An Unnatural Arrangement Quotes

I have the honour to be quite of your Lordship's opinion," said Mr. Lovel, looking maliciously at Mrs. Selwyn, "for I have an insuperable aversion to strength, either of body or mind, in a female."
"Faith, and so have I," said Mr. Coverley; "for egad I'd as soon see a woman chop wood, as hear her chop logic."
"So would every man in his senses," said Lord Merton; "for a woman wants nothing to recommend her but beauty and good nature; in every thing else she is either impertinent or unnatural. For my part, deuce take me if ever I wish to hear a word of sense from a woman as long as I live!"
"It has always been agreed," said Mrs. Selwyn, looking round her with the utmost contempt, "that no man ought to be connected with a woman whose understanding is superior to his own. Now I very much fear, that to accommodate all this good company, according to such a rule, would be utterly impracticable, unless we should chuse subjects from Swift's hospital of idiots. ~ Fanny Burney

Marsh looked at me sideways, causing a brief stir of familiarity. "You liked the library?"
"It was all I could do to keep her from bolting herself inside," Alistair told him.
With mock indignation, I protested, "I never even touched a book. I walked through and walked out."
"Her eyes were filled with an unnatural light," Alister confided in his cousin. "I feared for my safety. ~ Laurie R. King

Standing alone at the railing is Four. Though he's not an initiate anymore, most of the Dauntless use this day to come together with their families. Either his family doesn't like to come together, or he wasn't originally a Dauntless. Which faction could he have come from? "There's one of my instructors." I lean closer to say. "He's kind of intimidating." "He's handsome," she says. I find myself nodding without thinking. She laughs and lifts her arm from my shoulders. I want to steer her away from him, but just as I'm about to suggest that we go somewhere else, he looks over his shoulder. His eyes widen at the sight of my mother. She offers him her hand. "Hello. My name is Natalie," she says. "I'm Beatrice's mother." I have never seen my mother shake hands with someone. Four eases his hand into hers, looking stiff, and shakes it twice. The gesture looks unnatural for both of them. No, Four was not originally Dauntless if he doesn't shake hands easily. ~ Veronica Roth

If any sensual weakness arise, we are to yield all our sound forces to the overthrowing of so unnatural a rebellion; wherein how can we want courage, since we are to deal against so feeble an adversary, that in itself is nothing but weakness? Nay, we are to resolve that if reason direct it, we must do it, and if we must do it, we will do it; for to say "I cannot" is childish, and "I will not" is womanish. ~ Philip Sidney

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same "wily and suspicious" marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality into the mix. ~ Stacy Schiff

On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. - It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. - It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. - It's a blasted heath. - It's a Hyperb ~ Herman Melville

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I'll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists. Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature. Which is true, but that's not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.'

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don't do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can't just watch. They can't just appreciate. They can't just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist's job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific."

- Ian Malcolm ~ Michael Crichton

The institution of marriage should be re-examined because of its overwhelming claustrophobia. The odds are stacked against spontaneity and effervescence. It's an institution that was brought about for the sake of family and children, but biologically, it's very unnatural. It's masochism and torture the way it's been organized. ~ Peter Beard

Oh, what a harmony of abandonment and impulse, of unnatural and yet graceful postures, in that mystical language of limbs miraculously freed from the weight of corporeal matter, marked quantity infused with new substantial form, as if the holy band were struck by an impetuous wind, breath of life, frenzy of delight, rejoicing song of praise miraculously transformed, from the sound that it was, into image. ~ Umberto Eco

That is the tragedy of losing an older brother. He stays still. You keep on and one day become the older one. It's unnatural, that reversal. It's the thing that keeps the family from ever being whole again. ~ Tiffany McDaniel

The changes are on a more subtle level, a change of consciousness which most humans cannot perceive. I do not believe it to be an unnatural change; change is part of reality. ~ Charles Lominec

He felt as if he were under an intolerable physical strain, as if his body were likely at any moment to fly to pieces. Other strange physical symptoms came to trouble him. An unpleasant odour lingered in his nostrils, as if he could literally smell the sulphur of the pit; and he had from time to time the curious illusion that his flesh was turning black. He had to look continually at his hands to be sure that it was not so. Nightmares troubled him, waking and sleeping - and one bad dream conjured up another, running from box to box to release its fellows. The world around him seemed to have become equally mad and hateful. The newspapers were full of stories of grotesque violence and unnatural crimes. He knew neither how to go on nor what to do to bring these horrors to an end. ~ Iris Murdoch

