The Uncanny Quotes

#1. The uncanny is not a literary genre. But nor is it a non-literary genre. It overflows the very institution of literature. It inhabits, haunts, parasitizes the allegedly non-literary. It makes 'genre' blink.

Nicholas Royle

#2. THE UNCANNY VALLEY

Michio Kaku

#3. The uncanny first impression was again one of private hells coexisting in public space.

Patrick McGrath

#4. We don't need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It's how we justify killing each other.

Charlie Jane Anders

#5. It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.

Karen Russell

#6. There's something known as the Uncanny Valley where things look a little too real and you're not quite sure what you're looking at. It becomes weird like it did in 'The Polar Express,' where the eyes seem so realistic, and yet you know it's animated.

Nolan North

#7. Imagine that this communication sometimes lends a sense of the uncanny to the landscape because of the narcissism of our human gaze, but that it is just part of the natural world here.

Jeff VanderMeer

#8. How is it that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become a revenant?

John Banville

#9. Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread.

William Barrett

#10. Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.

Ransom Riggs

#11. Everything - the uncanny clarity of my vision, the clearness of my thoughts as pure conceptual flow - suggested higher, not lower, brain functioning.

Eben Alexander

#12. The beautiful thing about 'The Strain Trilogy' is the ability to move from gore to high fable to creeping dread to domestic drama to unbearable suspense to the uncanny and on and on. The epic journey is designed to support these swings in mood, and that complements my tastes, which are wide-ranging.

Chuck Hogan

#13. I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather's nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you around the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately.

Kate Atkinson

#14. We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

Iris Murdoch

#15. The sacred is found boring by many who find the uncanny fascinating.

Mason Cooley

#16. In her relief, Eleanor had stood for a time in the darkened room, watching the faint undulations on the lake, silver-rimmed clouds being drawn across the pewter sky, nursing the uncanny sense of being the only person on earth awake.

Kate Morton

#17. The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali's appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.

Amit Chaudhuri

#18. This time James Swindler strode into the room. It had always irritated Jack that Swindler had the uncanny knack to give the impression he belonged, regardless of the surroundings. He'd probably look comfortable strolling through Buckingham Palace.

Lorraine Heath

#19. The distinction between "magick" and "communication" exits only in our traditional ways of thinking. The uncanny Egyptians attributed both inventions to a single deity, Thoth, god of speech and other illusions.

Robert Anton Wilson

#20. I wished I could read in their shrivelled faces and watery eyes, I wished I could hear in the bad French which came half through their pinched lips and half through their pointed noses, how the old ladies had got at least on to good terms with the uncanny beings which haunted the castle.

E.T.A. Hoffmann

#21. The generation of atmosphere, the aura of the uncanny, is one of the most important secrets of magic. It contributes to the willing suspension of disbelief, the feeling that, within the circle, or in the presence of the magical shrine, anything may happen.

Doreen Valiente

#22. He has all the uncanny intuitions of a psychopath. Have you ever dealt with one? It's almost like a form of mind-reading ...

Sue Grafton

#23. In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

Stanley Kubrick

#24. For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky.

Janet Fitch

#25. I have the uncanny feeling that, just at the end of my life, I am beginning to reinhabit completely the body I long ago left.

Alice Walker

#26. I'd never taken to four foot creatures who had the uncanny ability to point out all my flaws in thirty second flat. And just for the record, I can too read without moving my lips.

Darynda Jones

#27. Back at the Rash [a Florida nightclub], a waif in a lime latex body tube went into the rest room to snort the newest designer drug, XGB5, which gave people the uncanny sensation of throwing money away while chewing their own lips off. It was hard to come by and everyone had to have it.

Tim Dorsey

#28. People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that's the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick.

Scott Westerfeld

#29. The name [Spooky] comes from well back in university I was doing a series of essays and writing about Sigmund Freud's idea of the uncanny and I was really intrigued by this idea of "The Unheimlich".

DJ Spooky

#30. I could share an hour of warm camaraderie with Dad, then once I'd walked out the door, get the uncanny feeling I'd disappeared into the wings of his mind's stage, like a character no longer necessary to the ongoing story line.

