Quotes & Sayings About Undoing

Have only this consolation
that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him. — H.P. Lovecraft

You want to feel sorry for him, but he was his own undoing. — Ridley Pearson

At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working - I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I'd spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn't handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. — Gillian Flynn

The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century ... unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today. — John F. Kennedy

Peace comes not from doing, but from undoing; not from getting, but from letting go. — Swami Satchidananda

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. — John F. Kennedy

It was another horrible yet almost laughable moment. Cupcakes and birthday car sex had been my undoing. — Richelle Mead

That passivity in me has been the core of it all, the real evil. That weakness, that refusal to compromise a fractured and stupid morality, that awful pride! For that, I let myself become the thing I am, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I let Claudia become the vampire she became, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I stood by and let her kill Lestat, when I knew that was wrong, the very thing that was her undoing. I lifted not a finger to prevent it. And Madeleine, Madeleine, I let her come to that, when I should never have made her a creature like ourselves. I knew that was wrong! Well, I tell you I am no longer that passive, weak creature that has spun evil from evil till the web is vast and thick while I remain its stultified victim. It's over! — Anne Rice

I am falling in love with you, Laney Keating."
"Don't say that."
"It's true."
"Don't say it," I said miserably, looking away.
"Why?"
Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person who was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing that we create. It's an undoing.
"Because you deserve better," I whispered. — Leah Raeder

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after. — Iris Murdoch

I think it's safe to say that the entire abortion industry is based on a lie ... . I am dedicated to spending the rest of my life undoing the law that bears my name, — Norma McCorvey

I've never met a murderer who wasn't vain ... It's their vanity that leads to their undoing, nine times out of ten.They may be frightened of being caught, but they can't help strutting and boasting and usually they're sure they've been far too clever to be caught. — Agatha Christie

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing. — Virginia Woolf

His hand lightly pressed to the small of my back, and I turned. His arm slid around me and I was brought up against him. 'You're shaking,' he said, a frown lacing his tone. 'I know.' 'We don't have to,' he said. 'I'm a patient man.' 'Are you really?' I asked, my tone slightly rueful. His white teeth flashed. 'For you I would be.' The sincerity in his voice was my undoing. 'No more talking,' I whipered.
- Romeo & Rimmel — Cambria Hebert

Faeries are unaffected by alcohol, but much to her surprise - and the faeries' undoing - they get very, very drunk on carbonation. Using copious amounts of Coke, she was able to discover a single faerie's true name. — Kiersten White

Do not choose for your friends and familiar acquaintance those that are of an estate or quality too much above yours ... You will hereby accustom yourselves to live after their rate in clothes, in habit, and in expenses, whereby you will learn a fashion and rank of life above your degree and estate, which will in the end be your undoing. — Matthew Hale

I'm going to stop undoing, deconstructing, I'm going to start building. Even with Colombe I'll try to do something positive. What matters is what you are doing when you die, and when June 16th comes around, I want to be building. — Muriel Barbery

I will be my undoing,
If I become my obsession.
I will forget the ones I love,
If I do not serve them.
I will war with others,
If I refuse to see them.
Therefore, I choose to turn away
From my reflection,
To rely not on myself
But on my brothers and sisters,
To project always outward
Until I disappear
[And only God remains.] — Veronica Roth

People call Kong "a monster." He's not. There's nothing evil about Kong. He's just another creature who has opened up a little bit of his heart to Ann and it proves to be his undoing. — Peter Jackson

Surely the weakness of our monarchy in Saudi Arabia is bound up in our addiction to extravagance. I fear it will be our undoing. — Jean Sasson

Pastor Smith did not have the religious constitution needed to provide salvation for any of us who'd had a hand in this tragic event. We had put on the armour of God, and there was no undoing what we had done. My faith, my belief in myself as a good citizen, everything I had thought was truth was scattered to the wind, and no one on this earth could put that to rights. Things weren't as simple as living and dying. I understood that now. — Cheryl R Cowtan

Work is the undoing of nature. — Paul Majkut

In looking back now, I see how it began in my childhood, altho' I was not conscious of the necessity until '67 or '68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end ... So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing. — Alice James

What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing? — Amory Lovins

The beast is the modern world that we live in! The material world. The physical world. The world of illusion that we think is real. We live for it; we're enslaved by it. And it will ultimately be our undoing. — Madonna Ciccone

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet. — Carl Rakosi

My death granted immortality.
With one look, I knew he'd be my undoing ... Forgotten, book #1 of the Fate Trilogy — Sarah J. Pepper

Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing. — Mia Farrow

My weakness and my strength, my purpose and my distraction, my redemption and my undoing. — R.K. Lilley

For now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help sooth me. — Bram Stoker

Laila sees something behind this young girl's eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila's salvation. — Khaled Hosseini

The Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A traffic policeman stops Sister Bridget for speeding. She pulls into the side of the road and winds down her window. The officer walks round and starts undoing his fly. "Oh dear," she says, "Not the breathalyser again." — Frank Carson

The light, that lies In woman's eyes, Has been my heart's undoing. — Thomas Moore

Once the return tide starts, it will be impossible to stem it, and it will prove our undoing. — Moshe Sharett

I'll wear it,' Frost interrupted, the thought of hot pink undoing him. — Scarlett Dawn

If I am distracted, it is your fault. You have been my undoing since the day we met. — Danielle L. Jensen

Oh, what? So, because I'm not going to leave my wife for you, I don't even qualify as bisexual?"

"You could, but you're not." The only thing that kept me from trying to outpace him again was the crowd and the fact that I was afraid someone would overhear.

"And just why is that?"

"Because to call a spineless, wishy-washy closet case like you 'bi' would be an insult to bifolk everywhere." I shook my head in disgust. "You're a fucking stereotype, you know that? Bisexuals are fighting to get rid of the misperception of themselves as being greedy or on the fence, and here you are undoing all that. — Amelia C. Gormley

With the advances of science he saw moral perspective being lost. Science and technology practically took on the role of religion, so that man was actually worshipping at the altar of science, a fallacy, if not a heresy, that could lead to the undoing of the American spirit. — Winston Groom

The only thing predictable about you is that you consistently appear when you suppose I least expect it. Perhaps that will be your undoing; for now I shall expect to see you every time I turn around. — Colleen Gleason

The ways of the heart are complex." He looked out at the ocean again. "The waves churn and break upon the rocks, Talon. So do human feelings. Passion can be a man's undoing. With passion must come wisdom; otherwise, your enemies have a weapon to use against you. — Raymond E. Feist

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.
And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture, - a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope ...
Penelope, who really cried. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Tears ache in my throat and each time his lips caress mine I'm closer to the dam within me bursting open. He's undoing me, tearing out my demons with burning strokes of his lips and the salty taste of his mouth. In his arms, I'm changing, becoming anew. — Sarah Noffke

Ovid lies here, the poet, skilled in love's gentle sport;
By his own talents he worked his undoing.
Oh, you who pass by, if ever you have loved,
Think it not a burden to wish him calm repose. — Ovid

Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yarn onto her doll's head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her. Already Laila sees something behind this young girl's eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will be her undoing and Laila's salvation.
The little girl looks up. Puts the doll down. Smiles. — Khaled Hosseini

The definition of irony - A Pope who refuses to give law enforcement the names of hundreds (or maybe thousands) of predatory homosexual pedophile priests around the world, then claiming that gay marriage will be the world's undoing. (Speaking of Benedict the XVI.) — Dave Champion

She reached toward the chessboard, and he caught her hand in his. "Believe me," he whispered. "When I wish to be, I can be very convincing." He followed the seam of her fingers with this thumb, tracing slowly upward until he reached the soft cleft below her knuckles. He watched as her eyes widened and her lips parted. Then he stroked the spot lightly - a quick, circular caress - and she made a little sound, half gasp and half sigh. That little sound - that tiny, panting breath - was very nearly his undoing. Jeremy knew that sound. It was the tumbler of a lock falling in place, the charged crackle between lightning and thunderbolt, the hiss of a candlewick the instant before it comes alive with flame. An incomplete sound. A sound that promised - and begged for - more. — Tessa Dare

But don't worry ... my retaliation will be your wonderful undoing. — Gail McHugh

When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me, I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One definitely gets the impression that to be left deserted results in a split of personality. Part of the person adopts the role of father or mother in relation to the rest thereby undoing, as it were, the fact of being deserted. In this play various parts of the body -- hands, fingers, feet, genitals, head, nose or eye -- become representatives of the whole person, in relation to which all the vicissitudes of the subject's own tragedy are enacted and then worked out to a reconciliatory conclusion. — Sandor Ferenczi

The only question which concerns us here is whether these "educated" persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor. — Carter G. Woodson

We are undoing a pattern ... It's the human pattern: we project onto the world a zillion possibilities of attaining resolution. — Pema Chodron

The world is getting too small for both an Us and a Them. Us and Them have become codependent, intertwined, fixed to one another. We have no separate fates, but are bound together in one. And our fear of one another is the only thing capable of our undoing. — Sam Killermann

We spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply where we simply did not know what to do. — Bell Hooks

A turn in fortune should move us toward empathy and solidarity....But we live in a time when merchants of division draw us away from mutuality and toward the undoing of democracy itself. — Jeff Chang

Your soul stained my shoulders. my whole life smells like you. this will take time. undoing you from my blood. — Nayyirah Waheed

These are O Lord the humble desires of my most reasonable ambition and all I dare call happinesse on earth: wherein I set no rule or limit to thy hand or providence. Dispose of me according to the wisdome of thy pleasure. Thy will bee done, though in my owne undoing. — Thomas Browne

I respect animals. I have more sympathy for an injured or dead animal than I do for an injured or dead human being, because human beings participate and cooperate in their own undoing. Animals are completely innocent. There are no innocent human beings. — George Carlin

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Beware of your habits. The better they are the more surely they will be your undoing. — Holbrook Jackson

Safe! Such a colorful, horrible bog of lace and silks as I have hopes of never seeing again! You have proven to be our hero, kind Sir, for indeed, had you not been there to grant the way of escape, I fear we would have certainly met our undoing! With lace underfoot and egos overhead, not even the strongest woman has hope of weathering such a place! — Lindsey Renee Backen

He's never stared at her like this before. Sometimes he gazed at her as if he wanted to be her undoing, but just then it was as if he wanted her to undo him. — Stephanie Garber

Power surged through him: unfettered power, unimaginable power. It coursed through him and gave life to his maddened cry, feeding it, making it unnecesssary even to breathe. Deeper and deeper his screm became, until it was the primal voice of the very land itself. It was raw, searing. It was the energy of making and undoing, and he had unleashed it. — Derek Donais

Life is a paradox. Every truth has its counterpart which contradicts it; and every philosopher supplies the logic his own undoing. — Elbert Hubbard

To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing. — Cormac McCarthy

Relationships without a Divine Aim always "break up," for they are based on nothing. Divine Purpose could be described as forgiveness -- the undoing and releasing of the ego. Belief in the ego prevents awareness of True Union and Intimacy. The underlying fear of Intimacy and Union is the ego's fear of loss of itself, the 'personal self' and the 'personal world. — David Hoffmeister

Is he aiming at doing anything, or simply undoing what's been done? It's the great misfortune of our government - this paper administration, of which he's a worthy representative. — Leo Tolstoy

A righteous man is honest, even to his own undoing. — D.J. Molles

For conservatives, the issue is that for generations now, they have failed to make the case for their values. They haven't even conveyed conservative values to many of their children. And when they have, the university has often succeeded in undoing them. — Dennis Prager

They tried to be too clever
and that was their undoing. — Agatha Christie

platform. Outside an old man in overalls was working his way along the wagons, undoing padlocks, throwing bolts, hauling the massive panel doors back along their tracks. Apart from him, no one. Could it be this simple? He didn't pause to ask himself the question a second time. Just sprang down from the opening onto the concrete siding and began walking, head lowered and limping at first, until the oxygen started flowing through his bloodstream and the muscles of his legs began to work then, as they did, quickening his pace and striding faster, lifting his head to the seamless pale blue dawn sky and tasting the breath of freedom. He found a covered overpass that seemed to connect the freight platforms with the main terminal. Took the stairs two at a time and started across the bridge towards the massive building at the other side. The station hall was a curiously romantic — Greg Wilson

Now is the time for the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe who engaged in the slave trade throughout this hemisphere to come forward in a positive way to assist in undoing the harm that was caused by their past colonial policies in the hemisphere. — Charles B. Rangel

I could not even imagine any place of secondary importance for myself, and for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the most insignificant one in real life. Either a hero or dirt - there was no middle way. That turned out to be my undoing, for while wallowing in dirt I consoled myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero overlaid the dirt: an ordinary mortal, as it were, was ashamed to wallow in dirt, but a hero was too exalted a person to be entirely covered in dirt, and hence I could wallow in dirt with an easy conscience. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Meditation means a state of unconditioned mind. Meditation is the process of undoing the harm that every society goes on doing to every individual - communist or Catholic, Jaina or Jew, it does not matter. I am not talking about any particular conditioning that is wrong; I am saying conditioning AS SUCH is wrong. — Rajneesh

I have to expend an awful lot of energy actively undoing the impact of my name. Understandably, people assume that I have at least some connection to Iran. The truth is that I don't. I have very little knowledge about the culture, the language, the history. I've never been to Iran. I've never even been inside a mosque. — Said Sayrafiezadeh