No, she couldn't blame this one on him. This one was entirely hers. She'd sent him running away.
Everyone knew it, too, which was nowhere more apparent than in the carriage once they were all settled in and headed off.
Lisette was unusually silent. The duke's wooden expression said that he wished he could be anywhere else but here. And Tristan was studying her with a cold gaze.
He did that for a mile or so before he spoke. "You're a cruel woman, Jane Vernon."
"Tristan!" Lisette chided. "Don't be rude."
"I'll be as rude as I please to her," he told his sister, with a jerk of his head toward Jane. "That man is mad for her, and she just keeps toying with him."
Guilt swamped Jane. And she'd thought that spending half a day trapped with Dom would be bad? She must have been dreaming.
"It's none of our concern," Lisette murmured.
"The hell it isn't." Tristan stared hard at Jane. "Is this about Nancy? About the fact that if she has a child, Dom will lose the title and the estate?"
"No, of course not!" How dared he!
"Tristan, please--" Lisette began.
"That's why you jilted him years ago, isn't it?" Tristan persisted. "Because he no longer had any money, and you'd lose your fortune if you married him?"
"I did not jilt him!" Jane shouted.
An unnatural silence fell in the carriage, and she cursed her quick tongue. But really, this was all Dom's fault for never telling his family the truth. She was tired of being made to l ~ Sabrina Jeffries

On August 10, 1984, my plane landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. There were no skyscrapers here. The blue domes of the mosques and the faded mountains were the only things rising above the adobe duvals (the houses). The mosques came alive in the evening with multivoiced wailing: the mullahs were calling the faithful to evening prayer. It was such an unusual spectacle that, in the beginning, I used to leave the barracks to listen – the same way that, in Russia, on spring nights, people go outside to listen to the nightingales sing. For me, a nineteen-year-old boy who had lived his whole life in Leningrad, everything about Kabul was exotic: enormous skies – uncommonly starry – occasionally punctured by the blazing lines of tracers. And spread out before you, the mysterious Asian capital where strange people were bustling about like ants on an anthill: bearded men, faces darkend by the sun, in solid-colored wide cotton trousers and long shirts. Their modern jackets, worn over those outfits, looked completely unnatural. And women, hidden under plain dull garments that covered them from head to toe: only their hands visible, holding bulging shopping bags, and their feet, in worn-out shoes or sneakers, sticking out from under the hems.

And somewhere between this odd city and the deep black southern sky, the wailing, beautifully incomprehensible songs of the mullahs. The sounds didn't contradict each other, but rather, in a polyphonic echo, melted away among the ~ Vladislav Tamarov

Moreover, probably owing to excessive self-consciousness, perhaps as the result of the generally unfortunate cast of my personality, there existed between my thoughts and feelings, and the expression of those feelings and thoughts, a sort of inexplicable, irrational, and utterly insuperable barrier; and whenever I made up my mind to overcome this obstacle by force, to break down this barrier, my gestures, the expression of my face, my whole being, took on an appearance of painful constraint. I not only seemed, I positively became unnatural and affected. I was conscious of this myself, and hastened to shrink back into myself. Then a terrible commotion was set up within me. I analysed myself to the last thread, compared myself with others, recalled the slightest glances, smiles, words of the people to whom I had tried to open myself out, put the worst construction on everything, laughed vindictively at my own pretensions to 'be like every one else,' - and suddenly, in the midst of my laughter, collapsed utterly into gloom, sank into absurd dejection, and then began again as before - went round and round, in fact, like a squirrel on its wheel. Whole days were spent in this harassing, fruitless exercise. ~ Ivan Turgenev

The natural human´s an animal without a logic. Your projection of logic onto all affairs is unnatural. ~ Frank Herbert

We spent an enormous amount of time as hominids and as primates living as hunter-gatherers. That is the natural way for us to live, and we're suddenly living in this profoundly unnatural way, and we're still in the process of adapting to it and working out how to live with it. ~ Spencer Wells

Nothing is truly unnatural, because everything that exists, including human intelligence, is a product of nature. If human intelligence can devise ways for the genes from two men to result in a child, their doing so is an entirely natural event. ~ A.C. Grayling

