Unsettled Quotes

1. "It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose— well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible."
Author: Aldous Huxley

2. "A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose-well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes-make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words "Not to be published" drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, "What fun it would be," he thought, "if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
Author: Aldous Huxley

3. "Sergei remembered well how unsettled Nikishin had been by the arm and leg that day. Then, it had made him sneer inwardly, but it was difficult to maintain that derision since he began to like the man. Trust him even. And that could be dangerous enough, laws being what they were, Nikishin being who he was. Never mind that any normal individual would be revolted by Sergei's current physical state, and justifiably so. Cyborg patchwork over mangled flesh. The pinnacle of attractive. He'd always been different, a freak. Now it was just visible. Impossible to hide."
Author: Aleksandr Voinov

4. "I quickly got used to being picked up by my mother, and taken to the air raid shelter near our home. Although frightening, this was a great adventure to me as a child, for in the shelter I played with the other children and we felt safe there as we were surrounded by grown-ups; although now the grown-ups were more worried than they had been in the past. There were greater feelings of anxiety and fear in the older people, which we children also felt, and it unsettled us all."
Author: Alfred Nestor

5. "I was in way too deep. I was cut in so many places that I felt like I was bleeding out from every part of my body. Being outside and watching people live their normal lives took me out of my head, but the minute I stepped back into the apartment, I was muted inside. No words, no actions, no me. - Unsettled"
Author: Alisa Mullen

6. "The press gave me a voice too quickly, and that could have unsettled a man who had every right to feel he should be in control of the thing he had created."
Author: Alison Moyet

7. "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes."
Author: Azar Nafisi

8. "Her heart was bruised by the kiss, smashed and surprised and unsettled by it. September thought kisses were all nice, sweet things asked for gently and given gladly. It had happened so fast and sharp it had taken her breath. Perhaps she had done it wrong, somehow. She put the kiss away firmly to think about later. Instead, she smiled at him and pulled a carefree mask over her face."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

9. "Getting lost or losing grip gives life meaning and direction. It gives you the opportunity to grow, learn something new and startover. Next time you feel like your failing, slipping or just unsettled in life - take a deep breath - get in the moment of just "being" - feel the life run through your body - stand up and keep going."
Author: Claire M Charters

10. "How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snowdome paper weight that's been shaken. There's a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it's now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris. (p30)"
Author: Craig Silvey

11. "Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it"
Author: Henry Miller

12. "Dreams were the brain's way of sorting out things left unsettled in our waking lives"
Author: Hilary Duff

13. "The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water."
Author: J.G. Ballard

14. "Your talk of sniffling riders with invisible noses has unsettled me."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

15. "Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time."
Author: Jennifer Egan

16. "I live quite an unsettled life."
Author: Joely Richardson

17. "I had a variety of minds about me and all of them unsettled."
Author: John Clare

18. "Under this swarm of waspish self-inquiries he began to feel sorry for himself - a brilliant man trapped, a Byron tamed; and his mind wandered back to Sarah, to visual images, attempts to recollect that face, that mouth, that generous mouth. Undoubtedly it awoke some memory in him, too tenuous, perhaps too general, to trace to any source in his past; but it unsettled him and haunted him, by calling to some hidden self he hardly knew existed. He said it to himself: It is the stupidest thing, but that girl attracts me. It seemed clear to him that it was not Sarah in herself who attracted him - how could she, he was betrothed - but some emotion, some possibility she symbolized. She made him aware of a deprivation. His future had always seemed to him of vast potential; and now suddenly it was a fixed voyage to a known place. She had reminded him of that."
Author: John Fowles

19. "I refuse to live life with unsettled differences"."
Author: John Paul Warren

20. "Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman."
Author: Kate Atkinson

21. "There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart. ... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142]."
Author: Kim Edwards

22. "I hated the distance between us. It left me unsettled, unbalanced. Like the good parts of myself were fading."
Author: Kristen Simmons

23. "She felt vaguely upset and unsettled. She was suddenly tired of outworn dreams. And in the garden the petals of the last red rose were scattered by a sudden little wind. Summer was over --- it was Autumn."
Author: L.M. Montgomery

24. "You saw me before I saw you. In the airport, that day in August, you had that look in your eyes, as though you wanted something from me, as though you'd wanted it for a long time. No one had ever looked at me like that before, with that kind of intensity. It unsettled me, surprised me, I guess. Those blue, blue eyes, icy blue, looking back at me as if I could warm them up. They're pretty powerful, you know, those eyes, pretty beautiful, too."
Author: Lucy Christopher

