Disconcerting Quotes & Sayings

By the time I had gathered my wits sufficiently to press the point the lamps had guttered out and Brisbane was sleeping heavily fatigued by his effortshighly successful efforts I must confessto divert me from the investigation. I lay awake physically satisfied but deeply annoyed. Even after nine months of marriage I was still not entirely comfortable with my responses to his physical overtures. The merest touch from him and all reasonable though seemed to fly out of my head. It was most disconcerting and more so because he apparently knew it I thought irritable. — Deanna Raybourn

There are few things more disconcerting than realizing the first date you thought went so well was in fact a dud. — Mallory Ortberg

My son wants to be Batman and he wants the Batman costume that comes in the mail. It has fake muscles in it, which is very disconcerting on a four-year-old. — Matthew Broderick

I'd just run into my gynecologist at Starbucks and she totally looked right past me like she didn't even know me. And so I stood there wondering whether that's something she does on purpose to make her clients feel less uncomfortable, or whether she just genuinely didn't recognize me without my vagina. Either way, it's very disconcerting when people who've been inside your vagina don't acknowledge your existence. Also, I just want to clarify that I don't mean "without my vagina" like I didn't have it with me at the time. — Jenny Lawson

Another person, more or less, thinking I'm crazy wasn't going to make me lose sleep. But the look I got from Mr. Shaw wasn't "she's a whack-job," it was more like "hmmm."
"What else can you do?"
Now it was my turn to stare. "Uh, well, I have a freakshow ability to fall through spirals into other times. Is that what you mean?"
"Must be a little disconcerting, that."
"A little. The puking's fun though." Mr. Shaw laughed. I'd made the man laugh. Score one for the Clocker. — April White

Every once in a while Carlos broke out of restrained cop mode and got poetic. I found it a bit charming and a whole lot disconcerting. — Juliet Blackwell

The shock of the way I mix patterns and fabrics can be disconcerting, but what I am trying to do is provoke new ideas about how pieces can be put together in different ways. I think this is a more modern way to wear clothes that in themselves are fairly classic. — Jean Paul Gaultier

Once in a while it can be a bit disconcerting to be so recognisable. — George Wendt

The guys who appeared to have a genuine interest in the videos and products at the arcade confounded everyone. You couldn't be sure who was actually looking to fool around. It was even more disconcerting when a straight couple came in to check out dildos and cheap negligees, as if taking a shot at spicing up their sex life or beginning in earnest their earliest dalliances into swinging. — Drew Nellins Smith

I stayed only two days in the capital. I was welcomed by a cheering citizenry, who threw flowers at my head. It was disconcerting to think I could have put almost any young man in my retinue on a white horse and they would have thrown flowers at him instead. It was not me they cared about, only what I meant to them: a cessation of hostilities, a chance for prosperity, food on the table. — Megan Whalen Turner

There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the private security firm not having enough people, supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging. — Mitt Romney

Every role I've played, that could've happened. It's nice, it happens, but it is rather disconcerting when a young child comes up to at the airport and starts doing your lines, it happens. — Michael York

Truth can well out of a man like blood from a wound, and it can be just as disconcerting to look at. — Robin Hobb

There is nothing more disconcerting to passers-by than to see a man in a wheelchair pleading with a woman who is meant to be looking after him. It's apparently not really the done thing to be angry with your disabled charge. Especially — Jojo Moyes

Chocolate is an excellent flavor for ice cream but both unreasonable and disconcerting in chewing gum. — Fran Lebowitz

It's a very strange phenomenon being hated by people you've never met. Some journalists just seem to hate me and everything I do, and it's disconcerting because I've never met this person. — Moby

It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting. — Richard Russo

Even after a peak parenting experience, children never transition to a fully self-tuning physiology. Adults remain social animals: they continue to require a source of stabilization outside themselves. That open-loop design means that in some important ways, people cannot be stable on their own - not should or shouldn't be, but can't be. This prospect is disconcerting to many, especially in a society that prizes individuality as ours does. Total self-sufficiency turns out to be a daydream whose bubble is burst by the sharp edge of the limbic brain. Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them. (86) — Thomas Lewis

