Quotes & Sayings About Mercurial

My mother was one of the most dynamic and brilliant women I have ever known. She was also mercurial and unfocused. — Christina Baker Kline

Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament. It has been with my pleasure, and not-inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth - from my husband, the man with whom I had lived for almost a decade. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Like the lotus flower, business blooms in the mud, and in the dark of night. The lotus is an amazing creation of God, because for all of its beauty, it is the sum total of work performed in a mess. It is also a creation that has the ability to create seeds in its habitat for a very long time without help from human hands. The lotus has the ability to survive beyond the mercurial nature of weather (storms, frost). The lotus is one strong, powerful, and resilient flower that blossoms in a substance (mud) that none of us would want to touch. — Robin Caldwell

Nor yet be overeager in pursuit of any thing; for the mercurial too often happen to leave judgment behind them, and sometimes make work for repentance. — William Penn

Mr. Stalker
Mr. Kinky
Mr. Spellcaster
Mr. Charming
Mr. Personality
Mr. Stalker
Mr. Celebrity
Mr. Beautiful
Mr. Mercurial — R.K. Lilley

The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied. — Jeanette Winterson

The capacity for extravagant emotion that my husband finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament. — Ayelet Waldman

For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp and, like all little girls, even those who speak to fantastical wild boars and mercurial horses, she collapsed in desperate sobs, of the kind that come so easily to a twelve-year-old, and so hard to a person of forty. — Muriel Barbery

Life is an orbit where light and darkness follow each other in a mercurial cycle. — Pramudith D. Rupasinghe

How could she explain to Felicity that her anxiety was like a strange, mercurial little pet she was forced to look after? Sometimes it was quiet and pliable; other days it was crazy, running around in circles, yapping in her ear. — Liane Moriarty

Her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth ... — Megan Whalen Turner

I'm totally on a mission to find my signature scent, but I'm too mercurial. — Lexa Doig

The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made pf chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again. [p. 59] — Siri Hustvedt

Men as steadfast and normal as the women were mercurial and strange. The men in their lives loved them the way astronomers loved stars, loved the promise of what they were, knowing there was something about them they would never truly understand. — Sarah Addison Allen

There's a mercurial nature, but more of a mysterious nature to women that I think is what makes them so attractive. And I think that that's what I love: Guys never seem to know when they've come too close and crossed the line, and then the temper comes. — Andrew Stanton

I've done a lot of films that are purely live-action roles, and even if I hadn't come across performance capture as a technology, I think I'd always consider myself a sort of mercurial actor. — Andy Serkis

Wetiko is elusive and mercurial, for whatever we say wetiko is, it isn't, in that it is always more, less, and other than what we are able to say it is in language. — Paul Levy

Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing. — David Lovelace

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. — Kay Redfield Jamison

He was a handsome man, not in the way of mercurial Cesare or the false angel, Morozzi, but with a calm steadiness that sat well upon him and shown in everything he did. The creations he drew from fire and air were possessed of great delicacy, but I was coming to realize that the man himself was as an oak, unshakable in the greatest storm. — Sara Poole

In any case, if recognition arising from proximate circumstances based upon fleeting criteria constitutes the sole measure of our personal significance, recognition will be both mercurial and insufficient. — Neal A. Maxwell

For the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming. — Ben Macintyre

Women have so many levels. There's the physical level, which is a lot of fun. There's this emotional level, which is extremely mercurial. — Robin Williams

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it [dignity]. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it. — Dave Eggers

driven, passionate, mercurial, irascible" [the character of Michelangelo] — Miles J. Unger

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was. — May Sarton

Despite the sisters' pretend rivalry and occasional squabbles, they were each other's staunchest ally and closest friend. Few people in Lillian's life had ever loved her except Daisy, who adored the ugliest stray dogs, the most annoying children, and things that needed to be repaired or thrown out altogether.
And yet for all their closeness, they were quite different. Daisy was an idealist, a dreamer, a mercurial creature who alternated between childlike whimsy and shrewd intelligence. Lillian knew herself to be a sharp-tongued girl with a fortress of defenses between herself and the rest of the world- a girl with well-maintained cynicism and a biting sense of humor. — Lisa Kleypas

She would never understand her sister. Her sister was like the weather, no, she was worse than the weather. She was like an earthquake that came out of nowhere to shake the world up, but even the tiny tremors, so unpredictable, were a little disorienting. Still, afterward, you were left feeling glad, if only because the ground was no longer shaking. — Victoria Kahler

We are too mercurial for our own good. — Erin Morgenstern

He, who for an ordinary cause, resigns the fate of his patient to mercury, is a vile enemy to the sick; and, if he is tolerably popular, will, in one successful season, have paved the way for the business of life, for he has enough to do, ever afterward, to stop the mercurial breach of the constitutions of his dilapidated patients. He has thrown himself in fearful proximity to death, and has now to fight him at arm's length as long as the patient maintains a miserable existence. — Nathaniel Chapman