Therefore, when facing any problem in marriage, the first thing you look for at the base of it is, in some measure, self-centeredness and an unwillingness to serve or minister to the other. The word "submit" that Paul uses has its origin in the military, and in Greek it denoted a soldier submitting to an officer. Why? Because when you join the military you lose control over your schedule, over when you can take a holiday, over when you're going to eat, and even over what you eat. To be part of a whole, to become part of a greater unity, you have to surrender your independence. You must give up the right to make decisions unilaterally. Paul says that this ability to deny your own rights, to serve and put the good of the whole over your own, is not instinctive; indeed, it's unnatural, but it is the very foundation of marriage. ~ Timothy Keller

To be effective, morality has to be reasoned (or worked out). To want ("vouloir", Fr.) to repress evil only by coercion, and to obtain morality by a sort of training with the help of constraint, without motivating it from within, is to make it an unnatural result, devoided of lastind value. ~ African Spir

I'd been stuck in one gender my whole life. It never bothered me. Now I wondered how that would feel for Alex. The only analogy I could come up with wasn't a very good one. My second grade teacher, Miss Mengler (aka Miss Mangler), had forced me to write with my right hand even though I was left-handed. She'd actually taped my left hand to the desk. My mom had exploded when she found out, but I still remembered the panicky feeling of being restrained, forced to write in such an unnatural way because Miss Mengler had insisted, 'This is the normal way, Magnus. Stop complaining. You'll get used to it. ~ Rick Riordan

Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian. ~ Arthur Koestler

All I'm saying is that there is a generation gap, and I think it revolves around this public/private thing. Our generation -- we subscribe to the old liberal doctrine of the inviolate self. I'ts the great tradition of realistic fiction, it's what novels are all about. the private life in the foreground, history a distant rumble of gunfire, somewhere offstage. In Jane Austen not even a rumble. Well, the novel is dying, and us with it. No wonder I could never get anything out of my novel-writing class at Euphoric State. It's an unnatural medium for their experience. Those kids...are living a film, not a novel. ~ David Lodge

She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who'd been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim. ~ Dennis Lehane

I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad. When you are nice to others, they are nice to you. When you give, you receive. ~ Alice Herz-Sommer

Now the good gods forbid That our renowned Rome, whose gratitude Towards her deserved children is enrolled In Jove's own book, like an unnatural dam Should now eat up her own! ~ William Shakespeare

But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man- that it is an unnatural state- will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end ~ Aldous Huxley

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. ~ Friedrich Engels

You try to steer a course in American society that's not self-destructive. But America is a country that inflicts injury. It does not like to see anything that comes in response, and accuses one of anger as if it were an unnatural response. ~ Randall Robinson

Sometimes it amazed him. Lanky Thom with his white hair and mustaches, who had been a Queen's lover once, and more willingly than himself, not to mention more than a lover, if you believed half he said. Square-jawed Harnan with that tattoo on his cheek and more elsewhere, who had been a soldier all his life. Juilin with his bamboo staff and his sword-breaker on his hip, who thought himself as good as any lord even if the idea of carrying a sword himself still made him uneasy, and fat Vanin, who made Juilin look a bootlicker by comparison. Skinny Fergin, and Gorderan, nearly as wide in the shoulders as Perrin, and Metwyn, whose pale Cairhienin face still looked like a boy's despite being years older than Mat. Some of them followed Mat Cauthon because they thought he was lucky, because his luck might keep them alive when the swords were out, and some for reasons he was not really sure of, but they followed. Not even Thom had ever more than protested an order of his. Maybe Renaile had been more than luck. Maybe his being ta'veren did more than dump him in the-middle of trouble. Suddenly he felt... responsible... for these men. It was an uncomfortable feeling. Mat Cauthon and responsibility did not go together. It was unnatural. ~ Robert Jordan

I was familiar with the realms of unnatural, for I myself was an unnatural. Not a monster in appearance; I looked like other young women, though perhaps not as primped and manicured. But I wasn't the same as other girls. My friends believed I was sick or gifted. Either way, I was unfortunate. Something entirely new upon the earth. ~ Adam McOmber

