Shock Quotes - Page 23

• The biggest shock of your life is when you first make a record and go to a show and then people start singing the words. Because it occurs to you that they've listened to it!

  Nigel Godrich

  People, Singing, Records

  Source: www.rollingstone.com

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• Most loverspicture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else--their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.

  Aldous Huxley

  Love, Reality, Discovery

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• I'm an old sinner. Nothing shocks me.

  Charlie Chaplin

  Sin, Sophistication, Sinner

  "Fictional character: Calvero". "Limelight", www.imdb.com. 1952.

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• The electrical matter consists of particles extremely subtile, since it can permeate common matter, even the densest metals, with such ease and freedom as not to receive any perceptible resistance.
  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.
  Electrical matter differs from common matter in this, that the parts of the latter mutually attract, those of the former mutually repel each other.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Taken, Glasses, Doubt

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• By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.

  Eric Hoffer

  Animal, Men, Odds

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• TV acting is so extremely intimate, because of the peculiar involvement of the viewer with the completion or "closing" of the TV image, that the actor must achieve a great degree of spontaneous casualness that would be irrelevant in movie and lost on the stage. For the audience participates in the inner life of the TV actor as fully as in the outer life of the movie star. Technically, TV tends to be a close-up medium. The close-up that in the movie is used for shock is, on TV, a quite casual thing.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Stars, Acting, Actors

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

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• We tend not to choose the unknown, which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. An yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Happiness, Disappointment, Littles

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2002). “Wisdom from Gift from the Sea”, p.76, Peter Pauper Press, Inc.

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• The pointless ferocities of intellectual life shock businessmen, who kill only to eat.

  Mason Cooley

  Intellectual, Businessman, Ferocity

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• What occasions the greater part of the world's quarrels? Simply this: Two minds meet and do not understand each other in time enough to prevent any shock of surprise at the conduct of either party.

  John Keats

  Party, Two, Mind

  John Keats (1914*). “The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats”, p.273, Рипол Классик

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• And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Discovery, Piano

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• But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.

  Anna Quindlen

  Ignorance, Perception, Age

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• Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression. The argument goes that, if people could see just how many of us there are, some in very important places, the negative stereotype would vanish overnight. ...It is far more realistic to suppose that, if the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.

  Jane Rule

  Gay, People, Political

  Jane Rule (2013). “Outlander: Short Stories and Essays”, p.247, Open Road Media

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• Hereditary monarchy offers numerous advantages for America. It is the only form of government able to unify a heterogeneous people. Thanks to centuries of dynastic marriage, the family tree of every royal house is an ethnic grab bag with something for everybody. We need this badly; America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home. We can't go on much longer depending upon disasters like Pearl Harbor and the Iranian hostage-taking to "bring us together.

  Florence King

  Country, Home, Government

  Florence King (1990). “Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye”, p.125, Macmillan

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• When you go apartment-hunting in the South, you encounter little old ladies who ask you if you use strong drink. In New York you encounter paranoids who wonder if you will commit suicide--not that they care; what they worry about is blood on their fresh paint, a dubious smell in the hallway, or a hole in the awning as you pass through on your way to the sidewalk. The Southerner who moves to any part of the country has problems, but the culture shock that attacks the Southerner who moves North is almost indescribable.

  Florence King

  Suicide, Country, Strong

  Florence King (1976). “Southern ladies and gentlemen”

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• Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.

  J. B. Priestley

  Writing, Hair, Play

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• a fortress against ideas and against the
  Shuddering insidious shock of the theory-vendors
  The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy
  Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.

  Louis MacNeice

  Men, Ideas, Crumbling

  Louis MacNeice (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.44, Faber & Faber

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• When I came to explain to them the 'Nelson Touch', it was like an electric shock. Some shed tears, all approved - 'It was new - it was singular - it was simple!'.

  Horatio Nelson

  Simple, Electric Shock, Tears

  Horatio Nelson (2012). “The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol II. With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters”, p.69, tredition

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• A boy's mind is not so easily sullied as a girl's.... Undesirable knowledge is not an equal shock to the moral nature.

  Elizabeth Missing Sewell

  Girl, Knowledge, Boys

  Elizabeth Missing Sewell (1866). “Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation, and Applied to Female Education in the Upper Classes”, p.397

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• I'm going to give the people what they want. Sensation, horror, shock. Send them out in the streets to tell their friends how wonderful it is to be scared to death.

  Crane Wilbur

  People, Giving, Want

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• If you purposefully look to shock people, it isn't funny. That's what 50 million dollar Hollywood comedies do; try to be shocking and dirty. They aren't really. It isn't enough to shock. It's easy to shock. Real surprise is what I'm after. Those early movies, we had drugs, which you weren't supposed to show. You weren't supposed to shoot up. We would make fun of hippies. I think that we were punk before there was punk.

  John Waters

  Fun, Real, Hippie

  "John Waters Takes It All". Interview with Colleen Kelsey, www.interviewmagazine.com. August 28, 2014.

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• Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker and fable-gatherer seduced by the uncanny and the unearthly. In Lilith's Cave, he once again reaches into a magical cornucopia of folklore and fantasy and spreads before us, in enchanting language, the marvels and shocks of dybbuks, ghosts, demons, spirits, and wizards.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Christian, Brother, Caves

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• Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awareness, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers-settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing-to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence.

  Bill Ayers

  Father, War, Destiny

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• The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's duties.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Reading, Gardening, Genius

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.636, Modern Library

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• My first big acting performance was in the Marilyn Monroe biography piece, and it required frontal nudity. I talked to Mira Sorvino, my co-star, about how nervous I was because I didn't know how my mom would react. She said, 'Can I be completely honest with you? I've seen your mom in interviews, and she seems pretty screwed up. I don't think there's much you could do to shock a broad like that.' And from that moment on it was big nipples to the wind!

  Ashley Judd

  Mom, Stars, Thinking

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• He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Men, Years, People

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