Shock Quotes

“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
― Noël Coward, Blithe Spirit

“Well, good-bye for now," he said, rolling his neck as if we hadn't been talking about anything important at all. He bowed at the waist, those wings vanishing entirely, and had begun to fade into the nearest shadow when he went rigid.
His eyes locked on mine wide and wild, and his nostrils flared. Shock—pure shock flashed across his features at whatever he saw on my face, and he stumbled back a step. Actually stumbled.
"What is—" I began.
He disappeared—simply disappeared, not a shadow in sight—into the crisp air.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“Draco, do it, or stand aside so one of us -" screeched the woman, but at that precise moment the door to the ramparts burst open once more and there stood Snape, his wand clutched in his hand as his black eyes swept the scene, from Dumbledore slumped against the wall, to the four Death Eaters, including the enraged werewolf, and Malfoy.
"We've got a problem, Snape," said the lumpy Amycus, whose eyes and wand were fixed alike upon Dumbledore, "the boy doesn't seem able -"
But somebody else had spoken Snape's name, quite softly.
"Severus ..."
The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading.
Snape said nothing, but walked forwards and pushed Malfoy roughly out of the way. The three Death Eaters fell back without a word. Even the werewolf seemed cowed.
Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face.
"Severus ... please ..."
Snape raised his wand and pointed it directly at Dumbledore. "Avada Kedavra!”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it'll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.”
― Alan Moore & David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

“There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“It's a pretty big shock to realise that the only people you can identify with are psychopathic killers.”
― Dan Wells, Mr. Monster

“God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Pain can kill, all on its own: the body goes into shock and shuts down.”
― Teri Terry, Slated

“Then Frederica went towards him, holding out her hand, and he raised his eyes from Felix’s eager countenance, and smiled at her, causing Mr. Moreton to suffer a shock. It was not at all the sort of smile with which his lordship beguiled his flirts, but something warmer and more intimate. Good God! mentally ejaculated Mr. Moreton. Sits the wind in that quarter?”
― Georgette Heyer, Frederica

“Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.”
― peter kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.”
― Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker

“I hate this image of me as a prim Edwardian. I want to shock everyone.”
― Helena Bonham Carter

“Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape.”
― Christine Stockton, Sluts

“There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.”
― Frederick Barthelme, Elroy Nights

“Sometimes you take all my words away from me.”
― Amie Kaufman, These Broken Stars

“Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself-Oh, yes!-in every other way.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“If you haven't been this close to superhumans, you don't understand what it's like to fight them. Even when you've got powers yourself, the predominent impression is one of shock. The forces moving around you are out of human scale, and your nervous system doesn't know how to deal with it. It's like being in a car accident, over and over again. You never feel the pain until later.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much;nor would I experience much until I was well into middle age-the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste till qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story

“AAAAIIIE!

You're the guy with the things, and the thing that does that thing, and then you did that one thing!

Oh, and I think there's something about other things, and maybe you fix things?
-Sergeant Schlock”
― Howard Tayler, Resident Mad Scientist

“Shock is when language and emotion get overwritten by trauma's numbing code.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Terror had them all for a moment, and it ravaged them, and when it was finished, shock had its way with them, and left them cold and helpless.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Hopebreaker

“No, it wasn’t that he had killed them that bothered her—it was that he had done it so well.”
― Melissa Bashardoust, Girl, Serpent, Thorn

“-Queria te levar no baile amanhã.
Marfiza, que partia a laranja ao meio, ficou ser reação aparente. A lâmina em movimento terminava de atravessar os últimos milímetros do bagaço da laranja e continuou o corte até a primeira camada da pele e seguiu em frente, epiderme-derme-hipoderme abaixo. Atônita depois do convite, cortando-se a si e nenhum pio. Até o susto com o sangue em jorro denso. Chafariz pintando o rosto dela e o dele também. Um gritinho baixo, miado e cataploft. Ele desmaiou por entre as pernas dela esguichadas de sangue. Ela atônita pra mim, olhos maiores que a cara: morto?
Adelmino estava vivo. Tão vivo que alguns anos depois se casaria comigo. Pai dos meus quatro filhos. Pamonha ali estatelado.”
― PAULO SALVETTI, Cara Marfiza,

“Seto Kaiba [to Ishizu]: 'Duel Monsters' was invented in the mid-90s! There's no way it's 3,000 years old!”
― Kazuki Takahashi, Yu-Gi-Oh! (3-in-1 Edition), Vol. 6: Includes Vols. 16, 17 18

“Vivienne [Westwood] and Malcolm [McLaren] use clothes to shock, irritate and provoke a reaction but also to inspire change. Mohair jumpers, knitted on big needles, so loosely that you can see all the way through them, T-shirts slashed and written on by hand, seams and labels on the outside, showing the construction of the piece; these attitudes are reflected in the music we make. It’s ok not to be perfect, to show the workings of your life and your mind in your songs and your clothes. And everything you do in life is meaningful on a political level. That’s why we’re all merciless about each other’s failings and why sloppiness is derided.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Among the diners were two young Americans, Anna Strunsky and William English Walling. Having first met in the United States, they had crossed paths again in Russia, where they were each gathering material for magazine articles. The shock of seeing the student killed brought them closer. As the melodramatic Anna wrote to her brother, "Our love which has been filling our hearts from the hour of our first meeting suddenly burst into speech. It was was baptized in blood.”
― Adam Hochschild, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes

“It was beautiful and sunny outside , belying the day’s ludicrous events . I was thinking about cigarettes for the first time in ten years while shock and denial held hands and started making out .”
― Stacey E. Bryan, Day for Night

“Corruption has been as much a fixture on these contemporary frontiers as it was during the colonial gold rushes. Since the most significant privatization deals are always signed amid the tumult of an economic or political crisis, clear laws and effective regulations are never in place - the atmosphere is chaotic, the prices are flexible and so are the politicians. What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting locations from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“Like twinned with unlike is beauty's shock.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Dictation: A Quartet

“I want to live
Just as I wish

But only a shock
Can help me now

Fall is the new rise”
― Jazalyn, vViIrRuUsS: I Never Forget