Queasy Quotes & Sayings

All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (god having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers. — Christopher Hitchens

Hee hee hee!" Nero said. "You children are like three clowns!"
"Ho ho ho!" Count Olaf said.
"Ha ha ha!" Violet said, who was beginning to feel queasy from faking all this laughter. — Lemony Snicket

This emphasis on the difference between intentions and ultimate results constituted an implicit critique of the Christian and civic republican traditions, and continues to make moralists queasy. Both traditions had stressed the importance of good and benevolent intentions. By unlinking consequences from intentions, Smith called into question the necessity and possibility of elevating the economic behavior of individuals through preaching and propaganda.
Yet just as he transmuted the Christian virtue of charity into the secular virtue of benevolence, on another level Smith preserved the classic republican concern for the common good. Those who could be motivated to devote themselves to promoting the public interest were in need of superior reason and understanding, by which we are capable of discerning the remote consequences of all our actions, and of foreseeing the advantage or detriment which is likely to result from them. — Jerry Z. Muller

Sometimes the butterflies were there just to make you queasy; sometimes the butterflies were there to let you know that something good was on its way — Daniel Waters

cheese-dip for lunch and dinner and yogurt, oats and blueberries for breakfast. The thought of eating anything else make her stomach queasy. Angie wondered how much longer the food choice would last and what the next few weeks of culinary delights her body would — Ashley Fontainne

At present, however, with his aching head and queasy stomach, Sebastian was feeling exceedingly resistible. Or if not that, then resistant. Aphrodite herself could descend from the ceiling, floating on a bloody clamshell, naked but for a few well-placed flowers, and he'd likely puke at her feet.

No, no, she ought to be completely naked. If he was going to prove the existence of a goddess, right here in this room, she was damned well going to be naked.

He'd still puke on her feet, though. — Julia Quinn

Fortified with self-loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he'd absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he'd gone to the gate tight-lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if walking to his own execution as well as Jelim's. He'd known at some deep, cold level that he would cope. He was wrong. Utterly. — Richard K. Morgan

This is the queasy shadowland, and they don't even work hard at that because they have never learned to work at anything. They turn sloppy, and when the youngness is gone, there isn't much left. Just the dead eyes and the small meaty skills and the feeling their luck went bad sometime, when they weren't watching. Fifteen to twenty-five is the span, and they age quickly and badly. These are the bunnies who never find a burrow. — John D. MacDonald

She pushed herself up, swayed, and might have tumbled if Feeney hadn't gripped her arm. "Head rush. I'm okay, just a little queasy. Lowell's in there, secured. You need to haul his ass in. Your collar."
"No, it's not." Feeney gave her arm a squeeze. "But I'll haul his ass in for you. McNab, help the lieutenant upstairs, then get your butt back down here and start on the electronics."
"I don't need help," Eve protested.
"You fall on your face," Feeney murmured in her ear, "you'll ruin your exit."
"Yeah. Yeah."
"Just lean on me, Lieutenant." McNab wrapped an arm around her waist.
"You try to cop a feel, I can still put you down."
"Whatever your condition, Dallas, you still scare me."
"Aw." Touched, she slung an arm around his shoulders. "That's so sweet. — J.D. Robb

I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it's because you've ripped a hole in your skin. — Gillian Flynn

A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky. — Henry Miller

m a butterfly!" screamed the fat man as he ran, flapping his arms like two really flabby, really rubbish wings. "You're actually not," Valkyrie Cain told him for the eighth time. He ran around her in a big circle, bathed in moonlight, and she just stood there with her head down. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and moments earlier she'd had to drag her eyes away from his wobbling bosoms before they made her feel queasy. Now that his trousers were starting their inexorable slide downwards, she was averting her gaze altogether. "Please," she said, "pull up your trousers. — Derek Landy

