"I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion"
About this Quote
“I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion” is an insult engineered for maximum chill. Stevenson doesn’t grant his target the dignity of hatred; he offers something worse: the sense of being emotionally irrelevant. “Indifference” lands first, a word of polite detachment, almost bureaucratic in tone, as if the speaker is filing a report rather than picking a fight. Then comes the twist of the blade: “closely bordering on aversion.” The sentence performs a neat bit of rhetorical sadism by pretending to measure feeling with scientific restraint while quietly escalating it.
The specific intent is social domination through understatement. Stevenson’s phrasing withdraws intimacy and, by extension, power. Aversion implies a visceral recoil, but it arrives as a footnote to indifference, suggesting the addressee isn’t even worth the full-bodied passion of disgust. It’s contempt in a tailored suit.
Subtextually, the speaker positions themselves as the rational party, someone too composed to be “affected.” That’s Victorian manners doing double duty: civility as camouflage for cruelty. The insult also has plausible deniability. If challenged, the speaker can retreat to the supposedly mild first clause - I’m merely indifferent - while the second clause continues to hum with hostility.
Context matters: Stevenson, writing in a culture obsessed with propriety, knew that the most devastating blows were often delivered without raised voices. In a world of drawing rooms, reputations, and coded aggression, coolness is a weapon. The line works because it sounds measured, but its real message is total banishment: you don’t move me, and you almost repel me. Almost is the cruelty. It implies a threshold the other person keeps failing to cross.
The specific intent is social domination through understatement. Stevenson’s phrasing withdraws intimacy and, by extension, power. Aversion implies a visceral recoil, but it arrives as a footnote to indifference, suggesting the addressee isn’t even worth the full-bodied passion of disgust. It’s contempt in a tailored suit.
Subtextually, the speaker positions themselves as the rational party, someone too composed to be “affected.” That’s Victorian manners doing double duty: civility as camouflage for cruelty. The insult also has plausible deniability. If challenged, the speaker can retreat to the supposedly mild first clause - I’m merely indifferent - while the second clause continues to hum with hostility.
Context matters: Stevenson, writing in a culture obsessed with propriety, knew that the most devastating blows were often delivered without raised voices. In a world of drawing rooms, reputations, and coded aggression, coolness is a weapon. The line works because it sounds measured, but its real message is total banishment: you don’t move me, and you almost repel me. Almost is the cruelty. It implies a threshold the other person keeps failing to cross.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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