By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and she determined to subordinate him to a stronger religious discipline than was offered by the easy-going Protestants. If so, she was wise. — John Le Carre

I had huge fun with Chris Evans, as Captain America, because super-soldier though he may be, he's still a man, up against a God who in his own mind is infinitely superior. Then, in the ring with The Hulk, we've got this silver tongued, lightening quick mind up against the embodiment of rage..Loki has this mercurial, transformative ability, not just physically but intellectually, so not all the fights are purely physical. Mind games? Maybe.. — Tom Hiddleston

If you're going to have guests," the ghost said with a sigh, "would it be so hard to give me a little advance warning?" Her eyes were dark with heavy lids. She had soft cheekbones and gentle features, framed neatly by twin locks of hair, which swept her cheeks on either side. The rest was tucked behind her ears and spilled down her back and shoulders in silvery waves, like a mercurial waterfall. She had a slim, spritely figure, and her movements were as smooth as smoke in a soft breeze. She placed the cup on the tray with a gentle clink, and drifted to a seat on the windowsill. Through her opaque figure, I could see the swaying branches of a weeping willow in the yard. "How — William Ritter

Kenya is a mercurial character. I feel the country has a presence that can turn on its people in a very violent way. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Bronson always said that, of all the girls, Louisa was most like her mother, and he didn't mean it as a compliment. Both were mercurial, passionate, willful. Louisa had seen despair like Abba's from the inside. She had inherited it the way some daughters came into a silver tray or a set of spoons. — Kelly O'Connor McNees

Disintegration: literally, the loss of integrity. But if the mind can be described as one's subjective experience of the brain, then what is the self but vagrant fluorescings of neural constellations, individual states of consciousness determined by mercurial configurations of amplitude and alliance? — Brian McGreevy

The world is violent and mercurial--it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love--love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love. — Tennessee Williams

I guess I'm a Gemini through and through, but I'm mercurial. I get bored doing the same things. — Jewel

The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seeing and to be seen. — Christian Nestell Bovee

On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it. — Terence McKenna

The dark leaden mask hides the devil with a soul of deceit, with his warm syrupy vacuous words coercing, enticing and grasping with exposed sharpened claws, scratching slow at his prey's surface with bullet pointed precision, inserting the slow hot mercurial poison of falsification of love straight into the flowing veins of the succumbing vulnerable heart. The prey's wanton escape futile, isolated & drawn into the hot fiery abyss. — Alison Blackmore

The Waverley sisters had married men as steadfast and normal as the women were mercurial and strange. — Sarah Addison Allen

Nothing tells in the long run like a good judgment, and no sound judgment can remain with the man whose mind is disturbed by the mercurial changes of the stock exchange. It places him under an influence akin to intoxication. What is not, he sees, and what he sees, is not. — Andrew Carnegie

We are all somewhat mercurial for temperament, and it is much easier to believe that all is well when the sun is shining, and yet, is not the sun always shining just behind the clouds that never last? — Grace May North

Like tiny islands on the horizon, they can vanish in rough seas. Even in calm weather, their coral gradually erodes, pickled by salt and heat. Yet they form the shoals of a life. Some offer safe lagoons and murmuring trees. Others crawl with pirates and reptiles. Together they connect a self with the mainland and society. Plot their trail and a mercurial past becomes visible.

Memories feel geological in their repose, solid and true, the bedrock of consciousness. — Diane Ackerman

Think of how hard it would be to create a gender-based movement across racial lines as long as one group believes that it has to be strong while seeing the other group as passive and weak. We could also go into the stereotypes of the saucy, mercurial Latina and the docile, easily-dominated Asian woman. — Melissa Harris-Perry

I actually think in some ways that it might be more challenging to be bipolar because it's so mercurial - it's so ever-changing. You can't get any traction. You can't build on a system. Whereas, somebody who has Asperger's, which is certainly a much more forgiving expression of autism, can create models for coping and build on them over time. — Claire Danes

Sculley began to believe that Jobs's mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people were rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the reflection of a mild bipolarity. — Walter Isaacson

...I am discovering that it is truly a mistake--it may even be a moral wrong, in fact--to judge. Truth is too complex, too contradictory, too mercurial, to be one-sided, though it is human nature to prefer the reassurance and ease of firm judgement. Judgement helps us to justify our less savory actions. — Melissa Pritchard

A barbarous practice, the inconsistency, folly, and injury of which no words can sufficiently describe.

[Condemning the use of mercurial medicines.] — Thomas Graham

There are times when democracy can be a disadvantage. There is an often-recounted and many-versioned story of the mercurial Doug Scott on K2. All versions end with Doug disagreeing with the others, who suggest that the matter be put to the vote. 'You know, youth,' replied Doug, 'democracy is a bit of a failure if you end up having to vote on it. — Victor Saunders

Damon, leather and silk and fine chiseled features. Mercurial and devastating. — L.J.Smith

In the realm of love and sex, it's girls who are in the position of working hard to adapt themselves to the needs and fantasies of the mercurial males whose approval and attention they seek. — Meenakshi Gigi Durham