Unsettling Times Quotes & Sayings

Our success depends on goal-oriented, focused actions, not on distractions. — Debasish Mridha

Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck. — Roger Zelazny

I'm lost in a transition. The old is dead, and I don't know what the new is. The only way to find the new is to start different things and see if there's something that can come out of experimentation. It's somewhat unsettling, but it's a hopeful thing in a way. I've been here before, lots of times. — David Lynch

Kissinger traces the balances made in foreign policy, including that of realism and idealism, from the times of Cardinal Richelieu through chapters on Theodore Roosevelt the realist and Woodrow Wilson the idealist. Kissinger, a European refugee who has read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he wrote in Diplomacy, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he pointed out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable. — Walter Isaacson

Your own private journal should record the way you face up to challenges that beset you. Do not suppose life changes so much that your experiences will not be interesting to your posterity. Experiences of work, relations with people, and an awareness of the rightness and wrongness of actions will always be relevant. — Spencer W. Kimball

At times, I was so confused that I felt like the stem of a pinwheel surrounded by whir and clatter, but through that whole unsettling time I knew that it simply would not do to hide in the barn with a book and an apple and let events plunge forward without me. — Lauren Wolk

I understand that you take the Bible, as written in English, translated many many times over the last three millennia as to be a more accurate, more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us than what I and everybody in here can observe. That, to me, is unsettling. — Bill Nye

For the most part people do not like to learn. They like to know adn they like to tell others what they know, but they do not like the process of learning ... — Jude Deveraux

It was odd
unsettling, actually
how love magnified everything. Small joy was turned into overwhelming happiness; worry became heart-stopping fear. It was as if love became a magnifying glass turned on the heart, taking whatever was there and making it appear many times its normal size. — Michael Thomas Ford

In these uncertain, unsettling times, with unpopular policies being implemented by a patchwork coalition of the damned, Nick Clegg is proving to be perhaps the most useful tool in the government's shed. Not because he says or does anything particularly inspiring, but because he functions as a universal disappointment sponge for disenchanted voters. You stare at Nick Clegg and feel infinitely unhappy, scarcely noticing Cameron and Co. hiding behind him. Governments around the world must be studying the coalition and working out how to get their own Clegg. He's the coalition's very own Pudsey Bear: a cuddly-but-tragic mascot representing the acceptable face of abuse. But unlike Pudsey, he actually speaks. — Charlie Brooker

What is there over which the incomparable beauty of childhood would not triumph? — George Sand

A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered. — Eudora Welty

You have to be careful what you write and not allow self righteousness to cloud your ability to be objective. This story is not about you, it's about people and things that no one else sees. The truth will at times come to you in a blur, unclear, unsettling refusing to leave until you figure out its relevance. — Crystal Evans

I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water. — Elizabeth Gilbert

When we have been badly injured and clearly wronged, we make an instant caricature of the person who did it to us. We define him totally by the one wrong he did. — Lewis B. Smedes

From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do. — Isabel Wilkerson

Companies that are made up of clusters of leaders will actually accelerate their growth by speeding up their rate of innovation as their competition pulls back, build better teams by investing in people while their rivals shrink training budgets, and pick up top talent as their industry peers lay people off. And so fast companies get that unsettling times are actually gifts for them and periods to get so far ahead of the competition that they can never catch up. — Robin S. Sharma

It is clear that no one can be made right with God by trying to keep the law. For the Scriptures say, "It is through faith that a righteous person has life."* — Anonymous

The more subtle inheritance of my strange childhood was the feeling, which we all shared to some extent, of believing we were never quite going about things correctly. Had I said the right thing? Had I worn the right clothes? Was I attractive? These questions were unsettling and self-absorbing, even overwhelming at times, and remained so throughout much of my adult life, until, at last, I grew impatient with dwelling on the past. — Katharine Graham

But the Seeker, who is of unsure gait, also has unsure traits. The way that he moves is unstable and ungainly. It is also unnatural. No other life form adopted this precarious locomotion method of walking on two legs. Intrinsically off balance at all times, it takes just a small stone or a banana peel to topple him over. It is a mysterious wobbly motion much like that of a bicycle. How easy it is, to throw a cyclist off balance, need not be elaborated. But try throwing a truck off balance? Unsettling the Seeker's balance is also equally easy. But try throwing a horse or a tiger off balance? Even a child knows that four wheels or, at least, three wheels are more stable than two wheels. — Biju Vasudevan

I don't know how people do this. How Blue did this. Two words. Two freaking words, and I'm not the same Simon anymore. — Becky Albertalli

Have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 4 June 1940 — Andrew Roberts

Pain has its own half-life; words don't change that. There — Will McIntosh

He smiled at her, and Sophie's emotions went to war. She had always admired Banallt's intellect and his easy manner with her. He never had condescended to her or made her feel unworthy or insignificant. But how could she forget him arriving at Rider Hall with Tommy, drunk and with a woman who was not respectable? All the times he'd watched her with his unsettling eyes and
then left with Tommy. The night he'd admitted he was unfaithful to his marriage and saw no reason to change. — Carolyn Jewel

Some of what makes growing up hard for famous kids is that they don't have room to do immature stuff. I was really happy that I could go to school and hang out behind the alley and be somewhat irresponsible. — Tavi Gevinson

Wouldn't take nothing for my journey now. — Maya Angelou