Without the witty, potent dialogue and the puzzling shape of the story, the movie would have been merely an American version of the kind of brooding, shadow-filled, Ufa-style expressionist stuff that Joe had grown up watching in Prague. Without the brooding shadows and cold adventurings of the camera, without the theatrical lighting and queasy angles, it would have been merely a clever movie about a rich bastard. It was much, much more, than any movie really needed to be. In this one crucial regard--its inextricable braiding of image and narrative--Citizen Kane was like a comic book. — Michael Chabon

If only the hat had mentioned a house for people who felt a bit queasy, that would have been the one for him. — J.K. Rowling

There isn't a grand plan at work in the progression of the books with respect to the line. I do want the books to be different from each other, certainly, but I'm more aware of that on the level of theme or structure. I can tell when I'm writing the last of a particular type of poem because the writing is too easy and I start to feel queasy. — Matthea Harvey

What happens with you when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy? Notice the panic, notice when you instantly grab for something. (51) — Pema Chodron

Adrian took a few steps toward me. "Not bad, Sage. I think you just scared old man Mazur."
I felt a smile of my own begin to form. "I don't know about that, but it felt kind of good."
"You should back talk people more often," he said. We grinned at each other, and as he regarded me fondly, I felt that same queasy feeling return. — Richelle Mead

Most people don't know that I have a huge phobia of bugs. It's gotten worse and worse over the years, but I just can't stand them! Even thinking about bugs makes me queasy. — Kelli Berglund

Jenny's admonition had the desired effect. Ned drew a deep breath and thrust his arm gingerly into the bag, his mouth puckered in distaste. The expression on his face flickered from queasy horror to confusion. From there, it
flew headlong into outright bafflement. Shaking his head, he pulled his fist from the bag and turned his hand palm up.
For a long moment, the two men stared at the offending lump. It was brightly colored. It was round. It was
"An orange?" Lord Blakely rubbed his forehead. "Not quite what I expected." He scribbled another notation.
"We live in enlightened times," Jenny murmured. — Courtney Milan

I'm about to be shot 150 feet up in the air. I feel queasy! — Isaac

He felt a little queasy, and more than a little light-headed. More and more, he felt the disorientation, the fragmenting of himself between day and night. By day, he was a creature of the mind alone, as he escaped his damp immobility by a stubborn, disciplined retreat into the avenues of thought and meditation, seeking refuge in the pages of books. But with the rising of the moon, all sense fled, succumbing at once to sensation, as he emerged into the fresh air like a beast from its lair, to run the dark hills beneath the stars, and hunt, driven by hunger, drunk with blood and moonlight. — Diana Gabaldon

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is both an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable. — Lorrie Moore

I must have made a noise, but the next thing I remember is being on my knees with my head low and a big, warm hand on the back of my neck. Adam's scent, rich and exotic, was all around me, giving me his strength to calm my queasy stomach. I don't think I lost consciousness completely, but it was a near thing.
When I lifted my head, the red wolf stuck his nose in my face and ran a long tongue over my cheek before Adam cuffed him lightly. I got to my feet with Adam's help, but stood on my own.
Adam reloaded the automatic when I handed him a fresh clip - though he grinned when I took it out of my bra. I think I was glad I couldn't hear well enough to decipher what he said. — Patricia Briggs

The work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
[on James Joyce's Ulysses] — Virginia Woolf

Wilderness trails constitute a rare space in America marked by economic diversity. Lawyers and construction workers get bitten by the same mosquitoes and sip from the same streams; there are none of the usual signals about socioeconomic status, for most hikers are in shorts and a T-shirt and enveloped by an aroma that would make a skunk queasy. — Nicholas Kristof

MARK ARM : Even if I did talk to [Layne Staley], I don't know what I would have said. Seeing him so far down the line on this trajectory that he had set for himself made me queasy. It seemed to me like once he discovered heroin, he decided he was going to fully embrace it. Based on the songs on Dirt, he just jumped in. There was no turning back. It was unfortunate and pathetic. That was the myth he made for himself, and he was living it out. — Greg Prato