25. "When we shrink from the sight of something, when we shroud it in euphemism, that is usually a sign of inner conflict, of unsettled hearts, a sign that something has gone wrong in our moral reasoning."
Author: Matthew Scully

26. "When I'm stuck in my writing, the world is amiss. If I'm eating a sandwich, it's an unsettled sandwich. If I'm in the shower, it's an incorrect shower. It's profoundly uncomfortable. But it's what keeps me pushing."
Author: Melissa Rosenberg

27. "It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but to old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we can in fact create."
Author: Michael Cunningham

28. "Unsettled by the sudden appearance of Captain Quire within her court, Gloriana resolved to forego all frivolous entertainments and shun the more unnecessary pleasures. Yet, the queen reasoned, this surely did not apply to healthful exercise, such as riding in the royal park. Nor could she refuse to spend the remainder of the afternoon in quiet seclusion, lying face down upon a cushioned bench in her private dressing room while gentle Lady Mary rubbed all the soreness from her muscles. Such occupations were safe, and harmless. It was only afterwards, when she was sleeping deeply, that Captain Quire came to her in a dream."
Author: Michael Moorcock

29. "She was a strange, unsettled planet that had had once sustained life. She was a language that I had thought I almost understood even though I couldn't speak it. She hadn't always been this way. She used to wear high knee socks and short shorts and tube tops, and travel everywhere on roller skates."
Author: Miriam Toews

30. "But our uneasy, unsettled feeling doesn't go away. I don't think we'll ever be able to reach our Shangri-La, however, I know it exists only in the depths of the forest or at the bottom of the deep blue sea."
Author: Naoki Higashida

31. "My view is that if your philosophy is not unsettled daily then you are blind to all the universe has to offer."
Author: Neil DeGrasse Tyson

32. "No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

33. "On nights when Gloria stayed up late enough to see Rachel come dreamily home she was always unsettled by the girl's appearance: clothes crushed and hair awry, eyes dazed and mouth swollen, with the lipstick eaten away. Love was often said to be torment, but Rachel could make it seem like punishment as well."
Author: Richard Yates

34. "I walked until the water lapped against my chest, and then I kept walking until it kissed the underside of my jaw. I was surprised how cold it was. I closed my eyes and ducked beneath the surface. Thee was the wind and the clouds and the pure pool and the boy beneath its unsettled surface, and the blood, the boy's and monster's, defiling the pool."
Author: Rick Yancey

35. "I was east of Skepticism and north of Faith, with an unsettled compass and variable winds. But I could offer up a prayer as well as the next man, and leave it to Heaven to judge the result."
Author: Robert Charles Wilson

36. "The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects that the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist's guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end."
Author: Robert Musil

37. "He smiled hesitantly and she smiled back in the same fashion, but he was unsettled by the thought that Muriel had undergone a transformation. Some of the stuff that had come out of her mouth lately, about God or babies, made him wonder if she'd had a brain transplant at some point in the last ten years. It was funny what happened to people after forty, when they realized that our place here on earth was leased, not owned."
Author: Scott Turow

38. "Away with the world's opinion of you – it's always unsettled and divided. Away with the pursuits that have occupied the whole of your life – death is going to deliver the verdict in your case. ... It's only when you're breathing your last that the way you've spent your time will become apparent."
Author: Seneca

39. "Crises marked by anxiety, doubt, and despair have always been those periods of personal unrest that occur at the times when a man is sufficiently unsettled to have an opportunity for personal growth. We must always see our own feelings of uneasiness as being our chance for "making the growth choice rather than the fear choice."
Author: Sheldon B. Kopp

40. "Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning."
Author: Sue Monk Kidd

41. "I haven't heard a woman say my name in a long time, Theresa. Say myname."She pulled in a hard breath, pretending to be annoyed rather than unsettled and excited by the intimacy."Very well. Tolly. Better?""Infinitely." Slowly he ran his fingertips along her cheek, making her shiver. "So many handsomegentlemen courting you, Tess," he whispered, "and yet here you are."
Author: Suzanne Enoch

42. "It was the week after Easter holidays, and he was journeying along with Smart the mare and the light spring-cart, watching the damp slopes of the hill-sides as they steamed in the warmth of the sun, which at this unsettled season shone on the grass with the freshness of an occasional inspector rather than as an accustomed proprietor."
Author: Thomas Hardy

43. "You do have a modicum of peace of mind here, but it's as unsettled as any other place."
Author: Todd Rundgren

44. "For while the threat of nuclear holocaust has been significantly reduced, the world remains a very unsettled and dangerous place."
Author: William S. Cohen

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