Existence itself is disconcerting and disorienting. — Natasha Lyonne

To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris. — A.J. Liebling

A lot of times, it's nice to open, because the heat's off you. You just go out and blast your set and say to whoever's going to finish, 'There you go.' Even though when you first start, people are drifting in, and that's kind of a bit disconcerting. — Joe Cocker

And I had the most disconcerting sensation: that in my memory she would look up from that game of solitaire and the sockets of her eyes would be empty. — Anne Rice

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences. — E. T. Bell

I hold Petrarch at leastly partly responsible for the disconcerting gap between Italian's written and spoken vocabularies. The — Dianne Hales

Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge. — G. M. Trevelyan

I understand you've been spending some time in the company of my son." Adam's father had a disconcerting stare. His eyes were hazel, close in color to my own, but there was an uncanny awareness in them - like he knew what you'd had for breakfast that morning and how you would sleep that night. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste. — Darin Strauss

The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love. — Sinclair Lewis

For someone like me, who prefers to keep their life as private as possible, it was disconcerting to have to define so much about myself. I don't want to be labeled as one thing or another. — Amber Heard

As a researcher, every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting. And this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you, and teaches you that you're very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in. — Sendhil Mullainathan

Rhy felt Alucard's eyes wandering slowly, hungrily, over him, and he blushed. The heat started in his face and spread down, through his collar, his chest, beneath shirt and belt. It was disconcerting; Rhy might not have magic, but when it came to conquests, he was used to holding the power - things happened at his whim, and at his pleasure. Now he felt that power falter, slip. In all of Ames, there was only one person capable of flustering the prince, of reducing him from a proud royal to a nervous youth, and that was Alucard Emery. Misfit. Rogue. Privateer. And royal. — Victoria Schwab

Where before we Comanches had simply stared at her femaleness, we now glared at it. She smiled back at us. It was a shade disconcerting. Then the Chief took over, revealing what had formerly been a well-concealed flair for incompetence. — J.D. Salinger

What was doubly disconcerting for me was that he showed such extraordinary and precocious insight in describing his own feelings that I felt he was making my own confession. — Andre Gide

It was disconcerting that being in love felt lonelier than lonelines. — Emily Maguire

Truth is so often disconcerting. — Rafael Sabatini

It was disconcerting when she asked questions that no one answered. That way lay madness. — K.F. Breene

I do find it a bit disconcerting when your name becomes a brand. — Sophie Ellis-Bextor

I read in a book that a man called Christ went about doing good. It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about. — Toyohiko Kagawa

It was always disconcerting to meet those who had become so obsessed with a single topic that they could not see their concerns in context. — Alexander McCall Smith

The days carry the living along; the dead are left behind. It was disconcerting to discover how everything went on without Papa. The sun came up and went down, the roses bloomed, the birds sang, the stars wheeled overhead exactly as they had before — Juliet Waldron

He was puzzled by his mood. Despite the beauty of his surroundings, he found it curiously disconcerting. The art was almost too good to be true. What was it saying about humanity, and how much was the Renaissance culpable of creating the myth of individual rather than collective achievement? Was this the beginning of the desire for individual fame and recognition that contradicted Christian humility and shared responsibility; licensing the modern notion of ambition and selfish aspiration? On — James Runcie

It's disconcerting to realize how little you have to say to someone who once occupied such a prominent place in your bed. — Sue Grafton

There's something very disconcerting about a sock with Winnie the Pooh on it wriggling and squirming about my knicker drawer. Looking for its honey pot. — Andrea Bramhall

It is my dream to create an art which is filled with balance, purity and calmness, freed from a subject matter that is disconcerting or too attention-seeking. In my paintings, I wish to create a spiritual remedy, similar to a comfortable armchair which provides rest from physical expectation for the spiritually working, the businessman as well as the artist. — Henri Matisse