Frank stared at her. "But you throw Ding Dongs at monsters."
Iris looked horrified. "Oh, they're not Ding Dongs."
She rummaged under the counter and brought out a package of chocolate covered cakes that looked exactly like Ding Dongs.
"These are gluten-free, no-sugar-added, vitamin-enriched, soy-free, goat-milk-and-seaweed-based cupcake simulations."
"All natural!" Fleecy chimed in.
"I stand corrected." Frank suddenly felt as queasy as Percy. — Rick Riordan

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. — Virginia Woolf

You can speak truth to power, ... but when you speak truth to weakness, weakness gets mad and queasy. It accuses you of its own insecurity."
"The Off Season: A Victorian Sequel — Jack Cady

Faith is one foot on the ground, one foot in the air, and a queasy feeling in the stomach. — Mother Angelica

She had told Erstwhile too much in the past, and thus he knew that occasionally she did go crazy. Sometimes it was when she felt particularly trapped or hopeless, or when the tunnels were unusually dark or stuffy, or when she got stuck in a crawl-through. Sometimes it happened for no obvious reason at all. She would feel a terrible panic tightening her chest and giving her heart a queasy lollop, she would be fighting for breath ... and then she would be recovering somewhere, shuddering and sick, devastation around her and her fingernails broken from clawing at the rock walls and ceilings. — Frances Hardinge

Dr. Rush made patients ingest the solution until they drooled, and often people's teeth and hair fell out after weeks or months of continuous treatment. His "cure" no doubt poisoned or outright killed swaths of people whom yellow fever might have spared. Even so, having perfected his treatment in Philadelphia, ten years later he sent Meriwether and William off with some prepackaged samples. As a handy side effect, Dr. Rush's pills have enabled modern archaeologists to track down campsites used by the explorers. With the weird food and questionable water they encountered in the wild, someone in their party was always queasy, and to this day, mercury deposits dot the soil many places where the gang dug a latrine, perhaps after one of Dr. Rush's "Thunderclappers" had worked a little too well. — Sam Kean

it was the thought of being injected with tiny machines that was making me queasy. Microscopic alien robots were swimming in my blood. It was creepy. — Craig Alanson

My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart ("a hollow, muscular organ," according to the gruesome definition in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin's orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas. — Vladimir Nabokov

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life. — Richard Ford

Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.' — Christopher Hitchens

The town's young parents especially prized this idea of Newton as a child's paradise. Many of them had left the hip, sophisticated city to move here. They had accepted massive expenses, stultifying monotony, and the queasy disappointment of settling for a conventional life. To — William Landay

Toph, I want to tell you something. I want to tell you about my nipples. I want to tell you about my nipples, and generally about the nipples of the men in our family. Because someday, son [I do this thing, and he does this thing, where I call him son and he calls me dad, when we are having funny father-son-type chats, mocking them in a way while also being secretly, deeply queasy about using these terms], someday my nipples will be your nipples. Someday you too will have nipples that protrude unnaturally far from your chest, and which will harden at the slightest provocation, preventing you from wearing anything but the heaviest cotton T-shirts. — Dave Eggers

You really have to love every single bit of what you do. The moment that you do something that makes you feel queasy to your stomach, the company dies. — Matt Mullenweg

The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects. — Michael Cunningham

I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway. — Donna Tartt

I get that same queasy, nervous, thrilling feeling every time I go to work. That's never worn off since I was 12 years-old with my dad's 8-millimeter movie camera. — Steven Spielberg