Life is sometimes to be watched as a retarded bird, uninspired by it. It may indeed be threaded, not as a precision course but as an affirmation of its own undoing. — Dew Platt

My darling. You're going to be my undoing. — Karina Halle

According to this, it's not the Twelve that is going to be the undoing of the Daughter of Light, but the Thirteenth Warrior." "Antonio Banderas is going to be my undoing? I'm rife with anticipation. — Darynda Jones

Right you guessed the rising morrow
And scorned to tread the mire you must:
Dust's your wages, son of sorrow,
But men may come to worse than dust.
Souls undone, undoing others,-
Long time since the tale began.
You would not live to wrong your brothers:
Oh lad, you died as fits a man. — A.E. Housman

Yet there is
no return: rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months' wonder, the city
the man, an identity - it can't be
otherwise - an
interpenetration, both ways. Rolling
up! Obverse, reverse;
the drunk the sober; the illustrious
the gross; one. In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing. — William Carlos Williams

This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the sight of a frump. — Virginia Woolf

Once you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing. — Ernest Becker

Human science cannot discover God. Human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry web of God's science. It works with its back to him, and is always leaving his intent and perfected work behind it. Science is always going farther and farther away from the point where his work culminates in revelation. — George MacDonald

That glittering hope is immemorial and beckons many men to their undoing. — Euripides

I would not like to be replaced by someone who immediately sets about undoing what I've tried to do for 25-26 years. — Antonin Scalia

Evil is its own undoing. — Veronica Rossi

Mourning is not forgetting ... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust. — Margery Allingham

I have a dream...

I dream of undoing the damage we've done.

I dream of clean water, clean air and clean soil.

Will you dream with me? — Brooke Hampton

pull a string, a puppet moves ...

each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand --
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,
I don't know ... — Charles Bukowski

You nightmare, gasped and jerk up all at once where I bolt too, hand flown to rest on his kidneys. Confused bedclothes, the sulphurous dark. Worse for you, the same war, another battle so undoing that in daylight you won't admit it, nothing, nothing, avert and work. His purple-circled eyes could have been anywhere. She sets a pan, quietly, of biscuits. Bring me morning's water bucket, then turn wordless out. Finished enough, now I will out too, Mr. Whitman in scandalous hand with a leaf to hold my place. Rivering. Greening. It all stops, water too silty and feet booted, she crooks in a moss-tree and is lost, forgets even to ask for moccasins. I have wrapped fear into linen and hoped it into lavender, saved for funerary. At noon he looks; returns, admits. Across the tablecloth can ask Where did you come from. — JSA Lowe

Live or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well. So here we are I've assigned myself a new obligation. I'm going to stop undoing deconstructing I'm going to start building ... What matters is what you are doing when you die ... I want to be building. — Muriel Barbery

When I was old enough to take baths in the bathtub, and to know I had a penis and a scrotum and everything, I asked her not to sit in the room with me. "Why not?" "Privacy." "Privacy from what? From me?" I didn't want to hurt her feelings, because not hurting her feelings is another of my raisons d'etre. "Just privacy," I said ... She agreed to wait outside, but only if I held a ball of yarn, which went under the bathroom door and was connected to the scarf she was knitting. Every few seconds she would give it a tug, and I had to tug back
undoing what she had just done
so that she could know I was OK. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I am chaos. I am the undoing of man. And all the world will fall to my feet. — Laura Thalassa

There is no undoing it, there's only learning from it, becoming stronger because of I, and moving forward to better it
(they speak of past mistakes) — Amelia Hutchins

[Fire] is lightfooted and shamanic, dancing between the visible and invisible, undoing matter one collapsed molecule at a time, wreaking utter destruction with a touch softer than breath. Its poor cousins, wind and water, are one-dimensional rubes by comparison. Wind is all push, push, push. Water is suffocating, but passively so. And even when water gets it together to be a torrent or a tsunami, it is but wet wind. Fire is at once elemental and otherworldly. Fire dances on the grave of all it destroys. Fire is serious voodoo. — Michael Perry

The researchers found that nearly every change they made was followed by a temporary uptick in performance, even when it involved simply undoing a previous change. They concluded that the increases in worker productivity were not due to better lighting or better pay or longer breaks per se. They were just temporary improvements caused by a change in routine. — Hal Herzog

My beautiful swan. My savior and my undoing. — J.A. Redmerski

Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependant on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth. — John Zerzan

We do ourselves the most good doing something for others. — Horace Mann

Your early successes can be your undoing later. — Michael Hyatt