St Mary Magdalene church was on the left-hand side of the road, set back behind a low brick wall, well-trimmed topiary and a narrow fringe of grass studded with lichen-covered gravestones from a hundred years ago. A sign had been tied to the railings: two capital As set inside a blue triangle that was itself set within a blue circle. An arrow pointed towards the church. Milton felt a disconcerting moment of doubt and paused by the gate to adjust the lace of his shoe. He looked up and down the street, satisfying himself that he was not observed. He knew the consequences for being seen in a place like this would be draconian and swift; suspension would be immediate, the termination of his employment would follow soon after, and there was the likelihood of prosecution. He was ready to leave the service, but on his own terms and not like that. — Mark Dawson

Being watched in the act of coitus is disconcerting, even for the most brazen. Yet, more than merely making the experience tolerable, masks reveal an innate longing to play to the crowd, to be naked, sweating, screaming in orgasm. — Chloe Thurlow

We live in a disconcerting world. Trying to comprehend what we see around us, we ask ourselves: what is the universe made of? and what is our place in it? where odes the universe come from? and where do we come from? — Rafael Abalos

The sudden noise through the headphones is disconcerting - a massive, evil-sounding slab of guitar, seemingly played with the sole intention of terrifying anyone who hasn't yet lived through a roughly equivalent sonic experience, such as riding their tricycle under a malfunctioning cement mixer full of dying children. — Caitlin Moran

It would have been funny if I had been an observer and not a participant, an idea that gave me a disconcerting insight into gossip. As I walked beside the silent Tamara, I realized that despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt. — Sherwood Smith

One had to breathe consciously and deliberately, which, though disconcerting at first, induced after a time an almost ecstatic tranquility of mind. The whole body moved in a single rhythm of breathing, walking, and thinking, the lungs, no longer discrete and automatic, were disciplined to harmony with mind and limb. — James Hilton

Last time I was in London, I visited Number 5, Bruton Street, which is the address I gave to Violet Bridgerton, the matriarch of the Bridgerton clan in my novels. It was a bit disconcerting to learn that it's actually a pub. — Julia Quinn

America's phones are bliss. Their habit of actually working is very disconcerting: Put in a coin, and speak to whoever answers. I truly hope it catches on everywhere. — Jonathan Gash

You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt. — Learned Hand

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life. — Sean William Scott

Such nice people, the Hillingdons, though she's not really very easy to know, is she? I mean, she's always very pleasant and all that, but one never seems to get to know her better.'

Miss Marple agreed thoughtfully.

'One never knows what she is thinking.'
'Perhaps that is just as well.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Oh nothing really, only that I've always had the feeling that perhaps her thoughts might be rather disconcerting. — Agatha Christie

Every father knows the disconcerting when you see your child as a weird, distorted double of yourself. It is as if for a moment your identities overlap. You see an idea, a conception of your boyish inner self ... made real and flesh.
He is you restarted, rewound; at the same time he is as foreign and unknowable as any other person. — William Landay

Even though I don't have any larger spiritual or ideological system, there is some logic in concert with a huge number of beautiful, disconcerting, screwed-up variables that results in a certain visual pleasure in violent things. Like a broken egg yolk can be the most violent thing I've seen all day, if I'm in the right mood. But also tons of trash in the woods or a burned-up trailer park can also come across as especially violent. — Elizabeth Neel

It was disconcerting for the novel to seem so different when I re-read it. Of course we are a different person each time we open a book to read it again; we can never really experience it in the same way, just as we can never step into the same stream twice. — Ramona Koval

Everybody has a great deal of experience in living. But no one lives in anything like the highest style of the art; and it is very disconcerting to notice how badly one lives in the sense of the extent to which fatigue and other discomforts are connected with one's important dealings with other people. — Harry Stack Sullivan

