Unpleasantness Quotes

“At best, I consider flying an unavoidable necessity, a time to resurrect forgotten prayers and contemplate the end of all joy in a twisted howling heap of machinery; at worst, I rank it right up there with psychotic episodes and torture at the hands of malevolent strangers.”
― T.C. Boyle, If the River Was Whiskey

“Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend mine reflecting on it.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“[I]t was as if I had been strolling absentmindedly and banged into a door.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“LADY BRACKNELL

This noise is extremely unpleasant. It sounds as if he was having an argument. I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.”
― Oscar Wilde

“(Nor was Shelley’s dad of any interest to Mira as an adversary. He was a mortgage broker with an irritable disposition who was always, in the family parlance, ‘in a rage’--an infirmity openly encouraged, as Mira pointed out, by his wife, who indeed devoted an unusual proportion of her daily conversation to reminding her husband of the many kinds of people in the world whom he disliked. That this list, which included vegans, slow walkers, loudmouths, ostentatious breast-feeders, people of indeterminate gender, buskers, bad drivers, and the unwashed, covered in one way or another the entire membership of Birnam Wood, Mira did not appear to find insulting. She saw Shelley’s father as a creature of his wife’s devising, not an autonomous adult, but a hapless pawn designed by Mrs Noakes for the solitary purpose of throwing her own, more vivid personality into greater relief--a plainly narcissistic exercise of which she, Mira, could not remotely see the appeal.)”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“Reading the newspaper is always unpleasant from an aesthetic point of view, and often from a moral point of view as well, even for those who don’t worry much about morality.

Reading about the effects of wars and revolutions--there’s always one or the other in the news--doesn’t make us feel horror but tedium.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“With the utmost love as our motivation, we sometimes think we are doing what is best for our children by protecting them from unpleasantness or cruelty. All we are really doing is shielding ourselves from owning up to misfortune or bad judgment.”
― Debi Tolbert Duggar, Riding Soul-O

“When a story is unpleasant, it is hard to focus on details that allow you to put yourself in the place of the subject, because the pain of distortion starts to feel familiar. Paying attention often requires some sort of empathy for the subject, or at the very least, for the speaker. But empathy, these days, is hard to come by. Maybe this is because everyone is having such a hard time being understood themselves. Or because empathy requires us to dig way down into the murk, deeper than our own feelings go, to a place where the boundaries between our experience and everyone else's no longer exist.”
― Wendy S. Walters, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

“With me he [Lamin] would wait till I finished each sentence, and leave long gaps of silence before he replied, silences I came to think of as conversational graveyards, where anything awkward or unpleasant I might have presented to him was sent to be buried.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“You had to take the direct approach, never the indirect approach, because colored people invariably avoided unpleasantness, they would lie, they would laugh, but they never faced right up to a situation, head on.”
― Ann Petry, The Narrows