Ambiguity Quotes - Page 8

• Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.

  Mary Oliver

  Dream, Song, Heart

  Mary Oliver (1998). “West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable.

  Alan Dershowitz

  Criminals, Defense, Roles

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• Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Echoes, Reader

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• There's the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations. And if two people do have differing views about their relationship - I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature - then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives.

  Elliot Perlman

  Mean, Views, Two

  "Seven Types of Ambiguity". Book by Elliot Perlman, 2003.

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• In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.

  James A. Baldwin

  Journey, Reality, Darkness

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• If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Faith, Lying, Joy

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.21, Convergent Books

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• For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities.

  Lance Armstrong

  Cancer, Teaching, Winning

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• He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

  Don DeLillo

  Pain, Self, World

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.24, Pan Macmillan

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• The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.

  Brennan Manning

  Reality, Decision, Promise

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• I've yet to meet a person in my life who doesn't have some moral ambiguity.

  Jason Beghe

  Moral, Moral Ambiguity, Persons

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• Warped with satisfactions and terrors, woofed with too many ambiguities and too few certainties, life can be lived best not when we have the answers - because we will never have those - but when we know enough to live it right out to the edges, edges sometimes marked by other people, sometimes showing only our own footprints.

  Rosalie Maggio

  Life, People, Satisfaction

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• That was the problem ... with trusting to the written word ... We were human, mortal and fallible. We forgot, we made errors, argued ambiguities, and twisted meanings to suit our own ends. And in doing so, mayhap we reshaped the gods themselves.

  Jacqueline Carey

  Errors, Suits, Problem

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• This is positively not an album to play while you do a doctorate thesis on "Bergson, Webern and Charles the Vicious, Paradox or Ambiguity?"

  Bob Brookmeyer

  Music, Play, Albums

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• You can have large projects and implement them by means of a few of the smallest things. Or you can use weak means that are more effective than strong ones, as Paul also said in his First Letter to the Corinthians. [...] The wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong.

  Pope Francis

  Strong, Mean, Looks

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• This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion

  Jean Baudrillard

  Distance, Spy, Use

  Jean Baudrillard (1998). “The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures”, p.121, SAGE

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• Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.

  Violet Trefusis

  Drunk, Giving, Brave

  Said to Sackville-West. "Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson". Book by Nigel Nicolson, p. 148, 1998.

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• The Russian proposal over Iran's uranium enrichment program is considerable, but it has some problems and ambiguities to be clarified in future talks.

  Ali Larijani

  Iran, Problem, Proposal

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• The United States has been ambiguous on the current situation in Nepal. They have not actually come out very strongly in terms of pushing the king to take measures on the detentions or abuses by the army. China continues to provide military equipment.

  Irene Khan

  Kings, Military, Army

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• Most of the complexity of the stories has developed as the stories came along (and may be a product of the principle that "nothing is what it seems"). I did start with some essential ambiguousness in the aliens' motivation and the questions this raises in human minds, which I consider to have been disregarded in Contact (novel and film). That, in part, may be what has delayed the writing of the fifth and sixth novelettes in the series.

  James Gunn

  Motivation, Writing, Mind

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• The Democratic leadership has expressed great concern for the incarceration rate in the commonwealth in the last few years. Now they want to fill the prisons up with people who would violate the merit law, a law that's been proven to be ambiguous at best and impossible to understand at worst.

  Bill Vaughan

  Years, Law, People

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• Cemeteries have always had a lure for me. They are well kept, free from ambiguity, logical, virile, and alive. In cemeteries you can summon up courage and arrive at decisions, in cemeteries life takes on distinct contours -- I am not referring to the borders of the graves -- and if you will, a meaning.

  Gunter Grass

  Decision, Borders, Alive

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• The new "ambiguity" means, in a way adjudged favorable to literary, poetic, intellectually and psychologically well-devised and praiseworthily executed linguistic performance, uncertainty of meaning, or difficulty for the interpreter in identifying just what the meaning in question is: it means the old meanings of ambiguity with a difference. It means uncertainty of meaning (of a word or combination of words) purposefully incorporated in a literary composition for the attainment of the utmost possible variety of meaning-play compressible within the verbal limits of the composition.

  Laura Riding

  Mean, Play, Differences

  "On Ambiguity". "Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays". Book by Laura Riding and Schuyler B. Jackson, edited by William Harmon, 1997.

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• In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

  Toni Morrison

  Book, Writing, Doors

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• I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills on the businessman's special to Tokyo.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Believe, Book, Sleep

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Preface, p. 16, 1989.

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• The law is more easily understood by few than many words. For all words are subject to ambiguity, and therefore multiplication of words in the body of the law is multiplication of ambiguity. Besides, it seems to imply (by too much diligence) that whosoever can evade the words is without the compass of the law.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Law, Body, Too Much

  Thomas Hobbes (2015). “Leviathan”, p.672, Thomas Hobbes

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