Shrug It Off Quotes & Sayings

He's not my boyfriend. We only went out a few times, you know." She leaned back against the car door. "Besides, I ended things recently - not sure if you heard." He leaned forward, his arms on both sides of her, a smug smile forming. "Oh yeah? Why's that?" She held back a grin. "Well, see, some other guy kissed me, so . . ." She left off with a shrug. His lips twitched. "And you liked it." "Maybe." He leaned closer. "In fact, you liked it so much, you want him to kiss you again." "I might not turn him down. — Denise Hunter

In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent. — Megan Smolenyak

You have to want the haunted house to scare you. It completely steals your money to go through with one of those people who shrug it all off, who touch the monsters' faces to show they're fake. — Stephen Graham Jones

The dying bees, the Antarctic melt, the mountains of old tires, the incessant toxic belch of factories that make Batman bobbleheads for Happy Meals. Off-gassing couches! Cancerous tinned tomatoes! Imprisoned killer whales! Our breastmilk is poisoned. We live absurdedly, ridiculously. OUR BREASTMILK IS POISONED. Try and explain even one sliver of it to a kid, just one angle of a thousand, and you'll see the face of the world's most incredulous and urgent WTF.

We have little to recommend us, and we know it. We shrug.

Rasmus Krook is the Captain of the Griffons. He doesn't shrug. — Kate Inglis

Turn it off," she said, her voice cracking.
"It's still good music," Joe told her with an almost apologetic shrug.
"It's crap," she breathed, still totally taken aback by the music playing again.
He shook his head. "No, it's not crap!" he said patiently and started peeling out of his sweater, trying hard not to get his braced hand caught in the sleeve. He emerged, his hair a bit messy, and tossed the sweater back towards the sofa. — Billy Wood-Smith

Reviews are for readers, not writers. If I get a bad one, I shrug it off. If I get a good one, I don't believe it — William Meikle

I can't. It's odd. The cameras are off in the top two levels. Same with biometric readers. Can't pinpoint him like we planned." "Off?" I ask. "Maybe he's having an orgy or wankin' off and doesn't want his Security to see." Sevro grunts with a shrug. "Either way, he's hiding something, so that's where we're headed." I — Pierce Brown

It's important to be aware of how we treat others. Even though someone appears to shrug off a sideways comment or to not be affected by a rumor, it's impossible to know everything else going on in that person's life, how we might be adding to his/her pain. People do have an impact on the lives of others; that's undeniable. — Jay Asher

Declan, fortunately, was a forgiving guy and proved pretty accommodating as we figured things out together. He was patient as Sydney and I painstakingly read the instructions on the can of formula Lana sent. He made little complaint when I initially put his diaper on backward. When he grew tired again and started crying, I had no instructions to follow. Sydney gave a helpless shrug when I looked at her. So I just walked him around the living room, crooning classic rock songs until he dozed off and could be set down.
Rose, who'd stayed with us off and on but looked more terrified of the baby than a Strigoi, watched me with amazement. "You're kind of good at that," she remarked. "Adrian Ivashkov, baby whisperer."
I looked down at the sleeping baby. "I'm making it up as I go along. — Richelle Mead

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it - and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it. — Gloria Steinem

Blaming society makes it awfully easy for a person of weak character to shrug off his own responsibility for his actions. — Stanley Schmidt

You looked like you wanted to jump his bones right there!"
"Jump his bones?" Sadie frowns. "What do you mean?"
... "It's like a pajama party. Except you take off your pajamas."
"Oh that." Her face clicks with recognition. You call it 'jumping his bones'?"
"Sometimes." I shrug.
"What an odd phrase. We used to call it sex."
"Oh." I say, discomfited. "Well we do too-"
"Or barney-mugging," she adds. — Sophie Kinsella

I am happy to say that there is nothing to report." The guard's voice grew muffled as he bent to shrug off his armor. "Save that I now know every path and stream in this village as though I were born here and had never set foot outside it, and have counted all the leaves on all the trees and found them in good health and order, and have taken the liberty of naming all the frogs down by the creek, placing them into clans by the markings on their back and taking for myself the title King and Overlord of all Frog-Kind. — Matthew Jobin

The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off. — Walker Percy

Doubt has become the veritable wellspring of my creative process and my philosophic explorations. It has equipped me with the temerity and wherewithal to question certain truths deemed 'fundamental' by my betters. Defiance has made me stubborn - possibly even arrogant - enough to shrug off rejection and all fears thereof, no matter how lacerating to the self-esteem these could be. It has given me the will to seek only to satisfy myself. — Ashim Shanker

Do I know what people say? Sure. I shrug it off. what else can you do? Stop people from talking? You might as well try to stop the wind from blowing. — Stephen King

Expect an army of Vigil drones, nearly as a many Praesidis guards, a Machim ground detachment of super-soldiers and at least one Inquisitor. Oh, and security barriers everywhere. Possibly some of those mechs we met on Helix Retention, too. You Humans have kicked off a shitstorm of epic proportions."