Ron Reagan

#31. One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.

D.H. Lawrence

#32. So he [Sigmund Freud] called this "the uncanny" and he also referred to cities as well, like the idea of walking through the city and the way the urban landscape could lead you to a sense of disorientation and to a kind of, you know, sense of repetition. And the way a city can unfold as you walk.

DJ Spooky

#33. The world moved in horrifying slow motion; Locke, who was no stranger to a beating, was cursed with the uncanny ability to recognize one just before it ceased to be theoretical.

Scott Lynch

#34. One of the findings that really interests me is that, although we think we ACT because of the way we FEEL, we often FEEL because of the way we ACT. So an almost uncanny way to change your feelings is to act the way you WISH you felt.

Gretchen Rubin

#35. I'm embarrassed to admit that I giggled slightly. The resemblance of his neck to a Pez dispenser was uncanny.

Pete Kahle

#36. Shall we go away whenever life looks like turning in the slightest uncanny, or not quite normal, or even rather painful and mortifying? No, surely not. Rather stay and look matters in the face, brave them out; perhaps precisely in so doing lies a lesson for us to learn.

Thomas Mann

#37. The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin's critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead.

Luke Harding

#38. Naturally I belonged to the bright and correct world, I was my parents' child; but wherever I turned my eyes and ears, the other world was there and I lived in it, too, even though it was often unfamiliar and uncanny to me,

Hermann Hesse

#39. You're all still here because of an uncanny will to survive despite the odds, among ... other reasons.

James Dashner

#40. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

Viktor E. Frankl

#41. One can evade a danger that one recognizes,' wrote historian Friedrich Zipfel, 'but a police working in the dark becomes uncanny. Nowhere does one feel safe from it. While not omnipresent, it could appear, search arrest. The worried citizen no longer knows whom he ought to trust.

Erik Larson

#42. We have an uncanny ability to make birds do what we want them to do. In Blood Simple there's a shot from the bumper of a car and it's going up this road and a huge flock of birds takes off at the perfect moment.

Joel Coen

#43. I'm about to rupture something, he was informed, as the big, gaily wrapped box she was carrying smacked into the small of his back again. She had an uncanny ability to hit the same spot every time.

Karen Chance

#44. Singleton has an almost uncanny ability to resist being caught up in the fads and fancies of the moment. Like most great innovators [and investors! - Ed.], Henry Singleton is supremely indifferent to criticism.

Robert J. Flaherty

#45. Children are ingenuous. They are also blessed with uncanny ability to read a person's character instantly. Even though they are inexperienced and unsophisticated, they often know instinctively who can be trusted and who is the charlatan.

Wess Stafford

#46. She had this uncanny sense of seeing things the way they were instead of the way you'd want them to be, of knowing me better than I knew myself. She could sniff out the truth even if it hurt.

Mike Gayle

#47. My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle.' It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life.

Cynthia Ozick

#48. The girl in the mirror caught my eye briefly ... It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself.

Kate Morton

#49. For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological.

Charles Bernheimer

#50. The camera has an uncanny ability to capture the world as it is, to seize events as they happen, and also to conjure visions of the future. But by the time the image reaches the eyes of the viewer, it belongs to the past, taking on the status of something retrieved.

A.O. Scott

#51. Mercy has this ... this uncanny ability to go where the trouble is thickest," Adam told him. He had decided a while ago that it wasn't deliberate, and that it had something to do with being Coyote's daughter. He was pretty sure that Mercy was completely oblivious.

Patricia Briggs

#52. Whatever happened behind now was simply that: behind. Lyra had left it. She felt she was leaving the world altogether, so remote and intent she was, so high they were climbing, so strange and uncanny was the light that bathed them.

Philip Pullman

#53. No noble opportunity is small. Mind small opportunities with noble traits, though they may seem quite uncanny at first sight; in the mind, you shall wonder!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#54. Interestingly, modern science has estimated that the age of the earth is about 4 billion years. Scholars feel it is uncanny that the Vedic Aryans could have conceived of such a vast span of time over 3,500 years ago that would be similar to the same figure estimated by science today.

