Wrong Mystery Quotes & Sayings

Now, with regard to religion, you say where you want to go is to a place where you can truly know God and love God. I am simply observing that your religions do not take you there. Your religions have made God the Great Mystery, and caused you not to love God, but to fear God. Religion has done little, as well, to cause you to change your behaviors. You are still killing each other, condemning each other, making each other "wrong." And, in fact, it is your religions which have been encouraging you to do so. So with regard to religion, I merely observe that you say you want it to take you to one place, and it is taking you to another. — Neale Donald Walsch

The only thing wrong with the NBA - or any other professional sport, for that matter - is a wild epidemic of Dumbness and overweening Greed. There is no Mystery about it, and no need to change any rules. — Hunter S. Thompson

You can think something is one way all your life, and it turns out you're wrong, it can be something else entirely. — Liane Moriarty

The things that bring couples together will always terrify me more than the things that tear us apart. They will always be harder to explain. They will always keep me up later. Love gone wrong has inspired so many great songs, but somehow, love going right is what's bizarre. It exposes deep freakcraft in the universe. As far as I'm concerned, 'some people are very kind' is the scariest line Bob Dylan ever wrote. Compared to that, his breakup songs are kid stuff. Some people are very kind and there's nothing in the universe to explain why.
It's a mystery how people lose each other
but to me, it's an even stranger mystery we manage to stay together, or to collide together at all. — Rob Sheffield

And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, Wow, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. — Kathryn Schulz

A rush of cold air blew against his face as he left her bakery. While he walked, Kaden tried to convince himself the date wasn't a big deal, but it was. The nervous energy swirling in his stomach gave him away. He'd never been on a date. Ever. He had met his wife the day they were bonded. He wasn't even sure of the proper protocol for a human date. His brothers had one-night stands, not dates. There was no way he could ask them. They'd never let him live it down. Perhaps he could find the answer on Google?
With all he had learned since his arrival, he was confident he could figure this out. Besides, this was a date with Annabelle - the one human he had made a connection with. After everything they had been through, taking her out on a date should be easy.
What could possibly go wrong? — Stacey O'Neale

Life is not a problem. To look at it as a problem is to take a wrong step. It is a mystery to be lived, loved, experienced. — Osho

Only by honoring the greater truths (the macrocosmic truth) may we begin to honor our subjective truths (our microcosmic truth). This is a recognition of the greater mystery of life and a deep honoring of being a child of that great mystery. In that profound recognition rests the awareness that the same macrocosmic mystery is within us, and it manifests and takes its course in many ways. When we simply recognize this fundamental aspect of the nature of existence, we can begin to understand its presence in our lives. And then finding ourselves moving away from the career or relationship we thought we'd be in for the rest of our life is less of a shock or a "something must be wrong" and more of a deep, humble sigh of "alright, okay, here we go, and so it is." This is the way life moves. We do not hold the reins, and to feign so creates only pain. Evolution necessitates change. — Tehya Sky

Young sir," he said, "you speak like an expert. And an expert, I can assure you, from a long association with them, is someone who has gone to considerable pains to be absolutely wrong. — Leonard Holton

Well, it's an anomaly! He must have received the wrong dosage. That's what happens when you put these matters in the hands of morons. — Wodke Hawkinson

When you read the account of a murder - or, say, a fiction story based on murder - you usually begin with the murder itself. That's all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. [ ... ] The murder itself is the end of the story. It's Zero Hour."
He paused.
"It's Zero Hour now. — Agatha Christie

It's strange when you think about it. There are hundreds and hundreds of murders in books and television. It would be hard for narrative fiction to survive without them. And yet there are almost none in real life, unless you happen to live in the wrong area. Why is it that we have such a need for murder mystery? And what is it that attracts us? The crime, or the solution? Do we have some primal need of bloodshed because our own lives are so safe, so comfortable? — Anthony Horowitz

I'm consciously shedding the assumption that a skeptical point of view is the most intellectually credible. Intellect does not function in opposition to mystery; tolerance is not more pragmatic than love; and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope. Unlike almost every worthwhile thing in life, cynicism is easy. It's never proven wrong by the corruption or the catastrophe. It's not generative. It judges things as they are, but does not lift a finger to try to shift them. I — Krista Tippett

In the quiet of the morning
You only have to rise
To feel something's wrong.
Uncontrollable circumstances
Tense the air and you know
Something's going to happen.