Alex spread her arms wide in an exagerrated shrug. "It's one of our best skills. — G.S. Jennsen

[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again. — Christopher Hitchens

See through the hollow eyes of today
yesterday lurks like an idol of dry clay,
I can't cuddle it, for it is too meek for a hug
it is too meek for a pat
I can't let it shrug
off the sweat gathered through summers,
winters and the longing born thereof.
ask them to stop,
Would you please ask them to stop. — Ashfaq Saraf

I shrug him off. 'Can't you just go away?
There's a moment. It has a sound in it, as if something very small got broken. — Jenny Downham

So, first, I want you to know that everybody experiences some level of anxiety. It's a normal human response to stress. It's like your body's smoke alarm. If there's a fire, you want to know so you can put it out or call 9-1-1, right?"

I shrug. "I guess. But it feels like my alarm is going off all the time."

Doctor Ann nods. "Some people's systems are more sensitive than others'. For you, maybe all it takes is burning a piece of toast, and your alarm thinks the house is on fire. — Jeff Garvin

Aelin's hand wavered slightly over his wound. "What's your shield made of, then?"
Fenrys tried and failed to shrug. But Gavriel muttered from where he worked on the still-whimpering pirate, "Arrogance."
Aelin snorted, but didn't dare take her eyes off Fenrys's injury as she said, "So you do have sense of humor, Gavriel."
The Lion of Doranelle gave a wary smile over his shoulder. The rare-sighted, restrained twin to Aedion's own flashing grins. Aelin had called him Uncle Kitty-Cat all of one time before Aedion had snarled viciously enough to make her think carefully before using the term again. Gavriel, to his credit, had merely given Aelin a long-suffereing sigh that seemed to be used only when she or Fenrys were around.
"That sense of humor only appears about once every century," Fenrys rasped, "so you'd better hope you Settle, or else that's the last time you'll see it. — Sarah J. Maas

A writer writes what interests him and what he can manage, and what he can make live, as Flannery O'Connor said. So my reaction to someone saying "You must!" or "You should!" or even "Hey, why don't you?" is basically to sort of shrug and politely walk off and do whatever I want to do. It's nobody else's business, really, and even if I happened to agree with one of those "musts" or "shoulds" what would I do about it, if my heart wasn't in it? — George Saunders

Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [ ... ] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past. — Colum McCann

In my game, you get brokenhearted a bit. You do a play, get a bad review in the papers ... actors are sensitive; you think of all the work you've done, and it breaks your heart, but you learn to shrug it off and to carry on. — Phil Daniels

Choices are funny things-ask a native tribe that's eaten grubs and roots forever if they're unhappy, and they'll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don't know there's an alternative, you can't miss it. — Jodi Picoult

George's feathers are ruffled. It's been a long time since last he forgot and let himself get up steam like this ... How humiliating! The silly enthusiastic old prof, rambling on, disregarding the clock, and the class sighing to itself, 'He's off again!' Just for a moment, George hates them, hates their brute basic indifference, as they drain quickly out of the room. Once again, the diamond has been offered publicly for a nickel, and they have turned from it with a shrug and a grin, thinking the old peddler crazy. — Christopher Isherwood

I started shedding friends like layers of winter clothing and found that even if I got cold, I would rather build my own damn fire. I was better off without them." I shrug, letting him know that's all there was to it. — Claire Contreras

Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's I Love L.A. — Bret Easton Ellis

I feel like you come in under a cloak of someone else's skin for a while, but then you can shrug it off - you have to find your own voice, if you want to keep doing it. That became a really conscious thing for me. — Bill Callahan

It is puzzling to me that otherwise sensitive people develop a real docility about the obvious necessity of eating, at least once a day, in order to stay alive. Often they lose their primal enjoyment of flavors and odors and textures to the point of complete unawareness. And if ever they question this progressive numbing-off, they shrug helplessly in the face of mediocrity everywhere. Bit by bit, hour by hour, they say, we are being forced to accept the not-so-good as the best, since there is little that is even good to compare it with. — M.F.K. Fisher

