Disgust Quotes

“I wanted to explain myself to myself in an understandable way. I gave shape to my fears and made excuses. I varied my velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling.
The enormity of my desire disgusts me.”
― Richard Siken, War of the Foxes

“…in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him—in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for—that other people should love him—became at the moment of his achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“The — the prophecy . . . the prediction . . . Trelawney . . .”
“Ah, yes. How much did you relay to Lord Voldemort?”
“Everything — everything I heard! That is why — it is for that reason — he thinks it means Lily Evans!”
“The prophecy did not refer to a woman. It spoke of a boy born at the end of July —”
“You know what I mean! He thinks it means her son, he is going to hunt her down — kill them all —”
“If she means so much to you, surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?”
“I have — I have asked him —”
“You disgust me.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.”
― Benjamin J. Carey, Barefoot in November

“Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust”
― Samuel Beckett

“A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people's lives a burden with her presence.”
― Stefan Zweig , Beware of Pity

“Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."

I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.

Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it”
― Marianne Moore, Complete Poems

“No, no, don't let my vulnerable heart share in this sacrifice to lust! Let him disgust me before pleasing me! Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can break before becoming the echoes of its vibration.”
― Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus: A Materialist Novel

“Oh, I know that she's disgusted,
cause she's feeling so abused.
She gets tired of the lust,
but it's so hard to refuse.”
― Elvis Costello

“Hypercritical, Shaming Parents
Hypercritical and shaming parents send the same message to their children as perfectionistic parents do - that they are never good enough. Parents often deliberately shame their children into minding them without realizing the disruptive impact shame can have on a child's sense of self. Statements such as "You should be ashamed of yourself" or "Shame on you" are obvious examples. Yet these types of overtly shaming statements are actually easier for the child to defend against than are more subtle forms of shaming, such as contempt, humiliation, and public shaming.
There are many ways that parents shame their children. These include belittling, blaming, contempt, humiliation, and disabling expectations.
-BELITTLING. Comments such as "You're too old to want to be held" or "You're just a cry-baby" are horribly humiliating to a child. When a parent makes a negative comparison between his or her child and another, such as "Why can't you act like Jenny? See how she sits quietly while her mother is talking," it is not only humiliating but teaches a child to always compare himself or herself with peers and find himself or herself deficient by comparison.
-BLAMING. When a child makes a mistake, such as breaking a vase while rough-housing, he or she needs to take responsibility. But many parents go way beyond teaching a lesson by blaming and berating the child: "You stupid idiot! Do you think money grows on trees? I don't have money to buy new vases!" The only thing this accomplishes is shaming the child to such an extent that he or she cannot find a way to walk away from the situation with his or her head held high.
-CONTEMPT. Expressions of disgust or contempt communicate absolute rejection. The look of contempt (often a sneer or a raised upper lip), especially from someone who is significant to a child, can make him or her feel disgusting or offensive. When I was a child, my mother had an extremely negative attitude toward me. Much of the time she either looked at me with the kind of expectant expression that said, "What are you up to now?" or with a look of disapproval or disgust over what I had already done. These looks were extremely shaming to me, causing me to feel that there was something terribly wrong with me.
-HUMILIATION. There are many ways a parent can humiliate a child, such as making him or her wear clothes that have become dirty. But as Gershen Kaufman stated in his book Shame: The Power of Caring, "There is no more humiliating experience than to have another person who is clearly the stronger and more powerful take advantage of that power and give us a beating." I can personally attest to this. In addition to shaming me with her contemptuous looks, my mother often punished me by hitting me with the branch of a tree, and she often did this outside, in front of the neighbors. The humiliation I felt was like a deep wound to my soul.
-DISABLING EXPECTATIONS. Parents who have an inordinate need to have their child excel at a particular activity or skill are likely to behave in ways that pressure the child to do more and more. According to Kaufman, when a child becomes aware of the real possibility of failing to meet parental expectations, he or she often experiences a binding self-consciousness. This self-consciousness - the painful watching of oneself - is very disabling. When something is expected of us in this way, attaining the goal is made harder, if not impossible.
Yet another way that parents induce shame in their children is by communicating to them that they are a disappointment to them. Such messages as "I can't believe you could do such a thing" or "I am deeply disappointed in you" accompanied by a disapproving tone of voice and facial expression can crush a child's spirit.”
― Beverly Engel, The Nice Girl Syndrome: Stop Being Manipulated and Abused -- And Start Standing Up for Yourself

“I had forgotten. Disgust shadows desire.
Another life is never safely envied.”
― Robert Wells

“Sadness is the ambrosia of all art.”
― Frances Fong

“Every word that is spoken and sung here (the Cabaret Voltaire) represents at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”
― Hugo Ball

“I can hardly forbear hurling things at him.”
― William Shakespeare

“The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Sex. You can't lie to yourself sexually. If you don't want it, it's the most disgusting thing in the world.”
― Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

“The sexual act of coitus and the body parts employed for it are so repulsive that, if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornment of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.”
― Walter Isaacson

“Mr. Herriton, don’t – please, Mr. Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist.”
Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.”
― E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“All those big words produce disgust today.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“What is awful is at once appealing and repulsive, it fascinates and generates disgust, and those who succumb to the awful can only escape it at the price of ennui, of boredom.”
― Hubertus Kohle, Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst

“The spectacle takes us away from our routines. For at least a time, we feel part of something big, colorful, exciting. It is perhaps understandable that civilians are often more enthusiastic during wartime than soldiers who have experienced battle. The soldiers know that war is often boring and dirty as well as terrifying and colorful. Even so, after some years, an old soldier like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could brush aside his earlier description of the pain, boredom, and death of war and declare that “its message was divine.” The stench disappears, but the spectacle remains in memory’s eye.”
― Nel Noddings, Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War

“When unrequited love dies it gets replaced with complete and utter contempt.”
― Shannon L. Alder, The Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Bible

“Disgust plays a role in sexuality analogous to its role in food selection by guiding people to the narrow class of culturally acceptable sexual partners and sexual acts. Once again, disgust turns off desire and motivates concerns about purification, separation, and cleansing. Disgust also gives us a queasy feeling when we see people with skin lesions, deformities, amputations, extreme obesity or thinness, and other violations of the culturally ideal outer envelope of the human body. It is the exterior that matters: Cancer in the lungs or a missing kidney is not disgusting; a tumor on the face or a missing finger is.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“Rozin also speculates that new elicitors can be acquired more circuitously with the help of language, as when one is swayed by passionate testimony or convinced by rational argumentation of the immorality or disgustingness of a practice such as eating meat or smoking (Rozin 1997). Fessler et al. (2003) lend some indirect empirical support to this speculation when they conclude, based on a Web-based self-report survey of nearly one thousand adults, that “moral vegetarians’ disgust reactions to meat are caused by, rather than the cause of, their moral beliefs.” In other words, in many cases of moral vegetarianism, something other than an antecedent revulsion to meat—perhaps propositional reasoning or effective rhetoric—is instrumental in becoming disgusted by meat.”
― Daniel Kelly, Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust

“...disgust in our species is deeply connected to morality: violations of moral norms and taboos can elicit disgust and feelings of uncleanliness and contamination.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Oh to have the confidence of a young white man. "Want a tip?"
"From you, baby? I want more than the tip!"
Ugh, gross. When did high schoolers become so terrible? I make a mental note to let Mrs. Peters know that Jeremy sucks, though I’m sure that given his less-than-subtle approach to life, she has an idea.
"Don’t call women old," I tell him. "In fact, don’t call women anything. I think you’d benefit from probably not talking to women in general for 5-7 years.”
― B.K. Borison, Lovelight Farms