Diverting Quotes

#1. It was incomprehensible to her that anyone should be amused by such a circumstance, but both Gilly and Gideon plainly thought it excessively funny, so she smiled dutifully, realizing the truth of her mama's dictum, that there was never any knowing what stupidities men would find diverting.

Georgette Heyer

#2. Pursing my lips, I strive to appear unaffected by his touch. He is so artful at diverting me from anything painful, or anything he doesn't want to address. And you let him, my subconscious pipes up unhelpfully, gazing over her copy of Jane Eyre.

E.L. James

#3. Diverting a river is easier than facing the truth; Cyrus did not want to acknowledge the fact that his horse would not have drowned if he had not forced it to try and cross the river.

Marcelo Figueras

#4. The thought of covering her in anything is Byronically diverting.

David Mitchell

#5. Books did not need to be beautiful back in the Fifties, because nothing else was beautiful back then. Books were simply there: you read them because they were diverting or illuminating or in some way useful but not because the books themselves were aesthetically appealing.

Joe Queenan

#6. I cannot fail these girls by diverting my eyes from the invisible residue of slavery that clings to them like a shadow.

Marquita Burke-DeJesus

#7. Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.

J.M. Coetzee

#8. The favorites of fortune or of fame topple from their pedestals before our eyes without diverting us from ambition.

Luc De Clapiers

#9. There was something cold and hard about the man, Nilssen thought - diverting his own ill feeling, as he often did, into a principle of aesthetic distaste.

Eleanor Catton

#10. You'll never learn anything or impress anyone by making excuses and diverting blame.

Frank Sonnenberg

#11. It is a fearful mistake for us to neglect the study of the Bible to investigate theories that are misleading, diverting minds from the words of Christ to fallacies of human production.

Ellen G. White

#12. I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.

Robert Harris

#13. The thing about a diversion is that it has to be diverting.

Eoin Colfer

#14. Some may find them merely diverting melodies. Others may find them incitements to Red revolution. And who will say if either or both is wrong? Not I.

Pete Seeger

#15. We in Ireland are gifted beyond most peoples with a talent for acting, and in Dublin especially, while scorning culture, which indeed we have not got, we are possessed of a most futile and diverting cleverness.

Susan Mitchell

#16. Happiness is such an incredible advantage in our life. When the human brain is positive, our intelligence rises, we stop diverting resources to think about anxiety.

Shawn Achor

#17. Suetonius, in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within - for we are both, and to ignore this duality is to invite disaster.

Suetonius

#18. Two days after this adventure, the emperor, having ordered that part of his army which quarters in and about his metropolis, to be in readiness, took a fancy of diverting himself in a very singular manner. He desired I would stand like a Colossus, with my legs as far asunder as I conveniently could.

Jonathan Swift

#19. On the placidly flowing river of time, he wished only to make a few ripples: he shrank from diverting its course.

Arthur C. Clarke

#20. So watch your step, friends. Make sure there's no evil unbelief lying around that will trip you up and throw you off course, diverting you from the living God.

Eugene H. Peterson

#21. I need to learn to keep a quiet heart. To trust that if God has allowed an interruption in my day, it serves a purpose. To believe that the time to finish what work I thought needed to be done will be given. To accept that He is diverting me from my 'plan A' to His greater plan.

Karen Ehman

#22. Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths.

John Stockwell

#23. The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas.

Nicholas Carr

#24. But I would also warn against diverting too many of the Empire's resources from a flexible navy of capital ships and starfighters to massive projects that can bring the Imperial presence to only one system at a time.

Timothy Zahn

#25. The pain of losing is diverting. So is the thrill of winning. Winning, however, is lonelier, as those you've won money from are not likely to commiserate with you. Winning takes getting used to.

David Mamet

#26. If we are not serving Jesus, and if he is not in our thoughts and hearts, then the things of the world will draw us instead to them! Moreover, the things of the world need not be sinister in order to be diverting and consuming.

Neal A. Maxwell

#27. He feels the bleakness crawling into his skull; Franco breaths in steadily, trying to tune in all out, that pressure on your brain, eroding focus, diverting the flow of thought down old ruinous canals...

Irvine Welsh

#28. It is a process of diverting one's scattered forces into one powerful channel.

James Allen

#29. Eccentricity may be diverting, Mama, but it is out of place in a wife: certainly in my wife!

Georgette Heyer

#30. When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we're simply giving ourselves extra work.

Michael Harris

#31. I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me. (Brewster 1860, p. 331)

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#32. There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

H.L. Mencken

#33. The Byrd cronies retaliated by diverting taxpayer money to fund whites-only "segregation academies," private schools founded to circumvent integrated public schools.

Margot Lee Shetterly

#34. Diverting one's attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse it with the future, and that at least would be something.

Richard Russo

#35. Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.

Honore De Balzac

#36. Spain has been massively diverting capital from the private sector into politically favored environmental projects for the better part of a decade ... every green job created, eliminated 2.2 real jobs and cost around $800,000 each!

Ron Paul

#37. Such self-referent misgivings creates stress and undermine effective use of the competencies people possess by diverting attention from how best to proceed to concern over personal failings and possible mishaps

Albert Bandura

#38. I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

#39. The fashion game is fun for architects to play and diverting for the public to watch, but it's deadly for building users. When the height of fashion moves on, they're the ones left behind, stuck in a building that was designed to look good rather than work well, and now it doesn't even look good.

Stewart Brand

#40. The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.

Albert Camus

#41. Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is that scribbling child in a grown-up body wondering if anybody is listening.

Herbert Gold