It is a funny thing. A man can make a promise to his God, break it five minutes later and never think about it. With an idle shrug of his shoulders, a man can break solemn promises to his mother, wife or sweetheart, and, except for a slight momentary twinge of conscience, he still won't be bothered very much. But if a man ever breaks a promise to himself he disintegrates. His entire personality and character crumble into tiny pieces, and he is never the same man again.
I remember very well a sergeant I knew in the army. Before a group of five men he swore off smoking forever. An hour later he sheepishly lit a cigarette and broke his vow to the five of us and to himself. He was never quite the same man again, not to me, and not to himself. — Charles Willeford

Remarks on My Character
Waving a flag I retreat a long way beyond
any denial, all the way over the scorched earth,
and come into an arching grove of evasions,
onto those easy paths, one leading to another
and covered ever deeper with shade: I'll never
dare the sun again, that I can promise.
It is time to practice the shrug: "Don't count on
me." Or practice the question that drags its broken
wing over the ground and leads into the swamp
where vines trip anyone in a hurry, and a final
dark pool waits for you to stare at yourself
while shadows move closer over your shoulder.
That's my natural place; I can live where the blurred
faces peer back at me. I like the way
they blend, and no one is ever sure itself
or likely to settle in unless you scare off
the others. Afraid but so deep no one can follow,
I steal away there, holding my arms like a tree. — William Stafford

Fixating on the outcome or needing to know all the details of an upcoming event, such as a trip, causes people to be upset when things don't go their way, overly focused on the future, and unable to bounce back easily. Inflexible people are susceptible to anger, distress, and depression. Surrendered people go with the flow, shrug it off when an unplanned situation happens, and tend to be happier, more lighthearted, and resilient. They remember to exhale during stress. — Judith Orloff

The fact is that in any open society people constantly say things that other people don't like. It's completely normal that should happen. And in any confident, free society you just shrug it off and you proceed. There is no way of creating a free society where nobody says anything that others don't like. If offendness is the point at which you have to limit your thoughts then nothing can be said. There might be people who might be offended by various kinds of literature. I myself, I am not very fond of, let me not mention Chetan Bhagat, I wasn't going to say that, so I have not. And yet, I believe such writer have a right to publish, and of course to live. The point is behind these ideas of offendness and respect there is always the threat of violence. Always the threat is if you do that which disrespect or offends me I will be violent to you and so the real subject is not religion, its violence. — Salman Rushdie

It's an ache. A heavy sadness. The kind that is brought on by heartbreak and then perpetuated by everything that reminds you of the way it's broken. The kind that feels impossible to shrug off or tuck away. But there is another feeling, too, surfacing, and soon I discover that it's the kind that makes the heartbreak almost something to savor because it is so simple and true. — Nina LaCour

She felt as if she had somehow failed him and herself by allowing his mother's behavior to upset her. She should be above it; she should shrug it off as the ranting of a village woman; she should not keep thinking of all the retorts she could have made instead of just standing mutely in that kitchen. But she was upset, and made even more so by Odenigbo's expression, as if he could not believe she was not quite as high-minded as he had thought. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Go, fly, swim, bound descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love what has not yet been seen, love no one, whom you are, whom you will be, leave yourself, shrug off the old lies, dare what you don't dare, it is there that you will take pleasure ... and rejoice, in the terror, follow it where you're afraid to go, go ahead, take the plunge, you're on the right trail. — Helene Cixous

I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action. — Mark Zuckerberg

Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own. — Helen Oyeyemi

When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences. — Muhammad Yunus

What do you think of when you think of mourning?' Jenny asks.
The question snaps me back to attention. I answer without really thinking. "I guess 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that's not very original.'
'I don't know it.'
'It's a poem.'
'I gathered.'
'I'm just clarifying. It's not a blues album.'
Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence.
'Does your response need to be original? Isn't that what poetry is for, for the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?'
I shrug. Who is Jenny, even new Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I for that matter?
'Why do you thin of that poem in particular?'
"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, / Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.'
I learned the poem in college and it stuck. — Steven Rowley

People just don't laugh when their family is violated, and you don't shrug it off. You band together and you defend together. It's a funny, primitive instinct. — Phillip Noyce

