Inscrutability Quotes

“People do not know what to make of me, and this pleases me. I don't want to be scrutable.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“You cannot find comfort in ducks.
Stoop to look into those beady brown eyes,
and they will tell you nothing.

- The Bridge, St. James's Park”
― Virginia Graham, Consider the Years

“I had no brothers or sisters, so life was not difficult for my mother and me. When I think back, I see her clearly with her thin lips resolutely closed, with something on her face like a mask, I don't know – a thick mask, as though her face were the surface of the sea. Do you understand? It possessed not a single colour but a multitude, appearing and disappearing and intermingling. We had no relatives. She and I acted as relatives to each other. It was as if she were some stranger on the road with whom circumstances had chanced to bring me... I used to have – you may be surprised – a warm feeling of being free, that there was not a human being, by father or mother, to tie me down as a tent peg to particular spot, a particular domain... I was not like other children of my age: I wasn't wasn't affected by anything, I didn't cry when hit, wasn't glad if the teacher praised me in class, didn't suffer from the things the rest did. I was like something rounded, made of rubber: you throw it in the water and it doesn't get wet, you throw it on the ground and it bounces back.”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North