Subhash Kak

#55. My name is John Taylor. I'm a private eye, specialising in cases of the weird and uncanny. I don't solve murders, I don't do divorce work, and I wouldn't recognise a clue if you held it up before my face and said Look, this is a clue.

Simon R. Green

#56. When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.

Jen Knox

#57. Cinder," he said, "will you marry me?" Absurd, she thought. The emperor of the Eastern Commonwealth was proposing to her. It was uncanny. It was hysterical. But it was Kai, and somehow, that also made it exactly right. "Yes," she whispered, "I will marry you." Those

Marissa Meyer

#58. Obama might do well to remember that his fast rise from the Illinois state Senate was due in large part to an uncanny ability to make friends and find mentors.

Ron Fournier

#59. What am I to do there? Is it a deception that I can no longer trust my thoughts? Only life is true, and only life leads me into the desert, truly not my thinking, that would like to return to thoughts, to men and events, since it feels uncanny in the desert.

C. G. Jung

#60. The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants has a huge plan that stems from the earlier issues of Uncanny X-Force. Archangel's fall was really the smaller consequence from killing the child Apocalypse. This is the big consequence.

Rick Remender

#61. I am ever more intrigued by the correspondence between mathematics and physical facts. The adaptability of mathematics to the description of physical phenomena is uncanny.

Nicolaas Bloembergen

#62. I have always been an outstanding football player, I have always had uncanny abilities, great arm strength, an immense ability to play the game from a quarterback standpoint. The problem was that I wasn't given the liberty to do certain things when I was young.

Michael Vick

#63. So it is not the danger that creeps people out. It is something else. Something uncanny. An aura of madness. Even with his face hidden, I could see Enmeduranki had it.

John C. Wright

#64. It's almost uncanny to receive a prize named in honor of Bernard Malamud. I must have been in my early teens when 'The Magic Barrel' was published and I first read it.

Deborah Eisenberg

#65. How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

Cormac McCarthy

#66. How do you and your mother manage to get your hair exactly the same shade? It's uncanny."

"I'll have you know, I'm a natural blonde!"

"How could I know that? You wouldn't let me turn the lights on.

Kara Lennox

#67. A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out; something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense.

Philip Pullman

#68. As he demonstrated with 'Juno' and 'Up in the Air,' Reitman has an uncanny knack among contemporary directors for tapping into the zeitgeist in dramatically satisfying ways.

Lou Lumenick

#69. My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me.

Michel Faber

#70. Vanity is a factor, but it is more a question of control. It is easier to trick others into perceiving you as beautiful if you can convince yourself you are beautiful. But mirrors have an uncanny way of telling the truth.

Marissa Meyer

#71. Jack had stolen that from Nosferatu: the love of a pure woman had an uncanny power over the things of darkness. Maybe 1964 was the last moment when you could get away with that: try such a thing now and people would only laugh.

Margaret Atwood

#72. We know only that our entire existence is forced into new paths and disrupted, that new circumstances, new joys and new sorrows await us, and that the unknown has its uncanny attractions, alluring and at the same time anguishing.

Heinrich Heine

#73. On the other hand, she had an uncanny resistance to physical pain: if she burnt her mouth or cut herself, as a rule she didn't cry. It was ill will, the ill will of the universe, that distressed her.

Margaret Atwood

#74. Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each others hearts.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#75. He has that uncanny ability to be dangerous and pull the public in [on Michael Barrymore

Les Dennis

#76. I understand you've been spending some time in the company of my son." Adam's father had a disconcerting stare. His eyes were hazel, close in color to my own, but there was an uncanny awareness in them - like he knew what you'd had for breakfast that morning and how you would sleep that night.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

#77. I think there's something extraordinarily nice about seeing the dawn up before one goes to bed, [] there's something uncanny about it.

Nick Drake

#78. It seemed uncanny that words, spread across a page just so, had the power to transport me to another time or place. But they could.

