Bafflement Quotes

“As long as she persisted in her belief that bafflement justified her actions, she felt confident no one would contradict her.”

“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”

“They both looked at me in a way that was fast becoming familiar: two parts bafflement to one part awe at my talent for making a bad situation worse.”

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.”

“It is the illusion of magic and the magic of illusion that we are primarily interested in- not the privy tricks or the key to the secrets themselves. We seek the bafflement, the contradictions, the amusements, and the innumerable emotions that ripple uneasily through the audience. It is not knowledge we are after, but mystery and disguises. We want to gaze at the impossible. We are hungry for surprises, astonishment. In short, we are looking for a true story, but one impossible to explain in all its complexity. When we discover that story, we shall have found- magic.”

“The thing is, and here we come to E. Gorey's Great Simple Theory About Art (which he has never tried to communicate to anybody else until now, so prepare for Severe Bafflement), that on the surface they are so obviously those situations that it is very difficult to see that they really are about something else entirely. This is the theory, incidentally, that anything is art, and it's the way I tell, is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.”

“Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We’re alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes (not to mention critics) do the best they can, but they may—they probably will—be scoffed at by their children’s children. We, the living readers, whether or not we’re members of juries, decide, all on our own, if we suspect ourselves to be in the presence of greatness. We’re compelled to let future generations make the more final decisions, which will, in all likelihood, seem to them so clear as to produce a sense of bafflement over what was valued by their ancestors; what was garlanded and paraded, what carried to the temple on the shoulders of the wise.”

“She opened her eyes and looked into his rather intensely. "What?" Alex asked. "This cannot be." "What can't be?" Alex asked her, more bafflement in his voice this time. "I have been reading people all my life. I can even read cats and dogs. I've been doing it all my life and i've been here longer than the two of you put together." "And?" Alex wanted to get to the point. Whatever the truth may be, he just wanted to hear it, wanted it on the table before them so he could get this over with and they can go home. "AND.....you are the first person that has nothing for me to see." "And here I was hoping you'd say I'd win the lottery or get married to a supermodel or something." Alex said, starting to laugh. "You don't understand. I don't see anything, anything at all. There is nothing to you, nothing but what I see before me." "So....what does that mean?" "It means you don't exist.”

“Some of them are mech,” said Zita, nimbly picking her high heels through the steaming pools of red goo and severed, wriggling limbs. She was splattered with blood and grinning as she came to them, but she frowned to see the utter bafflement on Rose’s face. “Hey, snap out of it. Haven’t you seen mech before?” She kicked a man’s severed head, and Rose gasped when his face slid off, revealing a skull of gleaming silver metal.Rose shook her head. “Mech are illegal. The government s-said they feared a robot war!” she insisted, turning to follow as Zita limped past her.Zita laughed dryly, folding up her rifle and tucking it under her skirt. “Is it so hard to imagine your government lied? Governments tend to do that.”