When I first started playing with Gotham in 2008, I learned that my team wanted me to jam in my first bout, when we'd be facing off against the Queens of Pain - the team that included Suzy Hotrod, Donna Matrix, and many other legendary skaters. I was so nervous that I was feeling a little queasy every time I thought about it, even a few weeks before the bout. Finally, I asked myself what skills I'd need to be able to face off against Suzy and win. I decided that I'd need to be fast, agile, and fearless. So I started to tell myself that I already was. Every time I thought about the bout and started to get nervous, I'd repeat those words. I'd repeat them in my head when I took the line at practice. I'd say them out loud before I went to bed. The day of the bout, I was nervous, but not quite as much as I expected to be. — Margot Atwell

But I couldn't. It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn't been there before, tiny mar less than two millimeters, but otherwise: perfect. I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past. — Donna Tartt

I took off my boot and sock and examined my ankle, expecting - and indeed, in that perverse manner of the injured male, rather hoping - to find some splintered bone straining at the skin like a tent pole, making everyone who saw it queasy. But the ankle was just faintly bluish and tender and very slightly swollen, and I realized that once more in my life I had merely achieved acute pain and not the sort of grotesque injury that would lead to a mercy flight by helicopter and a fussing-over by young nurses in erotically starched uniforms. — Bill Bryson

What are you doing?" Egnatious asked, eyebrows furrowed as he watched Gabriella do a flip.
Firen mimicked Gabriella and turned to Egnatious. "Fun times. Go with it." She didn't even crack a smile, though her body language said she was laughing on the inside.
Instead of following their act, Egnatious simply dove for an outcrop just as it began moving away. He nearly lost his balance, but Firen caught his flailing arms.
"Are you having a seizure or something?" she jested, displaying a rare vein of humor.
Egnatious sent her a queasy glare. — Laura Kreitzer

Aunt Hyacinth's protections around the house would stop a spirit. They wouldn't do anything against an axe murderer except make him queasy, which didn't seem like it would be much of a deterrent. I mean, a strong stomach probably came with the job. — Rosemary Clement-Moore

Amos sipped his coffee. "Sorry if that distubed you. Khufu's very picky. He only eats foods that end in -o. Doritos, burritos, flamingos."
I blinked. "Did you say-"
"Carter," Sadie warned. She looked a little queasy, like she'd already had this conversation. "Don't ask. — Rick Riordan

The clandestine operation tucked several floors below ground level inside a Los Angeles high-rise had never before made her queasy. Today the copper walls, marble flooring, refrigerated temperature and minimal furnishings took discomfort to a new level. She'd swear Alien was about to burst from her belly. — Robin Bielman

began to feel that queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English - a terrible suspicion that any pleasure involving more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit is somehow irreligiously excessive. — Bill Bryson

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country
indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky
provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut ...
... Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. — Annie Proulx

Electric light!" I said. We'd never had electric light at home, just gaslight and candles, and the only taps were in the kitchen and the back scullery. "Well, this is good!" said Ma. "Daisy, when we get to New York I won't want to get off this ship!" By midday I didn't know if she'd even get out of her bunk. It was a nice enough day and not a bit stormy, but the rocking of the ship in the water made her queasy before we even started moving. The boys wanted to go on deck so I had to go with them, and we joined the masses of third-class passengers climbing up to the fresh air. — Margi McAllister

Truth be told, the inward gaze is something she's not too fond of. But there are secrets that lurk in the mind, and she doesn't want any of them sneaking up on her. Sometimes it pays to take a deep look inside even if you get queasy gazing into those dark corners. — Alden Bell

I know many people who are actually queasy about the idea that their kids may harbour sporting ambitions. — Sebastian Coe

The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecesssary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this queasy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain. It could take the form of obsessively daydreaming of true romance, or turning a tidbit of gossip into the six o'clock news, or even going off by ourselves into the wilderness. The point is that in all these activities, we are seeking companionship in our usual, habitual way, using our same old repetitive ways of distancing ourselves from the demon loneliness. Could we just settle down and have some — Pema Chodron

At first I was queasy; I'll never forget the sound of the scalpel cutting a body open. But it was so cool trying to work out how these people died. — Jonathan Davis