrative laid down at the inception of the nation can be accepted only when consternation about their implications is abated. This can happen when the current collective identity begins to be taken for granted and ceases to be something anxiously and nostalgically clings to a mythical past, when identity becomes the basis for living and not its purpose - that is when historiographic change can take place. — Shlomo Sand

Take the high road. No matter how much strife, and consternation, frustration and anger you might be confronted with - don't go to that level. — Tim Gunn

You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind: in time after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob. For the whole remnant of your life, if you survive the test - some it is said, die under it - you will be stronger, wiser, less sensitive. — Charlotte Bronte

I also know this,' he went on: 'One cup poured into another makes different water; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another's eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man's smile would be consternation on another's mouth. Rear up eternal river, here comes grief! Man has no foothold that is not also a bargain. So be it! Laughing I came into Pacific Street, and laughing I'm going out of it; laughter is the pauper's money. — Djuna Barnes

She remembered the story from her childhood, about Adam and Eve in the garden, and the talking snake. Even as a little girl she had said - to the consternation of her family - What kind of idiot was Eve, to believe a snake? But now she understood, for she had heard the voice of the snake and had watched as a wise and powerful man had fallen under its spell.
Eat the fruit and you can have the desires of your heart. It's not evil, it's noble and good. You'll be praised for it.
And it's delicious. — Orson Scott Card

It has been brought to my attention that I may be a verbivore. I consumptor of words, that I subsequently spew forth with considerable consternation.
A Volley of verbs that are quite vexing has taken form, perhaps under the guise of consonants most foul!! Where have you wandered faithful vowels? — Neil Leckman

I'm sure I cause just as much consternation for editors as any other actor, but it definitely makes me feel more comfortable understanding how and why all the different camera setups exist. — Ed Helms

All the best and worse things in us are bound up in the legacy of our family. As children we ardently trust in the stability or, in some cases, the instability we were born into. No matter which...we embraced what was decent while simultaneously suppressing what was deficient yet both traits weaved roots of faithfulness and consternation into the very fabric of who we've become. This now plays significantly into how we nurture our own families and how we relate to others. Our love, our fears, our insecurities, and our loyalties all draw from how we were raised as well as our inherent desire to shift its paradigm to optimistically better the life of not just our children...but our children's children. That's the gift and or the curse of a legacy. Which will you leave behind? — Jason Versey

No one attached to the traditional image of authoritarian patriarchy could imagine the consternation men endure. They have suffered an unexpected blow to the emotional quality of their lives. Its gravity has not been calculated. They have far fewer reliable links than women to the classic currents of family life. They are alienated not only, as Marx said, from the means of production but also from the means of reproduction. — Lionel Tiger

Epifania's first order was the most ancient wish of dynasts: that Carmen must conceive a male child, a king-in-waiting through whom his loving mother and grandmother would rule. Carmen, realising in her bitter consternation that this very first instruction would have to be disobeyed, lowered her eyes, muttered, 'Okay, Epifania Aunty, wish is my command,' and fled the room. — Salman Rushdie

He thought he saw her smile waver when she read it, then she was hugging him tightly. "You're the one who needs to take care of yourself. Your escape is still all the news. They'll be searching for you." She drew back to look at him, and to his consternation he saw that she had tears in her eyes. "I couldn't bear to lose you again." He bent and kissed her forehead. Even if he could speak there was nothing he could say to comfort her. — Elizabeth Hoyt

Are you Hannah's boyfriend?"
... Marco's reply was, "Nope. She won't let me be."
Beth had immediately turned her cute look of consternation on me. "That's really rude, Hannah. — Samantha Young

There are things we know for certain."
"Oh? Name one."
"The sun's going to come up tomorrow morning."
"Why?"
"It always has."
"Does that really mean that it always will?"
A faint look of consternation crossed her face. "It will, won't it?"
"Probably, but we can't be absolutely certain. Once you've decided that something's absolutely true, you've closed your mind on it, and a closed mind doesn't go anywhere. Question everything, Pol. That's what education's all about. — David Eddings

There is nothing loving about encouraging fear. Nothing. Fear leads to darkness, depression, anger, irrationality, anxiety, consternation, unrest, and ultimately, destruction. Fear, as Yoda reminds us all, is the path to the Dark Side. Fear is a weapon, not a productive tool. Fear is a means of control. Fear should never be the basis for why anyone does anything regarding the health of the mind, body, and spirit. — Michael Vito Tosto