Ambiguous Quotes - Page 6

• Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous.

  Cheyenne Jackson

  Straight Up, Protagonists, Antagonist

  "'American Horror Story' Star Cheyenne Jackson Reveals The Bloody Secrets Of 'Hotel'". Interview with Shaunna Murphy, www.mtv.com. October 7, 2015.

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• When I was a TV director working on Judd Apatow's show Undeclared. I was surrounded by so many young people. People like Seth Rogen, who was 9 years old or something. It was just a ridiculous amount of talented young people. I started to think I'd like to see a young-love movie, but not one done in that glossy, Hollywood, high-concept manner we've become accustomed to. One that was, for lack of a better way of putting it, a little more ambiguous, '70s-style, where everyone was flawed, middle-class characters.

  Greg Mottola

  Character, Thinking, People

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• When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run.

  Russell D. Moore

  Running, Fear, Kids

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• Since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought is only a unit, since my thoughts create rifts as much as they unite, since my words establish contacts by being spoken and create isolation by remaining unspoken, since an immense moat separates the subjective certitude that I have for myself from the objective reality that I represent to others, since I never stop finding myself guilty even though I feel I am innocent.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Reality, Moats, Rift

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• I think every good song tells a story, as ambiguous and vague as it may be. And if you know what a song is talking about, it can only help your performance.

  David Cook

  Song, Thinking, Talking

  "'Idol' moments with winner David Cook". Interview with Misha Berson, www.seattletimes.com. July 8, 2008.

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• I always end up taking people that are morally ambiguous.

  Billy Crudup

  People, Ends

  "Billy Crudup Bares All". Parade Interview, parade.com. March 3, 2009.

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• My style is ambiguous and lucid.

  Cee Lo Green

  Style

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• All our qualities, whether good or bad, are unstable and ambiguous, and almost all are at the mery of chance.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Risk, Quality, Chance

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• I wish everybody was just ethnically ambiguous. It would make life a lot easier.

  Alexander Siddig

  Wish, Easier

  "Alexander Siddig Is Part of Julian Schnabel’s Latest Cinematic Canvas". Interview with Ashley Wren Collins, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 7, 2010.

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• I only like luxury fashion. You have to decide where you stand. I like well-made, authentic clothes, well-crafted tailoring. I also like the dream and fantasy of luxury, the exception and rarity of it. I have no interest at all in fast retail. It is ambiguous.

  Hedi Slimane

  Dream, Fashion, Luxury

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• You can't know if your values are being violated if you're ambiguous about what they are

  Dan Pallotta

  Knows, Ifs, Values

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• If you have the personalities down, you understand them and identify with them; you can stick them in any situation and have a pretty good idea of how they're going to respond. Then it's just a matter of sanding and polishing up the jokes. But if you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well. These two characters clicked for me almost immediately and I feel very comfortable working with them.

  Bill Watterson

  Character, Ideas, Two

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• What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?

  Doris Lessing

  Months, October, Unendurable

  'The Martha Quest' (1952) pt. 4, ch. 1

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• Life is also a mixture of unsolved problems, ambiguous victories and vague defeats-with very few moments of clear peace.

  Hugh Prather

  Victory, Mixtures, Problem

  Hugh Prather (2009). “Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person”, p.42, Bantam

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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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• Black life is ambiguous, and a kaleidoscope of meanings, rich, multi-sided . . . we have frozen our vision in figures that caricature, at best the complexity of our lives and leave the real artistic chore of interpretation unfinished.

  Charles Bartlett Johnson

  Real, Black, Vision

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• The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people-and this is true whether or not they are well-educated-is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations-in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

  Michael Moore

  Stupid, Intelligent, Differences

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• Post-Modern space is historically specific, rooted in conventions, unlimited or ambiguous in zoning and irrational or transformational in its relation of parts to whole……. …skew or distorted spaces, created by sharp angles which exaggerate perspective…. …always keep a mental coordinate system no matter how free- form and baroque they become. The reference plane is always an implied frontality, and the route through the building or the curvilinear elements then relate to this conceptual cage

  Charles Jencks

  Space, Perspective, Elements

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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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• Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.

  Jacques Barzun

  Mean, Men, Race

  Jacques Barzun (1965). “Race: a study in superstition”

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• One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog". The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog."

  Michael Frayn

  Fog, Taj Mahal, Guarantees

  Michael Frayn (2016). “Collected Columns”, p.110, Faber & Faber

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• I think that at the end of the day I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work in the same way that the New York Times crossword puzzle does: Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window, but there's a real rewarding sense if you feel like you've cracked it.

  Damon Lindelof

  New York, Real, Thinking

  "'Prometheus' Writer Damon Lindelof on Why 'Vague' Is Good and the 'Sadistically Cool' Fallout From the 'Lost' Finale". Interview with Todd Gilchrist, www.hollywoodreporter.com. June 7, 2012.

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• The first principle, when you don't know anything about the subject of a thesis, is to let the candidate talk, nodding now and then with an ambiguous smile. He thinks you know, and are counting his mistakes, and it unnerves him... the second principle of conducting an oral, ... is to pretend ignorance, and ask for explanations of very simple points. Of course your ignorance is real, but the examinee thinks you are being subtle, and that he is making an ass of himself, and this rattles him.

  Robertson Davies

  Mistake, Real, Ignorance

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• What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.

  Donna Tartt

  Wall, Loneliness, Yellow

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• There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.

  Marcel Proust

  Vices, Assuming, Virtue

  Marcel Proust, Dennis Joseph Enright (1992). “In Search of Lost Time: Swann's way”, Vintage

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