Quotes on Shock

I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged.

I had a very brilliant father who was not only intellectual, but was street-smart and very curious to boot. The day I found out that he didn't know everything, I grew up. It was a shock. I just thought that the man was the end-all of everything, and he knew the answer to everything. Then I found out I'd have to find out my own answers.

A visit to Marrakesh was a great shock to me. This city taught me color.

Modern tyrants are terror managers. Do not allow your shock to be turned against your freedom.

To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation - head down, trying not to screw up, trying to make it from one day to the next - that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and asking how much money you want to make.

A painting that doesn't shock isn't worth painting.

People don't get angry at you for shock value. People get angry at you when you affect something that is at their core, whether it be guns or religion or whatever. Their belief system.

That's the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God - so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true... Hell, don't pose me that one.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.

When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.

Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.

Now, we have inscribed a new memory alongside those others. It's a memory of tragedy and shock, of loss and mourning. But not only of loss and mourning. It's also a memory of bravery and self-sacrifice, and the love that lays down its life for a friend-even a friend whose name it never knew.

The habit of quietly absorbing the shocks will be quite a great help to stabilize pure awareness. _x000D_ The technique is: Just feel not disturbed. _x000D_ The disturbing influence could be a blessing of Mother Nature to develop the habit to make _x000D_ best use out of every situation. _x000D_ Every situation is God Sent. With this supreme wisdom of life any situation can be used _x000D_ to our advantage and regarded as a blessing of Mother Nature.

Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel.

Every fact of science was once Damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and "progress," everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man's refusal to bow to Authority.

When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

If anyone should doubt whether the electrical matter passes through the substance of bodies, or only over along their surfaces, a shock from an electrified large glass jar, taken through his own body, will probably convince him.

It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.