--Susan Bernhardt — Susan Bernhardt

What the hell is wrong with you?" Westin growled as they entered the house. Lia twirled a bit.
"I am in a good mood. Is that not allowed?"
"For most people, yes, it's preferred. On you, it's creepy. What's up? — Abbie Chandler

In the bazaar today I noticed a shopkeeper sitting cross-legged on the platform of his shop making up his ledger. A common sight - but there was something wrong, I could not at first see what. Then I understood: what was his heavy ledge resting on? It was lying open before him, on his stomach, but unsupported by his free hand, not resting against his knees. What on earth was propping it up?
The problem teased my mind so much that I had to retrace my steps for another look. There he was, comfortably scribbling away in the large ledger, which was standing up, apparently unsupported, in his lap. Then, as I stared, he closed it, and got to his feet - and the mystery was explained. He had elephantiasis of the scrotum, and had been utilising this huge football of tissue as a book-rest. — J.R. Ackerley

EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside
be glad for me. — Franz Wright

There is nothing wrong with God's creation. Mystery and Suffering only exist in the mind. — Ramana Maharshi

We were all searching outside ourselves for our missing pieces, and we were all looking in the wrong direction. Instead of finding ourselves, we'd lost our sense of self. Mystery didn't have the answers. A blonde 10 in a twoset at the Standard didn't have the answers. The answers were to be found within. — Neil Strauss

The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the mystery that surrounds them. — Lemony Snicket

Sometimes love comes easily, and sometimes it's the most challenging decision a person ever makes. That reality doesn't make one way right and the other wrong, it just is. The love underlying marriage is more than an emotion, more than a set of facts adding up to a decision. It's the choice that this is the person I'm going to stay with for the rest of my life. It's something you have to make with your head and your heart . . . . — Dee Henderson

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story. — Charles Baxter

If everything comes in your way just the way you wanted them to ,then you're probably in the wrong lane. — ARKOPAUL

The right things often happen for the wrong reason. — Alex Adam

I cadged a complimentary green matchbook with a gold bird icon from the Bell canning jar. Later we'd use the matches to light our spliffs. My fingertips tapped the stem to the gizmo that dinged a bell. Nobody came out. Wrong signal, so I did two bell rings. No response prompted me to tap out a series of bell rings. — Ed Lynskey

We see only moths wheeling into our candle, and we ask the wrong question: Why are all these moths committing suicide? Instead, we should ask why they have nervous systems that steer by maintaining a fixed angle to light rays, a tactic that we notice only where it goes wrong. When the question is rephrased, the mystery evaporates. It never was right to call it suicide. It is a misfiring by-product of a normally useful compass. — Richard Dawkins

People who think nothing could go wrong are usually disappointed. — Lemony Snicket

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. — Richard Feynman

[Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are 'one'? If so, his choice of metaphor - recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene - is fortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man? — James Shapiro

I didn't know that once you've proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you'll never be free again. — Steve Hamilton

In middle age there is mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes even love. I feel that there has been some miscarriage, some wrong turning, but I do not know when it took place and I have no hope of finding it. — John Cheever

No matter how many slow and complicated mysteries I encounters in my life, I still hope that one day a slow and complicated mystery will be solved quickly and simply. An associate of mine calls this feeling "the triumph of hope over experience", which simply means that it's never going to happen, and that is what happened then. — Lemony Snicket

As she traveled down the lane between the rows of parked cars, she noticed a conspicuous absence of new or expensive vehicles. Teaching didn't pay well enough for any luxuries, and Hannah thought that was a shame. There was something really wrong with the system when a teacher could make more money flipping burgers at a fast-food chain. — Joanne Fluke

Hey Shelly, you're looking at me like I'm from another planet. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. Bubbles sold me alien abduction insurance. I haven't got a care in the world. — Meryl Sawyer

