Quotes About Paradoxical

To be sure, to impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea—

Such was the paradoxical nature of sibling relationships: they could tease her for the sappiness and spelling of her suicide notes while being terrified she'd write new ones.

In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She's a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.

So now we begin to understand the paradoxical phonocentric "history of silence", that repression of writing which can scarcely be acknowledged.

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession.

happy to see me and unhappy to see me at the same time

It seemed to him a very Edinburgh thing. Welcoming, but not very.

Bollywood is a cinema of vibrant contradictions, which works when it seems it shouldn't.

Your kind, Aleran, are the most vicious and gentle, most savage and noble, most treacherous and loyal, most terrifying and fascinating creatures I have ever seen.' Her fingers brushed over his cheek again. 'And you are unique among them.

She smelled of cinnamon and honey and the clean sweat of exertion, with an undertone of baby-scent, that paradoxical smell composed of spit-up milk, soft feces, and the ultimate cleanliness of fresh, smooth skin.

Readers of the book, paradoxically, will have a different kind of surprise in store for them: What many "Vertigo" aficionados will find perplexing are the systematic, businesslike, matter of fact circumstances under which this odd, obsessional, very un-matter-of-fact film was created.

I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll.

Sometimes a therapist will deliberately "prescribe the problem" or symptom that the patient wants to resolve. A young man who keeps putting off finding a job might be told in therapy that he can't look for a job; a woman who won't initiate sex with her partner might be told not to initiate it for a month. This strategy, in which the therapist instructs patients not to do what they're already not doing, is called a paradoxical intervention

He sailed through the crowd, through the front of the small church, and found himself in the gloom inside. It always struck Gamache as paradoxical that churches were gloomy. Coming in from the sunshine it took a minute or so to adjust. And even then, to Gamache, it never came close to feeling like home. Churches were either great cavernous tributes not so much to God as the wealth and privilege of the community, or they were austere, cold tributes to the ecstasy of refusal.

The illusion that there might be a single, correct, absolute answer independently of context, purpose and perspective, that is independently of the relevant interface, leads to paradoxical nonsense.

In fact, the most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.

Superachievement and perfectionism are two of the leading cover-ups for toxic shame. As paradoxical as it may seem, the straight-A student and the F student may both be driven by toxic shame.

5. Disaster works (moves the story forward) by seeming to move the central Figure further back from his goal, leaving him in worse trouble than he was before the scene started. It may seem paradoxical to beginning novelists that scenes work best when they move the lead character further from his story goal – that the best narrative progress often appears to be backwards.

seemed to proclaim the unpeopled vacancy of this estranged forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed.

Nirvana is very funny. It's not sincere particularly. It's rather frivolous, actually.

It wasn't playing both sides of the fence – it was betting against yourself but still playing to win – and it encapsulated everything absurd and paradoxical that I loved about the French.

The final result of political action often, no regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning.

The great irony for a man in my position is how little use I have for organized religion. I am essentially a member of the unchurched. Yet, since high school I've felt a strong sense of vocation, a paradoxical longing and belonging which somehow resulted in my becoming a nonreligious religious leader. I was on the very fringe of religion,

Man lives in illusions in the comedy matrix of his absurd vices and paradoxical instincts.