Americans abroad have long been accused of such blinging arrogance and display. I find the charge generally unfair. Arrogance is incorrectly ascribed to what is really the cultural clumsiness of an insular (if continental) people less exposed to foreign ways and languages than most other people on Earth.
True, America as a nation is not very good at humility. But it would be completely unnatural for the dominant military, cultural and technological power on the plant to adopt the demeanor or, say, Liechtenstein. The ensuing criticism is particularly grating when it comes from the likes of the French, British, Spanish, Dutch (there are many others) who just yesterday claimed dominion over every land and people their Captain Cooks ever stumbled upon. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Marla tells me how in the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old. Marla lies down on her bed and undoes the tie on her bathrobe, and says our culture has made death something wrong. Old animals should be an unnatural exception. Freaks. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I mean, it's true, nobody talks about them, but when you bring it up, the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work there, and you built it but you don't own it, that's a highly unnatural notion. You don't have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity. ~ Noam Chomsky

Children lose their innocence piece by piece. The layers are carved away until our hearts have been exposed and polished into an unnatural gloss. We spend the rest of our lives trying to remember why we ever loved so passionately and how we dreamed so simply, before life chiseled us down to the core. ~ Deborah Smith

As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence. ~ Rene Dubos

You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Sometimes you dream strange dreams, impossible and unnatural; you wake up and remember them clearly, and are surprised at a strange fact: you remember first of all that reason did not abandon you during the whole course of your dream; you even remember that you acted extremely cleverly and logically for that whole long, long time when you were surrounded by murderers, when they were being clever with you, concealed their intentions, treated you in a friendly way, though they already had their weapons ready and were only waiting for some sort of sign; you remember how cleverly you finally deceived them, hid from them; then you realize that they know your whole deception by heart and merely do not show you that they know where you are hiding; but you are clever and deceive them again - all that you remember clearly. But why at the same time could your reason be reconciled with such obvious absurdities and impossibilities, with which, among other things, your dream was filled? Before your eyes, one of your murderers turned into a woman, and from a woman into a clever, nasty little dwarf - and all that you allowed at once, as an accomplished fact, almost without the least perplexity, and precisely at the moment when, on the other hand, your reason was strained to the utmost, displaying extraordinary force, cleverness, keenness, logic? Why, also, on awakening from your dream and entering fully into reality, do you feel almost every time, and occasionally with an extraordinary forc ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Gabe watched, holding his breath as the figure slowly turned. The body moved in an almost unnatural way as it shifted and crawled slowly on all fours across the floor. When the candlelight at last fell on the figure, Gabe could make out the auburn hair of his beloved Sophie. Her hair was matted, greasy, and hung in her face.
Gabe saw her shoulders were hollow looking and her skin was almost glowing white. Gabe caught sight of Sophie's fingers, her knuckles were bloody, and her nails cracked and peeling. Instinctively, Gabe fell to his knees and crawled to Sophie. Without even giving it a thought, he grabbed her hands and pulled them closer to the light. ~ Wendy Owens

To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. ~ Peter Watts

A girl and a boy, sitting lazily cross-legged under a pale green willow, picking at the grass. She is lying with her head in his lap, long red hair fanned against his knee. Her skin is not my unnatural red but like honeyed cream. She grins up at him, his eyes the color of an evergreen forest, of dragonfly wings, his corn-gold, too-long hair falling over his forehead. And she laughs. When she does her back, her throat arches slightly, and he blushes. He smells of wheat fields and fallen autumn apples soft against the earth, and it is a smell she knows like her own. Under the filmy reed-curtain of the old willow tree, they hold hands and talk quietly, shoes discarded like peach pits. The sun is low in the sky, warm and orange-gold on their young faces, their strong white smiles and freshly washed hair. The light spills onto their shoulders like water from a well. There are sharp-smelling rosemary branches braided into her hair, with their little blue blossoms, and the oil is on their brown fingers. The boy whispers something in the girl's ear, and she closes her eyes, lashes smoking cheekbones like bundles of sage. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

He was a horse of goodly countenance, rather expressive of vigilance than fire; though an unnatural appearance of fierceness was thrown into it by the loss of his ears, which had been cropped pretty close to his head. ~ Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

Playing a show before thousands of people is a highly unnatural state and when I get on the mat to do an hour of yoga before the show, I come out physically relaxed. ~ Adam Levine

Exercise is an unnatural act. ~ Peter De Vries

Auditioning is such an unnatural thing. You're in a tiny little room with, like, seven people cramped together, acting to a casting director; just, none of it makes any sense. ~ Jane Levy