The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit. — Adrienne Rich

Uncle Joe used to spend a fair amount of time in the loony bin. My family wasn't bothered by his regular trips to and from 'the facility'
they'd shrug and say, There goes Joe, and they'd put him in the car and take him in. One day Uncle Frank ... was driving Uncle Joe to the crazy place. When they got there, Joe asked Frank to drop him off at the door while Frank went and parked the car. Frank didn't think much of it, and dropped him off.
Joe went inside, smiled at the nurse, and said, 'Hi. I'm Frank Hornbacher. I'm here to drop off Joe. He likes to park the car, so I let him do that. He'll be right in.' The nurses nodded knowingly. The real Frank walked in. The nurse took his arm and guided him away, murmuring the way nurses always do, while Frank hollered in protest, insisting that he was Frank, not Joe. Joe, quite pleased with himself, gave Frank a wave and left. — Marya Hornbacher

Peter to Austin: Here are the facts, Austin. You've been engaged four times.
You've cheated on every single one of them. You're cruel
sometimes and superficial and spoiled and really fucked up
emotionally. You talk about my being inscrutable, but you treat
nothing as if it matters to you. Something terrible happens? You
make a joke and shrug it off. You feel too much? You get angry
and lash out at me. So no, I'm not in love with you. I'm fighting
it every fucking step! I just wish I could stop it. — Dani Alexander

I eat some crisps while I think about my question. "Would you rather have your knob chopped off or your tongue?"

"Bloody hell, Ariel," he says. "Can't you ask one normal question?"

I shrug. "Answer it."

"Tongue," he says.

I laugh. "Really? You'd rather never speak a single word ever again, never tell your wife you love her, never tell your children that you think they're beautiful, all so you could get your end away?"

He nods. "I wouldn't get a wife or a child if I didn't have a knob."

"You'd still have balls and sperm," I say. "You could still father a child."

He shakes his head. "I'd want my knob. — Beckie Stevenson

Rape culture is a funny thing. People gloss over some pretty shitty, creepy, wrong behavior, little brother, when they know the person in question. But you raise the reality of what they're doing, and it's a whole lot harder to shrug it off. — Wildbow

You certainly do heal fast. But you'll still have some impressive bruises, so if I were you I'd avoid your father for the rest of the night."
"I'll just tell him you abuse me," Helen said with a shrug. She jumped off the examining table.
"And I'll tell him you like it," he teased back. — Josephine Angelini

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular
especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're suppose to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, or urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws. — Hunter S. Thompson

I think the way to stop it is to shrug it off. Or take it with your tongue in your cheek. Sure, that's the system. At any rate, it's the system that works for you. It's the automatic control board that keeps you out there where nothing matters, where it's only you and the keyboard and nothing else. Because it's gotta be that way. You gotta stay clear of anything serious. — David Goodis

It's all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into the firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation ... is easy, is quick. There's also a universe, apparently. But I cannot bear to see the stars, even though I know they're there all right, and I do see them, because Tod looks upward at night, as everybody does, and coos and points. The Plough. Sirius, the dog. The stars, to me, are like pins and needles, are like the routemap of a nightmare. Don't join the dots. ... Of the stars, one alone can I contemplate without pain. And that's a planet. The planet they call the evening star, the morning star. Intense Venus. — Martin Amis

I had been granted unusual freedom and responsibility at an early age, for which I should have been grateful in the extreme, but I wasn't. Instead, I felt oppressed by the old man's expectations. It was drilled into me that anything less than winning was failure. In the impressionable way of sons, I did not consider this rhetorically; I took him at his word. And that's why later, when long-held family secrets came to light, when I noticed that this deity who asked only for perfection was himself less than perfect, that he was in fact not a deity at all - well, I wasn't able to shrug it off. I was consumed instead by a blinding rage. The revelation that he was merely human, and frightfully so, was beyond my power to forgive. Two — Jon Krakauer

On the way out to the car, Philip turns to me. "How could you be so stupid? I shrug, stung in spite of myself. "I thought I grew out of it." Philip pulls out his key fob and presses the remote to unlock his Mercedes. I slide into the passenger side, brushing coffee cups off the seat and onto the floor mat, where crumpled printouts from MapQuest soak up any spilled liquid. "I hope you mean sleepwalking," Philip says, "since you obviously didn't grow out of stupid. — Holly Black

People frequently ask me if adverse criticism bothers me. I've had a lot of it, and I have been able to shrug most of it off. — Warren Giles