Nikki Grimes

#79. what if there was an uncanny moment when all the birds were grounded from Cape Town to Juneau, and everywhere between--all feathers frozen in a universal stutter, so quick as to make a snail of light, and even Stephen Hawking's mind would miss it?

Kristen Henderson

#80. I have this uncanny knack of falling for the most irrelevant men,my love story would be comprising of short stories.

Pushpa Rana

#81. It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing - it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human race is based on.

Christa Wolf

#82. Oh, for shame! Nancy, have you never seen Florrie's face in a chrysanthemum, or a rose?'
'Never.' I said. 'Though there was a flounder for sale on a fishmonger's barrow, in Whitechapel yesterday, and the likeness was quite uncanny. I very nearly brought it home ...

Sarah Waters

#83. The others had taken Valek's return in stride, although Janco made a comment about Valek's lack of hair. 'You ever notice how couples start to look alike?' he asked.
In a deadpan, Valek replied, 'Yes. In fact I was just thinking how much you and Topaz resemble each other. It's uncanny.

Maria V. Snyder

#84. What connection is there, President, between this uncanny creature and the disappearance of Lord Beltham, of which we were talking at dinner?

Mark Twain

#85. I have found in experiments, people become used to the robots. The less startling they become, the more commonplace they get. If these robots do become commonplace, then that uncanny effect will go away.

David Hanson

#86. Heather A. Slomski's stories are downright addictive. I kept promising myself to turn off the light after just one more, and then breaking that promise, beguiled by her cool, measured prose and by the surprises, tensions, and uncanny encounters simmering beneath its elegant surface.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

#87. Maybe by making people feel uncomfortable, I tap into that uncanny quality that is a part of the scariest, weirdest things that you remember happening to you when you were a kid.

Ariel Pink

#88. It's pretty simple, really: I love the X-Men. They were my favorite heroes when I was a kid. My dad and I collected X-Men comics together, and I know it would have made him proud to see me writing 'Uncanny X-Men.'

Cullen Bunn

#89. The legendary yet factual Curtis Wilkie has been the right man in the right place at an uncanny number of extraordinary times.

Roy Blount Jr.

#90. Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.

Jorge Luis Borges

#91. Almost the whole of Christian theology could perhaps be deduced from the two facts (a) That men make coarse jokes, and (b) That they feel the dead to be uncanny. The

C.S. Lewis

#92. I reel in an uncanny intoxication of emotions, on minute bewildered and then frightened then the next, I swing from exhaustion to mania, from depression to tranquility and beneath it all, excitement fizzes as if my blood is filled with gas.

Patricia Cornwell

#93. He knew well the singularly strange sensation of loving one's family to distraction, and yet not feeling quite able to share one's deepest and most intractable fears. It brought on an uncanny sense of isolation, of being remarkably alone in a loud and loving crowd.

-Anthony's thoughts

Julia Quinn

#94. But when the next time approached for the full moon, I began to be aware of a strange, malicious influence. An atmosphere of horror hovered in the air and I was aware of inexplicable, uncanny impulses.

Robert E. Howard

#95. The nights were comfortless and chill, and they did not dare to sing or talk too loud, for the echoes were uncanny, and the silence seemed to dislike being broken - except by the noise of water and the wail of wind and the crack of stone.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#96. Like one's own children, golf has an uncanny way of endearing itself to us while at the same time evoking every weakness of mind and character, no matter how well hidden.

Timothy Gallwey

#97. Hutch called into the semidarkness of The Shed. 'Somebody's coming, Heck!'
Then he, with the rest, faded from sight with that uncanny quickness known only to creatures of the wild and young children who are, after all, also creatures of the wild.
("The Shed")

E. Everett Evans

#98. Music, the most abstract and uncanny art, is an eternal river of sound moving through time. We can free ourselves from whatever may be holding us back, and join that flowing river.

William Westney

#99. Apparently, that morning both Lorne's doorman and Robert De Niro had stopped him to say how uncanny the resemblance was. Did we dare disappoint Frank the Doorman and Robert De Niro?

Tina Fey

#100. All that you see was and is for your sake. The numerous books, uncanny markings, and beautiful thoughts are the ghosts of souls who preceded you.

Khalil