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say ... ?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art. — Neil Postman

This open eye for possible alternatives which need to be scrutinized before we can determine which is the best grounded is profoundly disconcerting to all conservatives and to almost all revolutionaries. — Morris Raphael Cohen

The realization is disconcerting because it suggests that in a given disagreement, the other guy might have a point, we may not be as pure as we think, the two sides will come to blows each convinced that it is in the right, and no one will think the better of it because everyone's self-deception is invisible to them. For — Steven Pinker

He looked closely. It was very disconcerting to have your gay unicorn best friend studying your penis that intensely. Finally, he gave his verdict. "It's a very nice penis." "Thank — T.J. Klune

Too much information can be as disconcerting as too little. — Patricia Wentworth

One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word. — Dorothy Day

incremental development can be disconcerting for teams and management who aren't used to it because it front-loads the stress in a project. — Steve Freeman

I am a fan of all of the same shows that David just listed. And then I also have a weird obsession with Court TV, which is now truTV - I don't know if you know that. Yeah they changed names. I don't know why they did that but they did. It was a little disconcerting to me at first. But I've gotten over it. — Debra Messing

Such is the disconcerting miracle of good acting; at its best it implicitly challenges our faith in who we are, who anyone is. — Melissa Febos

That was Big Fucking Mistake Number Two.
Ten minutes later, he heard Zoe coughing on the monitor and realized that he'd forgotten to keep her upright after he'd fed her. He ran into her room and scooped her up just in time for her to throw up all over both of them, a full-out, volcanic-style heaving that spewed out of her mouth and nose. Which was doubly disconcerting because, (A) holy shit, no one had ever warned him that something so tiny and cute could puke like a drunken frat boy who'd just gorged on a double-stuffed burrito, and (B) now Zoe was hollering like a banshee-Who left the dumbass in charge of me? Help!- — Julie James

Well,' Frederick had said, 'I will see what can be arranged, Archie. But I will not have the girl frightened or compromised.'
'You sound like a grandfather who has raised fifteen daughters and is now starting on his granddaughters, Freddie,' Lord Archibald had said. 'It is most disconcerting. — Mary Balogh

I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction. — Stephane Mallarme

The Frankenstein myth confronts Homo Sapiens with the fact that the last days are fast approaching. Unless some nuclear or ecological catastrophe intervenes, so goes the story, the pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo Sapiens by completely different beings who posses not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds. This is something most Sapiens find extremely disconcerting. We like to believe that in the future people just like us will travel from planet to planet in fast spaceships. We don't like to contemplate the possibility that in the future, beings with emotions and identities like ours will no longer exist, and our place will be taken by alien life forms whose abilities dwarf our own. — Yuval Noah Harari

Blindsight is excellent. It's state-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one. Like a C J Cherryh book it makes you feel the danger of the hostile environment (or lack of one) out there. And it plays with some fascinating possibilities in human development, and some disconcerting ideas about human consciousness. What else can I say? Thanks for giving me the privilege of reading this. — Neal Asher

Having been in front of the camera just a couple of times, I'm empathetic, because it's very disconcerting. Someone shuffles you off to the trailer; you sit there for eleven hours wondering what the hell's going on. — Kurt Voss

During his reading hours, which were between one and five o'clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to the disconcerting conclusion that whistling was not an important theme in literature. — Julio Cortazar

As long as Mary can't cook and has those awful manners - well, we're safe, nobody else would have her. I perceived that my wife's methods of housekeeping were not so entirely haphazard as I had imagined. A certain amount of reasoning underlay them. Whether it was worthwhile having a maid at the price of her not being able to cook, and having a habit of throwing dishes and remarks at one with the same disconcerting abruptness, was a debatable matter. — Agatha Christie

There's something dangerous about what's funny. Jarring and disconcerting. There is a connection between funny and scary. — Christopher Walken

