Uncanny Quotes

• In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

  Isaac Asimov

  Life, Games, Chess Game

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• Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.

  Peace Pilgrim

  Birthday, Peace, Age

  Peace Pilgrim (1992). “Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words”, p.19, Friends of Peace PIlgrim

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• Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

  John Banville

  Sleep, Dresses, Rehearsal

  John Banville (2012). “Ancient Light”, p.237, Vintage

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• The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, “always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.

  Phil Cousineau

  Spiritual, Hero, Journey

  Joseph Campbell, Phil Cousineau, Stuart L. Brown (1990). “The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work”, p.19, New World Library

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• The camera has an uncanny ability to capture the world as it is, to seize events as they happen, and also to conjure visions of the future. But by the time the image reaches the eyes of the viewer, it belongs to the past, taking on the status of something retrieved.

  A. O. Scott

  Eye, Past, Visions Of The Future

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• A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

  Max Beerbohm

  Cities, Quiet, Contradiction

  Sir Max Beerbohm (1958). “Selected essays”

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• Factual information alone isn't sufficient to guide you through life's labyrinthine tests. You need and deserve regular deliveries of uncanny revelation. One of your inalienable rights as a human being should therefore be to receive a mysteriously useful omen every day of your life.

  Rob Brezsny

  Rights, Needs, Tests

  Rob Brezsny (2005). “Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings”, p.23, Frog Books

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• There are people who are uncanny, who are finished products at a young age. I wasn't, thank God.

  Itzhak Perlman

  People, Thank God, Age

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• We know only that our entire existence is forced into new paths and disrupted, that new circumstances, new joys and new sorrows await us, and that the unknown has its uncanny attractions, alluring and at the same time anguishing.

  Heinrich Heine

  Joy, Sorrow, Path

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• The generation of atmosphere, the aura of the uncanny, is one of the most important secrets of magic. It contributes to the willing suspension of disbelief, the feeling that, within the circle, or in the presence of the magical shrine, anything may happen.

  Doreen Valiente

  Circles, Feelings, Atmosphere

  Doreen Valiente (2018). “An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present”, p.372, The Crowood Press

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• He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe," Joanna Hoffman said. "It's a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval, so then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you.

  Walter Isaacson

  Crush, Knowing, People

  Walter Isaacson (2011). “Steve Jobs”, p.121, Simon and Schuster

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• Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Mean, World, May

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• An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Believe, Moving, Men

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• One of the findings that really interests me is that, although we think we ACT because of the way we FEEL, we often FEEL because of the way we ACT. So an almost uncanny way to change your feelings is to act the way you WISH you felt.

  Gretchen Rubin

  Thinking, Feelings, Wish

  "Slate Discussion: The Happiness Project". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.washingtonpost.com. January 15, 2009.

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• In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Art, Thinking, Horror Genre

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• The sacred is found boring by many who find the uncanny fascinating.

  Mason Cooley

  Religion, Sacred, Boring

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• Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.

  Sigmund Freud

  Children, Men, Play

  Sigmund Freud (2013). “Leonardo da Vinci”, p.76, Routledge

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• There is no mission, nor interest to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter. We should see at once that the high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substiutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us - not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelming uncanny fact of mere existence.

  Alan Watts

  Laughter, Believe, Miracle

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• When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: "natural" qualities and those called truly "human" are inseparably grown together. Man, in his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature and embodies its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are terrifying and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Character, Reality, Men

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.29, Penguin

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• Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It's uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind.

  Aimee Mann

  Air, Return, Wreckage

  Song: True Believer, 2008

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• Sometimes, life seems to have a higher meaning. Events unfold in uncanny sequences. Long-forgotten acquaintances turn up with news that changes lives. A stranger appears and speaks a few words of wisdom, solving a previously insoluble problem, or something in a recent dream transpires in reality. Suddenly the existence of God seems confirmed.

  Dean Koontz

  Dream, Life Changing, Reality

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• As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it . . . judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself. 'Very well,' you will say, 'Why didn’t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do.' But let me tell you it is not done ― not on an empty road at midnight.

  Loren Eiseley

  Judging, Shadow, World

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• When my expectations are exactly fulfilled, I feel that something uncanny has happened.

  Mason Cooley

  Expectations, Feels, Fulfilled

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• Children have an uncanny memory for what parents say, but don't do.

  Wes Fesler

  Children, Memories, Hypocrisy

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• It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing—it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human race is based on.

  Christa Wolf

  Race, Goes On, Unbearable

  Medea ch. 10 (1996) (translation by John Cullen)

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