Ambiguous Quotes - Page 7

• Skywhale is ambiguous. I think she is beautiful, but a lot of people think she is grotesque. You are drawn in and repelled at the same time, and it has to have that dynamic. My work has a certain element of abject mutation, uncertainty and darkness. Even she is dark - I mean she has ten breasts.

  Patricia Piccinini

  Beautiful, Mean, Dark

  Source: www.lucyreesart.com

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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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• 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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• Like music my drawings transport us to the ambiguous world of the indeterminate.

  Odilon Redon

  Drawing, World, Transport

  "Great Paintings of the World". Book by Jean-François Guillou, p. 190, 2000.

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• Since the journey is a metaphor - the most ambiguous and seductive of metaphors, we tell ourselves - it can also be born of immobility. There is no need to drag our bodies around so much, all dressed up. It's hot, there are flies, diseases. It is enough to close our eyes, seated on a chair in the shade, to float on the waves of imagination. Isn't that what books are there for?

  Dacia Maraini

  Book, Eye, Journey

  Dacia Maraini, Dick Kitto, Elspeth Spottiswood (1999). “The Silent Duchess”, p.258, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• everything is ambiguous. It's exciting, in a way, if you can tolerate ambiguity. I can't, but I'm taking a course where it's taught, in the hope of acquiring the skill. It's called Modern Living, and you get no credit.

  Sheila Ballantyne

  Skills, Credit, Way

  Sheila Ballantyne (1975). “Norma Jean, the termite queen”, Doubleday Books

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• The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops

  Teju Cole

  Bus Stops, Creative, Energy

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• I don't want to be thought of as somebody who's spiritually ambiguous, but the reality is there's unknown things happening. I'm not ready to point at what they are or what the reason is, but I know they exist.

  Shane Carruth

  Reality, Want, Reason

  "Shane Carruth Reveals The Mysteries Of ‘Upstream Color’". Interview with Jessica Kiang, www.indiewire.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function; in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us.

  Erich Fromm

  Sleep, Culture, States

  Source: www.scribd.com

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• Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later.

  Francis Bacon

  Feelings, Special, Emotion

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• 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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• If readers must puzzle over unfamiliar or ambiguous words, you are making them work harder than they need to.

  Crawford Kilian

  Hard Work, Needs, Work Harder

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• This word "redemption," what is it about this word? Is it tangible? Do you know when it has happened? Is it necessary in a drama? Does it make a character boring? Does everyone agree on a character being "redeemed?" Or is it a word that is so subjective and polarizing and insignificant in modern television? It is a word that has been given, quite possibly, far too much significance, when it is truly ambiguous and meaningless in a drama. I have personally grown to loathe that word in literature.

  Michael Muhney

  Drama, Character, Doe

  Source: soaps.sheknows.com

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• A hero is someone who, for the general good, takes the initiative to solve an ambiguous problem.

  James Marcus Bach

  Hero, Problem, Initiative

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• When I first auditioned for Dexter... Well, I was sent the script, and I read it and loved it, and I knew right away that it was going to be a hit because it's the type of programming that I like to watch. It's that very morally ambiguous thing where you find yourself rooting for someone who's really an awful person, but... is he doing good? You're constantly calling into question your own moral code. I love that as an audience member.

  Julie Benz

  Finding Yourself, Calling, Awful

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• This is the power of images, the ambiguity. You are never completely sure of anything. With written language, it's more concrete. You have to establish some facts, but in movies, you see things happening, and the exact meaning behind the images is more ambiguous.

  Albert Serra

  Facts, Language, Ambiguity

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Feeble and timid minds . . . consider the use of dilatory and ambiguous measures as the most admirable efforts of consummate prudence.

  Edward Gibbon

  Effort, Mind, Use

  Edward Gibbon (2016). “The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon: Historical Works, Autobiographical Writings and Private Letters, Including The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.1228, e-artnow

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• The development of the plot of the novel leads to a single point, and it's my opinion that the ending that the novel has, which is a somewhat ambiguous ending, is the only logical ending given the structure of the book as a whole.

  Emily Barton

  Book, Plot, Development

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I never held Negroes to be inherently inferior. The statement in Marriage and Morals refers to environmental conditioning. I have had it withdrawn from subsequent editions because it is clearly ambiguous.

  Bertrand Russell

  Environmental, Moral, Conditioning

  Bertrand Russell, Barry Feinberg, Ronald Kasrils (1969). “Dear Bertrand Russell ... a selection of his correspondence with the general public, 1950-1968”, Allen & Unwin

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• Since I don't feel like I belong solely to any one of them I find that it makes me even more interested and open to other cultures as well. It's also fun looking ethnically ambiguous because no one can quite put a finger on what I am and it's very entertaining to me!

  Kina Grannis

  Fun, Other Cultures, Fingers

  "Rising Star: Kina Grannis". Interview, www.seventeen.com. July 14, 2010.

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