We think, sometimes, there's not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests, enchanting deer and butterflies with her smile. What a pleasure to be wrong. Princesses, knights, enchantments and dragons, mystery and adventure ... not only are they here-and-now, they're all that ever lived on earth! Our century, they've changed clothes, of course. Dragons wear government-costumes, today, and failure-suits and disaster-outfits. Society's demons screech, whirl down on us should we lift our eyes from the ground, dare we turn right at corners we've been told to turn left. So crafty have appearances become that princesses and knights can be hidden from each other, can be hidden from themselves. — Richard Bach

Olivia was a quiet child, but her lack of response was uncharacteristic. She stared at her mother with wide, frightened eyes, her mouth open, a hollow cave devoid of words. Something was wrong. Very wrong. — Caroline Mitchell

Beauty
be not caused," said Emily Dickinson. "It is."
In one way she was wrong. The scattering of light over a long distance creates a sunset. The crashing of ocean waves on a beach is created by tides, which are themselves the result of gravitational forces exerted by the sun and the moon and the rotation of the Earth. Those are causes.
The mystery lies in how those things become beautiful. — Matt Haig

She put a hand on his hip and turned him to her. "But things could go wrong, so i want to tell you something while it's just the two of us, Eddie. I want to tell you how much I love you." She spoke simply, with no drama.
I know you do," he said, "but I'll be damned if I know why."
Because you made me feel whole," she said. "When I was younger, I used to vacillate between thinking love was this great and glorious mystery and thinking it was just something a bunch of Hollywood move producers made up to sell more tickets in the Depression, when Dish Night kind of played out."
Eddie laughed.
Now I think that all of us are born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You ... Eddie, you fill me up. — Stephen King

Somehow the pain, the losses, the hurt, the bad, God
is able to transform these into something they could have never
been, icons and monuments of grace and love. It is the deep
mystery how wounds and scars can become precious, or a
ravaging and terrifying cross the essential symbol of relentless
affection."
"Is it worth it?" whispered Tony.
"Wrong question, son. There is no 'it.' The question is and
has always been, 'Are you worth it?' and the answer is and
always, 'Yes!' — William Paul Young

We are probably wrong to suspect that each individual has some secret passion, some mystery, some weakness; if Jean-Yves's father had had to express his innermost convictions, the profound meaning he ascribed to life, he could probably have cited nothing more than a slight disappointment. — Michel Houellebecq

Grandfather, there's something we want to talk to you about."
Grandfather looked concerned. "There's nothing wrong, is there?"
"It's about the Roth house," Benny said. "It's a funny house."
"Funny?" Grandfather asked.
"Well," Violet began. "Benny is right. There are funny things in the house and funny people outside the house."

The Mystery of the Singing Ghost — Gertrude Chandler Warner

Names are a great mystery. I've never known whether the name is molded by the child or the child changed to fit the name. But you can be sure of this- whenever a human has a nickname it is a proof that the name given him was wrong. — John Steinbeck

Cassandra always hid when she read, though she never quite knew why. It was as if she couldn't shake the guilty suspicion that she was being lazy, that surrendering herself so completely to something so enjoyable must surely be wrong. But surrender she did. Let herself drop through the rabbit hole and into a tale of magic and mystery ... — Kate Morton

If anything is a mystery to you and it is coming in between you and God, never look for the explanation in your intellect, look for it in your disposition, it is that which is wrong. — Oswald Chambers

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so — Gertrude Atherton

The rational approach start from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding. — Jeremy Narby

The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach? [...] Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn't all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn't accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away. — Thomas Frank

On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die facedown in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her cards, screamed delicately, and proclaimed that my doom was written in water and blood and ice. As for me, from about that time and for twenty years since, I had spat on my middle finger and slapped the rump of every aingerou I noticed, murmuring the sincerest, devoutest prayer that I might prove my parents' predictions wrong. Not so much that I feared the doom itself - doom is just the hind end of living, after all - but to see the two who birthed me confounded. — Carol Berg

I could never, I knew then, lose myself "in love." Margery had accused me of coldness, and she was right, but she was also wrong: For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love. — Laurie R. King

The range of the human mind, the scale and depth of the metaphors the mind is capable of manufacturing as it grapples with the universe, stand in stunning contrast to the belief that there is only one reality, which is man's, or worse, that only one culture among the many on earth possesses the truth.
To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, "There could be more, there could be things we don't understand," is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view. It is to permit yourself an extraordinary freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you may be right. — Barry Lopez

To me, ugliness, grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things. — Carrie Brownstein

Do you not realize, Hastings, that each and everyone of us is a complete mystery with layers. We each try to judge each other, but nine times out of ten, we are wrong. — Agatha Christie

If you don't scare the neighbors while copulating, I'm afraid you're doing something terribly wrong. — Lois Greiman

But the truly ambitious teams find relief in honesty when they've lost, because it's the diagnostic tool that leads to a solution - here's what we did wrong and let's fix it, so we don't ever have to feel this way again. Great teams explain their failure; they don't excuse it. Then they pay a visit to Charles Atlas and get stronger. When you explain a loss aloud, it's no longer a tormenting mystery. I believed in that brand of honesty my whole career, and I knew at least one other coach who believed in it too. — Pat Summitt

Oh, I'm not afraid of death! What have I got to live for after all? I suppose you believe it's very wrong to kill a person who has injured you-even if they've taken away everything you had in the world? — Agatha Christie

It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me ... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!"
"So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death. — Leo Tolstoy

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nothing like beautiful legs. 'Cause with beautiful legs, even if you've been there only once or twice, there might be something up there besides the cunt, there might be something really marvellous this time - it could be a cunt, but it could be - it's just something about looking at the legs just makes you - I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the cunt, I'm just saying, you always imagine - some extra magic when you're looking at the outside portion of the female. — Charles Bukowski

To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more ... things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge ... It is to permit yourself an extraordinary, freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right ... This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe. — Barry Lopez

You know the difference between right and wrong,' he repeated finally. 'Man, why did you need Initiation - by the Golden Dawn, or by anybody else? You are a genius, a sage, a giant among men. You have solved the problem which philosophers have been debating since antiquity - the mystery about which no two nations or tribes have ever agreed, and no two men or women have ever agreed, and no intelligent person has ever agreed totally with himself from one day to the next. You know the difference between right and wrong. I am overawed. I swoon. I figuratively kiss your feet. — Robert Anton Wilson

I had a feeling there was something wrong with me. I guess I was a mystery even to myself. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing. — Robert Jordan

There were two things Southerners hated to see knocking on their door. Jehovah Witnesses, because the majority of us were Baptist, and the undertaker. It was understandable that when Terk Rhinehammer opened the door, his face turned white as all the blood was drained from it after he looked past me and saw my hearse.
"What's wrong?" He used his hands to pat down his chest. "I'm not dead, am I? — Tonya Kappes

Shadowy mystery stalkers? Hidden escape hatches? Creepy subterranean tunnels? My mother tried to get me to take social work for my master's. I told her it was boring. I was so wrong. — Kelley Armstrong

One wrong move, one bad rumor, one mistake, and it's social death row. I'm the latest to be sentenced. Move out of the way, everyone. Dead girl walking.
-Riley — Dawn Klehr

Have they ever. Isabel never misses a trick. Anytime I step into their foyer, she's dropping hints all over the place. Don't get me wrong because I love both women dearly, and I enjoy playing a game or two of Scrabble, just not on every visit. Why can't we play Monopoly for a change of pace? I love squeezing the play money in my fist and snapping up the swanky properties like Park Place and Boardwalk. — Ed Lynskey

I thought that you would be frozen in awe when you found the sequence, when you heard a bird's song repeating my Morse code, my cry for help, my S.O.S, when you saw the same numbers in the petals of a flower and the structure of a pine cone, when you saw with your own eyes the interconnectedness of all things.
But I was wrong.
You searched for a male god, a creator, an intelligent designer, or you banished the beauty and mystery of the world beneath the cold concrete grave of closed-eye skepticism. The few of you who could still hear my music felt tortured and misunderstood; you reached out for any conspiracy theory large enough to explain your alienated despair, your sense that the Earth was dying and no one cared.
But listen to me -- you are not alone. Run your fingers through the grass and grab it in your fists, feel my pulse echoing through your blood. You. Are. Not. Alone. And I -- I am not dead yet. — Sarah Warden

With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms - the war novel - and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration - everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant - and from there the mystery of how we got to this disastrous moment unfolds backwards, Memento-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less. — Adam Johnson