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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Crazy isn't the best word; perhaps I just can't thing of the proper one. But there were these people who had lapsed into a complete stupor without benefit of beer, wine, or pills. They stared at you with blank and shiny doorknob eyes.”
― Stephen King, The Mist

“Crazy isn't the best word; perhaps I just can't think of the proper one. But there were these people who had lapsed into a complete stupor without benefit of beer, wine, or pills. They stared at you with blank and shiny doorknob eyes.”
― Stephen King, The Mist

“He had suspected something, yes. But suspecting was not like knowing; he knew that now, if nothing else. He could write an essay on the difference between suspecting and knowing. What made it doubly cruel was the fact that he had really begun to believe that the suspicions were groundless. And even if they weren’t, what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. Wasn’t that right? If a man is crossing a darkened room with a deep, open hole in the middle of it, and if he passes within inches of it, he doesn’t need to know he almost fell in. There is no need for fear. Not if the lights are off.”
― Stephen King, Cujo

“A state of shock is what happens to us- individually or as a society- when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have adequate explanation. At its essence, a shock is the gap that opens up between event and existing narratives to explain that event, Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums- which is why those opportunistic players, the people I have termed "disaster capitalists," have been able to rush into the gap with their preexisting wish lists and simplistic stories of good and evil.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

“At such tense moments it often happens, as it happened to me then, that some insignificant object will become forever linked to our extremity. We must recall the exact shape of a leaf whose shadow fell across the blind of a sickroom; the scroll on the handle of a spoon out fingers gripped in the numbness of despair, the lace that edged the handkerchief we pressed to our lips to hide their trembling.”
― Rachel Field, And Now Tomorrow

“His words crack my mind with the forced of an anvil. They shiver down my spine and make my knees tremble.
I misheard that. I must have. Or he's wrong. It doesn't make sense, after all, what he's saying. It's absurd.
But even as my dizzy thoughts churn, every stubborn piece of bravery and thin thread of hope turns frail.”
― Rebecca Quinn, Entangled

“He’s still in shock, but sooner or later, his trauma will catch up to him, and the anger will surface. Better we allow him to purge it in a way that brings him closure, than let it simmer beneath the surface and poison him.”
― Marie Mistry, Across an Endless Sea

“Turns out
I'm still alive.
Not dead
Just suffering from severe shock.
And maybe
Which feels
LOVE.
just as terrifying and horrifying and exciting
as every worst-case scenario I ever studied.
Except this
I am totally, utterly unprepared for.
And maybe that’s what makes it so great.”
― Rebecca Caprara, Worst-Case Collin

“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