Most Unnerving Quotes & Sayings

[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life
the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes
ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases. — Tom Bissell

The only antidote to the unnerving effects of such incoherence is integrity. People and organizations with integrity are wholly themselves. No aspect of self stands different or apart. At their center is clarity, not conflict. When they go inside to find themselves, there is only one self there. — Margaret Wheatley

In retrospect, the most unnerving aspect of being openly gay was that it turned out to be as disappointingly normal as being straight. — Lance Loud

Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do "practice"? — George Carlin

It was unnerving, the way people moved in herds. Especially when you were the prey. — Chris Russell

You are unnerving the hell out of me, Valkyrie."
"oh" she frowned, petting her bat fitfully " I must have misread the future for the past." she shrugged. "It happens. — Kresley Cole

You're trembling," he said. "I think I'm scared." "But why?" He smoothed his hand over her hair. "I was a fool to have left you alone, but it won't happen again." "I've never had anyone try to kill me before." Richard patted her back gently. "'Tis a bit unnerving the first time. — Lynn Kurland

(After meeting her birth mother after more than 40 years) We exchange bunches of orchids, laughing at the coincidence of the flowers. A little unnerving: I wonder if that choice has anything to do with genetics ... I want to take mine home and look after them so that they live for days. I might spray the leaves, and make sure they sit in an easterly window, and keep them out of the direct sun. — Jackie Kay

When I first started out all the attention could be a bit unnerving, especially when people stared. Now I find the best thing is to just relax. Being recognized is just something you have to get used to. — Tom Cruise

He left as silently as he'd come. Pierre LaManche favored crepe-soled shoes, kept his pockets empty so nothing jangled or swished. Like a croc in a river he arrived and departed unannounced by auditory cues. Some of the staff found it unnerving. — Kathy Reichs

Hapi?" I asked.
"Why, yes, I am happy!" Hapi beamed. "I'm always happy because I'm Hapi! Are you happy?"
Zia frowned up at the giant. "Does he have to be so big?"
The god laughed. Immediately he shrank down to human size, though the crazy cheerful look on his face was still pretty unnerving.
"Oh, Setne!" Hapi chuckled and pushed the ghost playfully. "I hate this guy. Absolutely despise him!"
Hapi's smile became painfully wide. "I'd love to rip off your arms and legs, Setne. That would be amazing!"
Setne ... drifted a little farther away from the smiling god.
"Oh!" Hapi clapped excitedly. "The world is going to end tomorrow. I forgot!"
"You'd never get to Memphis without my help. You'd get torn into a million pieces!"
He seemed genuinely pleased to share that news. — Rick Riordan

It was unnerving. She'd looked at him and had the uncontrollable urge to weep. Thus far she'd managed to control her emotions. Thank God. She didn't even want to imagine what he would think of her if she started weeping for absolutely no reason. — Debbie Macomber

The terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving. — Federico Garcia Lorca

I couldn't comprehend the magnetic pull
that could be felt. I never understood the way love
overpowers common sense and passion overtakes
logic, or how unnerving it is that no one else really knows how you feel - no one can judge me for being weak or stupid, no one can put me down for
the way I feel. — Anna Todd

I suppose it's more unnerving to be a boy than a girl,' she conceded.'It's the boys who have to make fools of themselves. — Stephen Vizinczey

In Sussex Drive, Linda Svendsen takes us deep behind the lines of Ottawa's politics, polls and pomp, and into the lives of Canada's two most powerful women. By turns shocking, funny, sizzling and illuminating, this story is brilliantly written with an unnerving authenticity that makes it seem all too real. You're going to want to read this. — Terry Fallis

Perhaps Obama is often slow to nail controversies because he needs time to live inside them for a while in his head. It's unnerving for the rest of us, but even the haters, one feels, are made to think more deeply than they'd like before they return to the bickering and the games. — Tina Brown

The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbiggind, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild ... savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical. — Bill Bryson

Perhaps this was what was so unnerving about Lily at this moment - the trust that was required in what we were doing. — Rachel Cohn

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later - again, for its own mysterious reasons. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I'm okay. It's exciting, and a little unnerving - but in a really cool way. Why are you so calm?"
"You sucked in all the excitment. — Nora Roberts

In most respects a pretty standard student domicile, there was something very unnerving about the apartment, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Eventually I realized: the light in the bathroom never turns off. — Al Burian

The kiss. There are all sorts of kisses, lad, from the sticky confection to the kiss of death. Of them all, the kiss of an actress is the most unnerving. How can we tell if she means it or if she's just practicing? ... — Ruth Gordon

I cleared my throat and began my presentation. As I moved through the different aspects of the proposal, he stayed silent, staring directly at his copy. Why was he so calm? His temper tantrums I could handle. But the eerie silence? It was unnerving.

I was leaning over the table, gesturing toward a set of graphs, when it happened.

"Their timeline for the first milestone is a little ambi-" I stopped midsentence, my breath caught in my throat. His hand pressed gently into my lower back before sliding down, settling on the curve of my ass. In the nine months I had worked for him, he had never intentionally touched me.

This was most definitely intentional. — Christina Lauren

It's both comforting and unnerving to learn that the most important person in your life may be someone you haven't met yet. — Chandler Baker

From Bourbon Street to Baton Rouge, the freaks come out at night in Louisiana. And nowhere are they more raucous and unnerving than at Tiger Stadium. — Pat Forde

Lorth spoke a word and came into focus, though he had learned from experience that his features, the ghost-pale skin of a Northman with the gold-green eyes of a wolf, were almost as unnerving to a Tarthian as the shadowy form of a cloaking spell. — F.T. McKinstry

What's more unnerving than magnetism, ghosts, and unpurified water? Gadgetmongers who purport to protect us from metaphysical monsters that go bump in the New Age night. — Chris Hardwick

if somthing accurs outside wht we call the natural order,its very smallness may be more immediately unnerving than,for istance,the eclipse of the sun to a tribe without astronomy,where holy awe must override any other feeling. very small cracks in our outer sell of reason let in very cold air.

memory in a house,1973 — L.M. Boston

It's unnerving how you fit in the basin of my thighs. — Audrey Rey

With Bruford, the album was One Of A Kind. All-instrumental, it possessed the kind of focused vision that allowed for no ifs or buts. With the unnerving confidence of youth, it had This Is What We Do And This Is How We Do It stamped all over it. — Bill Bruford

It was October 2001 and I lived in New York City. I was twenty-two. I, like many of my female friends, suffered from a strange combination of post-9/11 anxiety and height-of-Sex-and-the-City anxiety. They are distinct and unnerving anxieties. The questions that ran through my mind went something like this: Should I keep a gas mask in my kitchen? Am I supposed to be able to afford Manolo Blahnik shoes? What is Barneys New York? You're trying to tell me a place called "Barneys" is fancy? Where are the fabulous gay friends I was promised? Gay guys hate me! Is this anthrax or powdered sugar? Help! Help! — Mindy Kaling

There's something completely unnerving about seeing your parents
upset. I suppose it's because they're supposed to be the strong ones, but
that's not just it. Ever since people are kids they use their parents as some
sort of measurement for how bad a situation is. When you fall on the ground
really hard and you can't figure out whether it hurts or not you look to your
parents. If they look worried and rush toward you, you cry. If they laugh and
smack the ground saying "Bold ground," then you pick yourself up and get
on with it. — Cecelia Ahern

I believe in one thing: the human spirit is immortal and indestructible. In the beyond there could be anything, it is of no importance whatsoever. What we call death is not death. It's a rebirth. A caterpillar becomes a cocoon. I think there is a life after death and it is that that is unnerving. It would be so much simpler to conceive of oneself as a telephone cord that is unplugged. Then you could live any way that you wanted. God would have no importance of any kind. — Andrei Tarkovsky

Here is the deeply unnerving thing: The heart, cut from the chest, keeps beating on its own. Did Poe know this when he wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart"? So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. "We wash them off and they do just fine, — Anonymous

You live and die two or three times making a movie. First, you write it, and the first pivotal moment comes when you can get it made. The second is in the process of making it, when the movie reveals itself to you, its flaws and its virtues. Then the most unnerving moment is when that movie is then launched into the world. It's like bringing your kid to the first day at school and somebody points out that it has bowlegs, it is cross-eyed, or it's gorgeous. You feel very exposed. — Guillermo Del Toro

As an actor you want people to know you and there are times you want your pictures taken, but it's unnerving to walk out of a venue with friends and there are 20 people flashing lights in your face. Do you know how bright those lights are? — Ashley Greene

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you. — Yann Martel

Ursula, we have to talk ... ' he said, almost blurting. He couldn't believe he was in the "we have to talk" position. It was so unnerving. 'I have to ask you ... Let's be each other's emergency contact numbers.' This was his first concession towards commitment. — Sharon Weil

I wonder if kids growing up now are actually going to have that - if they're ever going to be able to unplug and have that ability to concentrate, or if it's just never going to happen for them. It's a little unnerving, frankly. — Ron Currie Jr.

Our mornings were never "rise and shine." They were "rise and fight." They were loud and ravaging. They were heavy and unnerving, like the after-math of a war, with unresolved territorial disputes.
They were never serene, but they were beautiful. More beautiful than the smile you wear when you step out of the shower, more tempting than the sight of you brewing coffee from across the kitchen bar, more promising than a glorious victory, bigger than all our tumultuous past. Bigger than you. Bigger than I. — Malak El Halabi

It was unnerving, to think she was being psychoanalyzed by someone who frequently complained that the castle walls had started bleeding again. — Marissa Meyer

Will hadn't seen him come into the room. He realized that the mysterious figure must have slipped in through a side door while everyone's attention was on the Craftmasters as they made their entrance. Now he stood behind the Baron's chair and slightly to one side, dressed in his usual brown and gray clothes and wrapped in his long, mottled gray and green Ranger's cloak. Halt was an unnerving person. He had a habit of coming up on you when you least expected it - and you never heard his approach. The superstitious villagers believed that Rangers practiced a form of magic that made them invisible to ordinary people. Will wasn't sure if he believed that - but he wasn't sure he disbelieved it either. He wondered why Halt was here today. He wasn't recognized as one of the Craftmasters and, as far as Will knew, he hadn't attended a Choosing session prior to this one. — John Flanagan

When will I go home?" Patricia asked. "What, do you want to go home for your birthday?" Cinque sneered. Patricia would turn twenty on February 20. This was, perhaps, the most unnerving thing that Cinque had said to her. He knew her birthday. It underlined that this was no random attack. They had been researching her life, which was chilling. - — Jeffrey Toobin

I did miss the music a bit - but only in the wings, when I was waiting to go on. It seemed dreadfully quiet, rather unnerving. But the wonderful thing was that one didn't have to be quite so obsessive about one's health, and one's voice. — Elaine Paige

When silence is a choice, it is an unnerving presence. When silence is imposed, it is censorship. — Terry Tempest Williams

In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity. — Paul Farmer

But, in fact, impermanence is like some of the people we meet in life - difficult and disturbing at first, but on deeper acquaintance far friendlier and less unnerving than we could have imagined. — Sogyal Rinpoche