Unsettling Quotes

“Unsettling are the days in which everyone is an expert.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“If I am not at 'peace', then I can be altogether confident that I've placed a larger 'piece' of myself in the hands of someone other than God.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“She was unsettling. But sometimes there was something perfect about it.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Last Night in Montreal

“There are settling girls, and there are unsettling girls. The ones who seem to have it in them to be flyers are the ones who want to snuggle into settling. The ones who look as settled as old housedogs want to twist their way into flying. Necessarily, you must be defensive about being a settling sort of girl.”
― Amruta Patil, Kari

“When one finds oneself in the kind of strange, unsettling circumstances as I presently find myself, it is only natural, after all, to have a few, unusual, vivid dreams.”
― M.D. Elster, Four Kings

“Sometimes I fear those noisy words boiling in an unsettling cauldron.”
― Pavitraa Parthasarathy

“So rich a client having suffered such a messy death was an unsettling embarrassment to Captain Harald Biscay. It was bad for business. He had the murder hushed up immediately, his security staff investigating the matter covertly but thoroughly. Five and a half thousand souls onboard. Five and a half thousand suspects. Three days. So far, nothing. Now it would be taken further by the planetary authorities on the colony world below. A forensic team (cunningly disguised as a cleaning crew) was now rummaging through Smiffs apartment, examining every single particle. He had a feeling -- a strong feeling, about what they were going to find. Somehow, Biscay was of the opinion that this was going to be another contender for the Unsolved Murders show.”
― Christina Engela, Dead Man's Hammer

“A life as long as the Minotaur's - that half-man half-bull, and fully scapegoat - a life that long doubles back on itself from time to time. Caves in. The minuscule tectonics of being alive, among the wholly human, always unsettling. The world shifts continuously beneath his feet. The Minotaur came from misspent want, from the planked birth canal, came from blood-drenched stone walls, from yellow thread. Belayed by desire, the beast pulled himself along. Pulled himself through centuries, through zeitgeists and kitchens, through paradigms and junkyards. Pulls still. Home.”
― Steven Sherrill, The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time

“Scenes from the Playroom

Now Lucy with her family of dolls
Disfigures Mother with an emery board,
While Charles, with match and rubbing alcohol,
Readies the struggling cat, for Chuck is bored.

The young ones pour more ink into the water
Through which the latest goldfish gamely swims,
Laughing, pointing at naked, neutered Father.
The toy chest is a Buchenwald of limbs.

Mother is so lovely; Father, so late.
The cook is off, yet dinner must go on
With onions as her only cause for tears
She hacks the red meat from the slippery bone,
Setting the table, where the children wait,
Her grinning babies, clean behind the ears.”
― R.S. Gwynn

“He would study any number of topics and had no real preferences, his many eyes enthusiastically moving back and forth as he read the pages at a steady clip. I don't believe he needed light, or eyes, to read, but I know he liked to mimic what he saw me doing. Perhaps he even thought it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“There were five of them, and four had traded their eyes for green-gold wasps that curled into their sockets and compounded their vision. Claws graced their hands like sharp commas. Scales at their throats burned red when they breathed. One wing sighed bellows-like out of the naked back of the shortest, the one who still had slate-gray human eyes. After a while, I'd wished he had wasps instead.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“It's always safest to never bet on nobody being stupid.”
― Howard Tayler, Sergeant in motion

“Don’t settle for a world that has settled, for that ends up being unsettling for both.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“And I asked her about the holes in the walls and Mom tried to joke, saying, “Yes, Marjorie was sleep punching too.” I didn’t get the joke.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“I don’t settle. Or more accurately, I can’t. To settle is to abandon great things to the death of smaller things. It is to desert what could have been for what never should have been. To settle is to bargain away the wildly rich abilities of our humanity in a ruinous trade-off for a lackluster existence. Settling is to declare an indefensible surrender to the evils of mediocrity at the expense of God’s resplendent and wholly viable vision for this existence of ours. No, I don’t settle because I can’t. And the fact is, neither can you. Therefore, I would suggest that you begin settling your life squarely on the reality that settling is far too unsettling to settle for.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The scene had the innocence of all unsettling things that take place in silence.”
― Yuri Herrera, The Transmigration of Bodies

“This mysterious, celestial painter has put mystery into everything: the line of mountains in the distance, the river of asphalt running beyond the camp, even the patches of scrub pocking the ground. These are left navy, frosted with moonlight, but never given enough definition to look like plants, and so instead they give Beni the impression of crouching things—the kinds of things that wait until all the people have gone to sleep to uncurl from the earth and walk the land.”
― Addison Lane, Blackpines: The Magpie Witch: The North Star in Eclipse