Evasive Quotes

The winter is cold, is cold.
All's spent in keeping warm.
Has joy been frozen, too?
I blow upon my hands
Stiff from the biting wind.
My heart beats slow, beats slow.
What has become of joy?

If joy's gone from my heart
Then it is closed to You
Who made it, gave it life...

Elusive, evasive, peace comes
Only when it's not sought.

Help me forget the cold
That grips the grasping world... ~ Madeleine L'Engle

He had fought back with every weapon in his arsenal, being alternatively obtuse, evasive and pedantic, for it was wonderful how you could obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision. ~ J.K. Rowling

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children? ~ Bharati Mukherjee

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. ~ Margaret Atwood

I'm thinking about coffee and dessert when my phone rings. I don't recognize the number.
"Hello?"
"Bishop!" It's Coach Chase. I almost forgot that I gave him my number. I don't want my dad to know who's on the phone. That would raise all kinds of questions requiring evasive answers.
"Hey... buddy... um, how's it going? ~ Greg Logsted

Just as there is a place for skepticism in sound reasoning, so is there also a place for an honest agnosticism. We are being honestly agnostic when we simply admit to an ignorance that is really ours, here and now. If our knowledge of a particular thing is so limited that it does not allow us to take a confident position regarding it, we should refrain from committing ourselves. To do otherwise would be intellectually irresponsible. Evasive agnosticism is the attitude that attempts to pass off vincible ignorance as if it were invincible. It is one thing to say "I don't know" after long and assiduous research into a subject. It is quite another to say "I don't know" when you haven't even bothered to look into the matter. ~ Dennis Q. McInerny

Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand. ~ Ayn Rand

I'm not being evasive but I am saying I'm not a scientist and I'm not directly involved in the consultation however the science must be sound, it must be agreed and the consultation must be of a high quality or no one will have any confidence in the process. ~ John Anderson

People keep speculating about my personal life because I am evasive about it. ~ Priyanka Chopra

She shrugs. She knows a confrontation is coming now, and she can do nothing to stop it. It's moving towards her already from every direction, and there's no special move she can make, no evasive gesture, that can help her escape it. ~ Sally Rooney

I'm also discovering that while they seem to believe that I do not require sleep, my husband (who also doubles as their father) has the ability to morph into an invisible and supremely evasive nocturnal being, with powers so stealthy as to evade capture by the aliens [children] that had invaded our once peaceful and quiet habitat [bedroom at night]. ~ Dallas Louis

This bruising is required before conversion that so the Spirit may make way for himself into the heart by levelling all proud, high thoughts, and that we may understand ourselves to be what indeed we are by nature. We love to wander from ourselves and to be strangers at home, till God bruises us by one cross or other, and then we `begin to think', and come home to ourselves with the prodigal (Luke 15:17). It is a very hard thing to bring a dull and an evasive heart to cry with feeling for mercy. Our hearts, like criminals, until they be beaten from all evasions, never cry for the mercy of the judge. ~ Richard Sibbes

Folk songs are evasive-the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn't be comfortable with it any other way. A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening. ~ Bob Dylan

There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that, more fear than Orr or Hungry Joe, more fear even than Dunbar, who had resigned himself submissively to the idea that he must die someday ~ Joseph Heller

They'd fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It's addicts stayed addicts. ~ Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

The girl had so many evasive maneuvers, I was starting to think she was a trained spy. ~ Cindi Madsen

surely you're enough of an armchair philosopher to realize that everything is a reconstruction of something else? Reality is a desperate and evasive creature. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Computer, what evasive action can we take?" "Er, none, I'm afraid, guys," said the computer. "Or something," said Zaphod, " ... er ... " he said. "There seems to be something jamming my guidance systems," explained the computer brightly, "impact minus forty-five seconds. Please call me Eddie if it will help you to relax." Zaphod tried to run in several equally decisive directions simultaneously. "Right!" he said. "Er ... we've got to get manual control of this ship. ~ Douglas Adams

People ask what are my intentions with my films - my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. ~ Ingmar Bergman

