Vague Quotes - Page 11

• I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.

  Barry Hannah

  Writing, Done, Too Much

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• My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum.

  Mary MacLane

  Desire, Goes On, Lectures

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• So I was in America and I thought I'll stick around while I'm here and just see what happens. The next film I did was High Art, so I guess it started with a sort of vague idea but really just a fantasy.

  Radha Mitchell

  Art, Ideas, America

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• When I start writing, I'll have a vague concept or I'll just have a title, and the song just goes on its own direction. Usually it goes in many directions within each song. They get really convoluted sometimes.

  Juliana Hatfield

  Song, Writing, Titles

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• That may sound a big vague, but what has struck me in city after city is that despite our differences and diversity, there's a common humanity we all share. In many ways we're all searching and longing for the same things.

  Rob Bell

  Cities, Differences, Common Humanity

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• And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.

  Jack London

  Dog, Animal, Long

  Jack London (2011). “Call of The Wild, White Fang”, p.51, Bantam Classics

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• The human race may be compared to a writer. At the outset a writer has often only a vague general notion of the plan of his work, and of the thought he intends to elaborate. As he proceeds, penetrating his material, laboring to express himself fitly, he lays a firmer grasp on his thought; he finds himself. So the human race is writing its story, finding itself, discovering its own underlying purpose, revising, recasting a tale pathetic often, yet none the less sublime.

  Felix Adler

  Writing, Race, Sublime

  Felix Adler (1914). “The Standard”

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• Dreams are vague and far away. Goals are tangible and achievable.

  Robin Roberts

  Dream, Goal, Tangible

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• The hands that help are better far / Than lips that pray. / Love is the ever gleaming star / That leads the way, / That shines, not on vague worlds of bliss, / But on a paradise in this.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Stars, Love Is, Hands

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “Lectures.- v.5-7. Discussions.- v.8. Interviews.- v.9. Political.- v.10. Legal.- v.11.-12. Miscellany”

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• I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.

  Michael Longley

  Writing, Shapes, Emotion

  Source: www.poetrymagazines.org.uk

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• That'’s a way to increase the realism to the reader, if you want to get technical - you leave it [character] vague and you let the reader fill in the blanks with their imagination.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Character, Imagination, Want

  Source: movies.about.com

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• My own interest in Yoga came from a vague understanding of Indian thought and Indian philosophy in the late sixties and early seventies and from looking at the idea of meditation and at what meditation was.

  Paul Harvey

  Philosophy, Yoga, Ideas

  Source: www.yogastudies.org

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• Every crazy fad from the 1800s comes back or they never go away. It’s like fashion, like everything’s already been invented, and somebody stumbles onto it and people will always, always be looking for an answer for some vague illness they can’t get a diagnosis for.

  Mary Roach

  Fashion, Crazy, People

  "Why “Asshole” Is High Praise - and Other Anatomy Lessons With Mary Roach". Interview with Sarah Zhang, www.motherjones.com. April 2, 2013.

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• Have we not all, amid life's petty strife, Some pure ideal of a noble life That once seemed possible? Did we not hear The flutter of its wings, and feel it near, And just within our reach? It was. And yet We lost it in this daily jar and fret, And now live idle in a vague regret; But still our place is kept, and it will wait, Ready for us to fill it, soon or late. No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been.

  Adelaide Anne Procter

  Stars, Regret, Wings

  "A Legend of Provence" l. 284 (1861)

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• The actual, original 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' I have vague memories of because I was pretty small, but I loved, loved, loved it. I have only those weird, visceral little-kid memories: I remember the extreme flat, two dimensional green that was their skin or the weird pizza with no sauce - it was just like yellow, drippy cheese.

  Mae Whitman

  Memories, Teenage, Kids

  "Mae Whitman on TMNT, blending into Arrested Development, and acting with Coach Taylor". Interview with Erik Adams, www.avclub.com. March 1, 2013.

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• The fourth paradigm forces us at every point to discern between the creationally valid and the sinfully perverse and thus confronts us with a never-ending task which requires not only competence but also spiritual discernment. Yet this is precisely the task which we must assume, even at the risk of being vague on specifics. The alternative is to compromise basic themes of authentic Christianity.

  Albert M. Wolters

  Spiritual, Risk, Tasks

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• We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life.

  Walter Pater

  Routine Work, Years, Desire

  Walter Pater (2006). “Marius the Epicurean: Easyread Large Edition”, p.233, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls, Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars - They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble, Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesy, That something new is coming to the world, The Lord knows what! Well, it's a long time coming, And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.

  Stephen Vincent Benet

  Stars, War, Long

  "A Child Is Born". Poetic Christmas drama in one act by Stephen Vincent Benet (first presented on radio as part of the anthology program "Cavalcade of America"), December 21, 1942.

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• In vain would science scan and trace Firmly her aspect. All the while, There gleams upon her far-off face A vague unfathomable smile.

  Alfred Austin

  Gleam, Faces, Vain

  Alfred Austin (1885). “At the Gate of the Convent: And Other Poems”

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• In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.

  Isaac Asimov

  Inspiration, Technology, Men

  Isaac Asimov (1951). “The foundation trilogy: three classics of science fiction”

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• I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, "intimations of immortality.

  George F. Kennan

  Seductive, Childhood, Promise

  GEORGE F. KENNAN (1967). “MEMOIRS 1925-1950”

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• All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.

  George Eliot

  New Experiences, Childhood, Would Be

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.1676, ShandonPress

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• A thrush, because I'd been wrong, Burst rightly into song In a world not vague, not lonely, Not governed by me only.

  Richard Wilbur

  Song, Lonely, World

  Richard Wilbur (2006). “Collected Poems 1943-2004”, p.86, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?

  Willa Cather

  Attitude, Numbers, Mind

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.45, U of Nebraska Press

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• You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.

  Natalie Goldberg

  Stories, Connections, Details

  Natalie Goldberg (2011). “Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life”, p.181, Open Road Media

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