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

“After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity. . . But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, and it isn't the game that is over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“There is a shock that comes so quickly and strikes so deep that the blow is internalized even before then skin feels it. The strike must first reach bone marrow, then ascend slowly to the brain where the slowpoke intellect records the deed.”
― Maya Angelou, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas

“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

“So this was shock. It seemed terribly inconvenient that the brain's reaction to being placed in mortal peril as to become much stupider.”
― Caitlin Rozakis, Dreadful

“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

“As long as I focus on what I can accomplish today,
what I can create,
who I can care for and love,
how I can grow, how I can participate
in pushing back,
I'm good.
I look at the whole and want to run screaming into the hills.

But that's privilege.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Politics is scripted for maximum shock that will lead to gossip and speculation. We are living in a sketch comedy zone. Everything is designed to be memed.”
― Jarod Kintz, Me and memes and memories

“I was just a girl who got a little confused between dreams and reality. I think we all do that. We all find one way or the other to divert ourselves from the deepest hurt.”
― Snehil Niharika, That’ll Be Our Song

“Sometimes I imagine aliens from a distant
planet swinging by Earth
taking one glance at our art
and zooming away as they whisper
What the fuck”
― Olivia A. Cole

“Shocks and Joys"
The biggest shocks in life were:
That freedom is a lie
Choosing chains carefully is more important
than chasing illusions…
That family and relatives are but a hit or miss biological coincidence…
That life isn’t short as they claim
for those who understand the game…
That there is no friend in need,
but indeed, need is the only constant friend…
The biggest joys in life were:
The smell of a freshly baked loaf of bread
A sip of water
The depth of a word
The taste of a fresh fig
The silence and tunes of nature
The unexpected scent of a rose that tickles the nose
after having fallen in the abyss of despair…

[Original poem published in Arabic on March 9, 2023 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“I wanted to turn on the table saw and rip a plank, but I had to drive to the airport. I had to go see what Lorraine had meant when she said that my sister was dead. I had to meet Bill at Mother’s and figure out why Lisa wasn’t there. I’d get on the plane knowing virtually nothing. If the passenger beside me were to ask the purpose of my trip, I’d have to tell him I didn’t know. Perhaps I would say, “Lorraine said they shot my sister” and then the person beside me would know as much as I.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“It's the shock of the thing, is what I'm saying, and my new and somewhat untested theory is that when something is shocking it also seems unfair even when it isn't. A shock disrupts the normal flow of things and what is normal usually feels the same as what is fair and I guess what philosophy and history and all sorts aim to do is to prize these two things apart, what is normal from what is fair, but only ever after the fact. Only, actually, when it’s too late for the people involved.”
― Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds