Awkwardness

Awkwardness is an unpleasant feeling, which can often arise in tense atmospheres where one doesn't really know how to act or what to say. Awkward situations can possibly later cause a form of anxiety. Awkwardness may also be used to describe social or physical clumsiness.

Quotes

• They certainly demonstrate that Seth, whether an aspect of Jane Robert's unconscious mind or a genuine "spirit," was of a high level of intelligence. Yet when Jane Roberts produced a book that purported to be the after-death journal of the philosopher William James, it was difficult to take it seriously. James's works are noted for their vigour and clarity of style; Jane Robert's "communicator" writes like an undergraduate . . . there is a clumsiness here that is quite unlike James's swift-moving, colloquial prose.
  • Colin Wilson in The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved , p. 390 (2000)

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 53.

• Awkward, embarrassed, stiff, without the skill
  Of moving gracefully or standing still,
  One leg, as if suspicious of his brother,
  Desirous seems to run away from t'other.
  • Charles Churchill, The Rosciad (1761), line 438.

• What's a fine person, or a beauteous face,
  Unless deportment gives them decent grace?
  Blessed with all other requisites to please,
  Some want the striking elegance of ease;
  The curious eye their awkward movement tires:
  They seem like puppets led about by wires.
  • Charles Churchill, The Rosciad (1761), line 741.

• God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude.

• With ridiculous and awkward action,
  Which, slanderer, he imitation calls.
  • William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), Act I, scene 3, line 149.