Reversal Quotes

“A fear of weakness only strengthens weakness.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“To be a philosopher, just reverse everything you have ever been told...and have a sense of humor doing it.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Do not have a catfight, boys, even if it is that time of the month,” said Serene, and when she saw them staring at her, she explained: “You know—women shed their dark feelings with their menses every month? But men, robbed of that outlet, have strange moodswings and become hysterical at a certain phase of the moon?”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, The Turn of the Story

“In the minds of my parents, they are the victims; I am the abuser.”
― Christina Enevoldsen

“The priest then turning toward the bride, inquired:

"Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband, etc., etc., so long as ye both shall live?"

To which the bride, throwing aside her veil, answered, firmly:

"No! Not if he were the last man and I the last woman on the face of the earth and the human race was about to become extinct and the angel of Gabriel came down from above to ask it of me as a personal favor."

The effect of this outburst, this revelation, this explosion, may be imagined but can never be adequately described.”
― E.D.E.N. Southworth, Capitola's Peril

“Anything great will only be appreciated if I am given the opportunity to feel the absence of it, or experience the reversal of it. It is only then that I can even begin to understand its majesty and cherish it in the manner I should have all along.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and thus conservative) form of social discourse. Reversal plays a double role in this novel (MONSIEUR VENUS), for it is not only a formal strategy bearing on citation, but itself a citation as well; one more cliché mobilized from the fin-de-siecle reserve.”
― Janet Beizer

“Wenda's chest and hips shrank, her shoulders and arms turned muscular and her body became lean and hard where it had been rounded and soft. The hair of her head shortened drastically, and a mustache sprouted on her upper lip. Her delicate human feet had become hard hooves. She was now not a nymph but a faun. Physically; she would never be male in spirit.”
― Piers Anthony, Knot Gneiss

“From surfeit to loss is a short line.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

“Joke 'em if they can't take a fuck.”
― Anonymous.

“Moments later, Sona Kilroy, heading for the open doorway, stepped over the sergeant’s body. With an old auto-rifle in his left hand and his favorite sword in the other, and the sharp melodic din of bolts and bullets ringing in his ears, ‘the Hammer’ grinned an evil grin to himself, well pleased. He wished he could’ve seen the look on the face of Indomitable’s captain when he realized the tables had just been turned on him! The thought amused him. It was bloody hilarious. He cackled, reveling in this complete reversal of fortune. Then he stalked onward with conviction, a grim smile on his lips – intent on taking the ship for himself.

* * *”
― Christina Engela, Dead Beckoning

“I don’t necessarily sit around inviting life to knock me down, but when it does I don’t wait around for an invitation to stand back up either.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Christmas is the beginning of a wonderfully tumultuous story of God coming on tip-toe in order to turn the world on it’s head.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The golden pill was more solvent than medicine, dissolving self, reversing the tide of opposites, like only knowing the alphabet from finish to start, z to a.”
― Sarah C. Patten, The Measure of Gold

“He was taken then, for half a minute, shivering and yawning in his long underwear, soft, nearly invisible in the December-dawn enclosure, among so many sharp edges of books, sheets and flimsies, charts and maps (and the chief one, red pockmarks on the pure white skin of lady London, watching over all . . . wait . . . disease on skin . . . does she carry the fatal infection inside herself? are the skies predestined, and does the flight of the rocket actually follow from the fated eruption latent in the city . . . but he can't hold it, no more than he understands Pointsman's obsession with the reversal of sound stimuli and please, please can't we just drop it for a bit . . .), visited, not knowing till it passed how clearly he was seeing the honest half of his life that Jessica was now, how frantically his mother the War must disapprove of her beauty, her cheeky indifference to death-institutions he'd not so long ago believed in -- her unflappable hope (though she hated to make plans), her exile from childhood (though she refused ever to hold on to memories) . . .”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Despite the challenges, the river never reverses its course. Rather, it decides to cut fresh banks, fashion serene inlets, feed swirling eddies, sweep away fallen timber, lavish the floodplains with rich nutrients, and declare by actions such as these that the cowardice of reversal would never have created rivers this magnificent.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough