Inability Quotes - Page 14

• Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.

  Steven Pinker

  Perspective, Suffering, World

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• Many Israelis can get to know what's really happening. I mean, you have soldiers who go and see things. It's not like France and Algiers or, I don't know, England and Kenya or Belgium and Kenya. It's in your backyard. It's much more about willingness, indecision, the inability, or exposure. There is a decision not to be exposed. People can live like five minutes away from it all.

  Amira Hass

  Mean, People, Decision

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm a comic because I don't want to do the nine-to-five, I have to modify that and say I'm a comic because I have an inability to do a nine-to-five.

  Jay Mohr

  Want, Nine, Comic

  Source: underthegunreview.net

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• I wonder if at this point, I mean, given [Donald's Trump] noted inability to deal with shame, humiliation and loss, and what seem like epically deep psychic wounds that he carries around, that he just wants to go and be in a place that he feels like he created.

  Michelle Goldberg

  Mean, Loss, Psychics

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Ignorance, Thinking, Islands

  The Call of Cthulhu ch. 1 (1928)

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• I needed to enhance the outward threat to Rachel.In the book [Girl on the Train], her inner threat is so strong; the fear of herself and her inability to remember and the false memories. In the film [Girl on the Train]I wanted to increase the exterior threat. So that's why Allison's part was bigger and was an important part of the climax of the film.

  Erin Cressida Wilson

  Girl, Strong, Memories

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect: It tends to create the inability to accept new ideas.

  Dean Williams

  Ideas, Sides, Investing

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• From inability to let well alone; from too much zeal for the new and contempt for what is old; from putting knowledge before wisdom, science before art and cleverness before common sense; from treating patients as cases; and from making the cure of the disease more grievous than the endurance of the same, Good Lord, deliver us.

  Sir Robert Hutchison, 1st Baronet

  Wisdom, Art, Prayer

  British Medical Journal 1: 671 (1953)

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• Adolescent girls were fighting a mother's interference because they wanted her to acknowledge their independence. Whatever resentment they had was not towards a mother's excessive concern, or even excessive control, but towards her inability to see, and appreciate, their maturing identity.

  Terri E Apter

  Girl, Mother, Fighting

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• Sharks have a deadly form of claustrophobia. It's not so much fear of enclosed spaces as it is inability to exist in them. No one knows why. Some say it's the metal in aquariums that throws their equilibrium off. But whatever it is, big sharks don't last long in captivity

  Neal Shusterman

  Sharks, Aquariums, Space

  Neal Shusterman (2009). “Unwind”, p.100, Simon and Schuster

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• Calvin: Know what I pray for? Hobbes: What? Calvin: The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference.

  Bill Watterson

  Differences, Praying, Hobbes

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• that's what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Love You, Flaws, Perceive

  Audrey Niffenegger (2014). “The Time Traveler's Wife”, p.244, Simon and Schuster

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• We’re not that strong anymore. (Hades) Oops, guess I screwed up. Inability to see the consequences of our thoughtless acts must run in the family. So much for my father being a god of prophecy, huh? (Stryker)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Running, Strong, Father

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2008). “One Silent Night”, p.13, Macmillan

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• It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

  Stephen Fry

  Beauty, Depression, Laughter

  Stephen Fry (2011). “Moab Is My Washpot”, p.93, Random House

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• As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.

  Muriel Barbery

  Wall, Believe, Littles

  "The Elegance of the Hedgehog". Book by Muriel Barbery, August 31, 2006.

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• "There is no analysis here," the most brutal of them wrote. Now I wonder if my papers lacked critical thought, or if it was really more about my inability/refusal to write in the convoluted style that they wanted me to. I remember the initial shock upon reading my peers' papers. I seriously could not understand them, and I couldn't understand why the writing had to be so unclear in order to be considered smart.

  Mary J. Miller

  Smart, Reading, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Upon reflection, I decided I had three main weaknesses: I was confused (evidenced by a lack of facts, an inability to coordinate my thoughts, and an inability to verbalize my ideas); I had a lack of confidence, which cause me to back down from forcefully stated positions; and I was overly emotional at the expense of careful, 'scientific' though. I was thirty-seven years old and still discovering who I was.

  Julia Child

  Confused, Reflection, Emotional

  Julia Child (2009). “My Life in France”, p.65, Gerald Duckworth & Co

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• A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: "Paul's dying; Paul's going to die"' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.

  Jean Cocteau

  Dream, Children, Believe

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• I marvel at how good I was before I met him, how I lived molded to the smallest space possible, my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers. So few people know what they're capable of. At forty-two I'd never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem - my chronic inability to astonish myself.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Passion, Two, Space

  Sue Monk Kidd (2006). “The Mermaid Chair”, p.17, Penguin

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• The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Media, Squinting, Depth

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• There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

  John Wyndham

  War, Ocean, Will To Survive

  John Wyndham (1951). “The Day of the Triffids”, Fawcett

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• I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Sorry, Unimportant Things, Important

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.132, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.

  John Jakes

  Jobs, Believe, Book

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• At forty-two, I had never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem--my chronic inability to astonish myself. I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they're being kind. I didn't fall. I dove.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Fall, Two, Judging

  Sue Monk Kidd (2006). “The Mermaid Chair”, p.23, Penguin

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• Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead.

  Jim Morrison

  Reality, Idols, People

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