I think I also don't confess because I am still so unbelieving of what happened. I am still aghast. I stun myself each time I retell the truth to myself, let alone to someone else. So I am evasive in order to spare myself ... I can see though that my secrecy does me no favors. It probably makes worse my sense of being outlandish. It confirms to me that it might be abhorrent, my story, or that few can relate to it. ~ Sonali Deraniyagala

What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves. ~ Azar Nafisi

Just to be seen strolling to or from a helicopter on the White House lawn, shouting an evasive answer to Sam Donaldson, must seem to the Reagans not quite satisfactory enough of a 7 PM presence, and this inane scene certainly galls the press. ~ Thomas B. Griffith

The fact was that one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness ... ~ Kiran Desai

It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss. ~ C.S. Lewis

Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head. ~ Harold Brodkey

Impossible, I realize, to enter another's solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely ~ Paul Auster

The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious. There are objects approximating the shape of a disc, some of which appear flat on bottom and domed on top. These objects are as large as man-made aircraft and have a metallic or light-reflecting surface. Further they exhibit extreme rates of climb and maneuverability with no associated sound and take action which must be considered evasive when contacted by aircraft and radar. ~ Nathan Farragut Twining

Gideon laughed. "I like to be direct."
"Okay," I said. "But I warn you, I like to be evasive, inserutable and generally send mixed messages."
"I doubt it."
"Human interaction is not my strong point," I told him.
"Not seriously."
"Seriously," I said. Thinking: There is so much about me he doesn't know.
Gideon put his hand on my leg. "What's your strong point, then?"
"Goats," I told him. "I am excellent with goats. ~ E. Lockhart

'Can't really say?' Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meeting
by a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book - mumble, guess-and-look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his own questions, etc.
But as I later realized, these are the games that all humans play when others
are sitting in judgment on them. ~ John Holt

BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements - this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped off. ~ Neal Stephenson

You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive. ~ Margaret Thatcher

I went up to his gravestone and repeated what the others had done: I placed a pebble on his tomb and silently said to him:

'Well, Oskar, at last we meet again, but this is not the time for reproaches and complaints. It would not be fair to you or to me. Now you are in another world, in eternity, and I can no longer ask you all those questions to which in life you would have given evasive replies... and death is the best evasion of all. I have received no answer, my dear, I do not know why you abandoned me... But what not even your death or my old age can change is that we are still married, this is how we are before God. I have forgiven you everything, everything...'

Murmuring these words, I let them push my wheelchair up the slight incline leading to the gravestone that marks the place where his remains are laid to rest, outside the Jewish cemetery of Jerusalem. I knew that somehow the power of my thoughts had reached him, and felt, after all those years, a strange inner peace filling my spirit. ~ Emilie Schindler

Jackson's? He wasn't being deliberately evasive or trying to be secretive, it wasn't in his nature. ~ George Donald

To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world. ~ Christopher Hitchens

We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

I should learn to be more craftily evasive, I thought: a bad evasion is tantamount to telling the truth. ~ William Boyd

Too many strive for the unachievable, and this pursuit consumes them. They rush frantic and desperate and so reveal weakness in the face of sadness. More than weakness, in fact. It is in truth a kind of cowardice, that which espouses an evasive disposition as if it were a virtue. ~ Steven Erikson

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends have been evasive about it, at the time. ~ Margaret Atwood

Cletus's middle name wasn't "Evasive", but it should have been. Another ~ Penny Reid

The search for this inner truth is the search for beauty. People whose vision does not penetrate beyond the narrow limits of the commonplace, and to whom a cabbage is but a vulgar vegetable, are surprised if they see a beautiful picture painted of one, and say that the artist has idealised it, meaning that he has consciously altered its appearance on some idealistic formula; whereas he has probably only honestly given expression to a truer, deeper vision than they had been aware of. The commonplace is not the true, but only the shallow, view of things.
[...]
Our moments of peace are, I think, always associated with some form of beauty, of this spark of harmony within corresponding with some infinite source without. [...]. In moments of beauty (for beauty is, strictly speaking, a state of mind rather than an attribute of certain objects [...]) we seem to get a glimpse of this deeper truth behind the things of sense. And who can say but that this sense, dull enough in most of us, is not an echo of a greater harmony existing somewhere the other side of things, that we dimly feel through them, evasive though it is ~ Harold Speed

Sometimes when an idea flashes, you distrust it because it seems too easy. You qualify it with all kinds of evasive phrases because you're timid about it. But often, this turns out to be the best idea of all. ~ Saul Bass

He saw, on their faces, that stubbornly evasive look ... the look of a man cheating himself of his own consciousness. ~ Ayn Rand

After Frank came out, Amy would begin a performance at a gig by walking onstage, clapping and chanting, 'Class-A drugs are for mugs. Class-A drugs are for mugs …' She'd get the whole audience to join in until they'd all be clapping and chanting as she launched into her first number. Although Amy was smoking cannabis, she had always been totally against class-A drugs. Blake Fielder-Civil changed that. Amy first met him early in 2005 at the Good Mixer pub in Camden. None of Amy's friends that I've spoken to over the years can remember exactly what led to this meeting. But after that encounter she talked about him a lot. 'When am I going to meet him, darling?' I asked. Amy was evasive, which was probably, I learned later, because Blake was in a relationship. Amy knew about this, so initially you could say that Amy was 'the other woman'. And although she knew that he was seeing someone else, it was only about a month after they'd met that she had his name tattooed over her left breast. It was clear that she loved him – that they loved each other – but it was also clear that Blake had his problems. It was a stormy relationship from the start. A few weeks after they'd met, Blake told Amy that he'd finished with the other girl, and Amy, who never did anything by halves, was now fully obsessed with him. ~ Mitch Winehouse

Honestly, not being evasive, but the great thing about Bond is that I have fifty years of movies - 23 movies and all the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, all of which are fodder. And when I'm working on the new Bond, I'm constantly going back to Fleming and the other movies - what are the bits and pieces, what are the resonances? ~ John Logan

Nishi's sister, who was sixteen years old, had gone for a "holiday" in Sylhet and returned six months later with a husband and a swelling belly. Nishi, strong on forward-planning skills, was taking evasive action: she was going on a holiday of her own and she would return when she was twenty-five. At that ancient age the danger of marriage was over. ~ Monica Ali

I was most alive when alone, negotiating odd encounters on the subway, surging along the sidewalk with a million faceless others. It was an expansive sensation, evasive, addictive. Each morning I rushed from the apartment to find it, as if late for an appointment. ~ Kate Bolick

For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man, when, without the certainty of its being reciprocated, she offers her love, and he, the wooed, remains cold and on the defensive! An insoluble tangle this, always; for not to return a woman's love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman's advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings. In vain, then, all the tenderness with which he extricates himself, useless all his polite, evasive phrases, insulting all his offers of mere friendship, once she has revealed her weakness! His resistance inevitably becomes cruelty, and in rejecting a woman's love he takes a load of guild upon his conscience, guiltless though he may be. Abominable fetters that can never be cast off! ~ Stefan Zweig

Occasionally, chewing over some random letter writer's dilemma, I'll find myself imagining scenarios where the problem could be sidestepped by an innocent fib or series of evasive manoeuvres. Then, I slap myself on the wrist. ~ Lynn Coady

The problem with trying to find your happiness through avoidance is the nature of reality. Reality simply does not allow us to evade unwanted experiences. Sure, we might be able to escape a few {...] but the evasive life often comes at a cost, like having to live your life in terror. Even if we can successfully ward off some terrifying experiences, we can not advert them all. Particularly, the most unpleasant ones: sickness, old age and death. If our strategy has been to flea unpleasant circumstances, when they come to meet us - as they surely will - our suffering will be great indeed. ~ Mark W. Muesse

Happiness was an evasive emotion that could not be fabricated, duplicated, or happened upon. It was something that was only handed out to a select few, but just like his mother, Ethan realized that he was never meant to have it. ~ Belinda G. Buchanan