Many life-affirming questions lead to an endless spool of disconcerting propositions and contradictory conclusions, and even more troubling, some queries prove unanswerable. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Mr. Robinson was a polished sort of person. He was so clean and healthy and pleased about everything that he positively shone - which is only to be expected in a fairy or an angel, but is somewhat disconcerting in an attorney. — Susanna Clarke

The trees called to me, urging me to abandon what I knew and vanish into the oncoming night. It was a desire that had been tugging me with disconcerting frequency these days. — Maggie Stiefvater

The pleasure I found in reading books was disconcerting ... I felt anxious about every new piece of information. I would latch onto one particular detail and start look for references and other versions of it in other writings. I remembered, for example, that for quite some time I tracked down the subject of kissing. I read and read and felt dizzy with the subject, as if I had eaten a psychotropic fruit. — Hassan Blasim

It is disconcerting to learn that while 73 percent of Americans can name the Three Stooges, only 42 percent can name the three branches of government.6 — Parker J. Palmer

This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language. — Gaston Bachelard

I have only touched one other computer at my friend Marissa's house, and found the experience disconcerting. There was something sinister about the green letters and numbers that flashed on the screen as the computer booted up, and I hated the way Marissa stopped answering questions or noticing me the second it was turned on. — Lena Dunham

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency. — Penelope Lively

Philosophers, comedians, and tipsy birthday celebrants all have proposed theories about why time seems to move increasingly swiftly as we grow older. But the most disconcerting rationale is not a theory. It is the undeniable realization that every day we live constitutes a smaller percentage of the accrued experience with which we awaken each morning, and therefore seems proportionately a smidgen quicker and smaller than the day before. — Michael Sims

The mystic lives and looks; and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience. — Evelyn Underhill

Geniuses are disconcerting. Their comings and goings in the ideal world give one vertigo ... They have a telescope in one eye and a microscope in the other. — Victor Hugo

He so enjoyed disconcerting a woman of conservative sensibilities, and he suspected that the detective had inhibitions atop reservations wrapped in reticense.
Lucan thinking about Samantha
Dark Need by Lynn Viehl — Lynn Viehl

We are all the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then, whereas at twenty we put on a show of being someone else, of being in the mode of the moment. If there is an intellectual fashion, you become an intellectual; if girls are fluffy and frivolous, you are fluffy and frivolous. As life goes on, however, it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned. I — Agatha Christie

In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems.
Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural encounter in fiction seems to reflect some deeper disorientations in the culture at large. — Howard Kerr

Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously. — Lance Morrow

But Gilbert's visits were not what they once were. Anne almost dreaded them. It was very disconcerting to look up in the midst of a sudden silence and find Gilbert's hazel eyes fixed upon her with a quite unmistakable expression in their grave depths; and it was still more disconcerting to find herself blushing hotly and uncomfortably under his gaze, just as if - just as if - well, it was very embarrassing. — L.M. Montgomery

I find fairies with cell phones disconcerting enough. Do they really need to use text talk? — Kelley Armstrong

Laurel wondered whether perhaps a person reached an age when so much was kept from them, so many details of life discussed and decided elsewhere,misheard or misunderstood, that to be surprised was no longer disconcerting. — Kate Morton

If you went to Harvard Medical School, chances are you'll be a doctor at some place. There's a career trajectory. Acting, there's nothing. It's constantly trying to procure jobs - it's very disconcerting. — Jesse Eisenberg

He tilted his head to the side, still watching me in that same, disconcerting way. "Some things are true, drunk or sober. You should know that. You deal in facts all the time."
"Yeah, but this isn't - " I couldn't argue with him looking at me like that. "I have to go. Wait ... you didn't take the cross." I held it out to him. He shook his head. "Keep it. I think I've got something else to help center my life. — Richelle Mead

It's a bit disconcerting being treated like Madonna. — Rowan Atkinson

It's very disconcerting to start out and to say, "I'm going to tell the truth," and then to realize it's that much trouble. — Elaine Stritch