Ambiguous Quotes - Page 8

• In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

  Aravind Adiga

  Reading, Writing, Trying

  "MoJo Interview: Aravind Adiga". Interview with Sonja Sharp, www.motherjones.com. June 19, 2009.

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• I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we're drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.

  Billy Collins

  Goes On, Littles, Serious

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". "PBS Newshour", www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

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• Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species- back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire has been ethically ambiguous. If you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth , and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other

  Daniel Dennett

  Play, Fire, People

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• In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

  R. D. Laing

  Madness, Sanity, Frame Of Reference

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• At evening casual flocks of pigeons make
  Ambiguous undulations as they sink
  Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

  Wallace Stevens

  Wings, Poetry, Darkness

  'Sunday Morning, I' (1923)

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• We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Unity, Essentials, Asking

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History”, p.250, W. W. Norton & Company

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• There is no such thing as one Islam. The Koran is ambiguous and Islam is not a monolithic entity.

  Walter Kasper

  Islam, Entity

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I'm a filmmaker who is known for these ambiguous portraits that tell multiple sides of the story without really telling the audience what to think.

  Joe Berlinger

  Thinking, Portraits, Stories

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

  Carrie Brownstein

  Art, Art Is

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• To be a hegemon is inherently ambiguous, usually implying some mixture of dominance and legitimacy, that is, being seen as contributing global leadership in a generally benevolent manner.

  Richard A. Falk

  Mixtures, Dominance, Legitimacy

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon this philistine equation between literature and liberalism and human goodness, and pay some attention to the darker, ambiguous, and often muddled energies and motivations that shape a work of art. If we do this, we can appreciate a writer like Céline or Gottfried Benn without worrying whether they conform to existing notions of political incorrectness.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Art, Motivation, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste. In my case it's kind of weird because I started out being known more for ambient things and ambiguous music, but what's experimental for me is the more traditional structure. For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.

  Bradford Cox

  Trying, Musician, Kind

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Surely a large part of the zealous repression of radical protest in America has its roots in the fact that millions of men who are apparently "insiders" know how vulnerable the system is because they know how ambiguous their own attachments to it are. The slightest challenge exposes the fragile foundations of legitimacy of the state.

  John Schaar

  Men, Roots, America

  John H. Schaar (1981). “Legitimacy in the Modern State”, p.31, Transaction Publishers

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• I was lucky I guess. My main job was done when I finally found Ben Whishaw and knew that there was someone who could portray a character who was so ambiguous and multi-faceted. Ben is equally dark and innocent; potentially violent and yet at the same time kind of a boy. He got all that across and still makes audiences root for the guy even though they might be kind of disturbed by that fact.

  Tom Tykwer

  Character, Dark, Boys

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Things either become unclear in a story or they're just ambiguous with no real point. So defined gray area with clarity that also works in the narrative, that's tricky.

  Annette Bening

  Real, Clarity, Tricky

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• Somehow, in the novel format, I don't really like to do upfront, ideological discussion. In my heart, literature remains a poetic and ambiguous medium. On the other hand, I trained as a documentary filmmaker in film school, so my films very much reflect reality and socio-political problems. They're less subtle I would say.

  Xiaolu Guo

  Heart, School, Reality

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own.

  James Arthur

  Negative, Poet, Mood

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.

  Peter Orner

  Thinking, Unhappy, Sometimes

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I'm very, very attracted to morally ambiguous characters, not just pure bad guys or pure good guys.

  Jonah Hill

  Character, Guy, Pure

  "Interview With Jonah Hill And Todd Phillips On New Film 'War Dogs'". "Weekend Edition Sunday" with Rachel Martin, www.npr.org. August 21, 2016.

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• I do sometimes play characters that are a bit ambiguous. You've got to be brave about that sort of stuff. I like the sense of people not feeling too secure, not immediately knowing what they have in front of them.

  Andrew Scott

  Character, Stuff I Like, Play

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

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• All things will be ambiguous, for this is the curse of wisdom.

  Greg Bear

  Curse, All Things

  Greg Bear (2014). “Anvil of Stars”, p.186, Open Road Media

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• I call myself an experimental philosopher which is as ambiguous a term as comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.

  Jonathon Keats

  Design, Philosopher, Scientist

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Human courtship has some wild extremes. At one end of the spectrum, there is harassment, pestering, blackmail, and an abuse of institutional power, which its targets rightly fear and loathe. At the other end is love, which as Nietzsche said, is beyond good and evil and always deserves our respect and compassion even when it is doomed or destructive. In the wide middle of the spectrum are all the ambiguous and tragi-comic goings-on of our species.

  Catherine Wilson

  Compassion, Evil, Abuse

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The attributes of liminality are necessarily ambiguous... Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial.

  Victor Turner

  Law, Conventions, Entity

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• The woman who fights against her father still has the possibility of leading an instinctive, feminine existence, because she rejects only what is alien to her. But when she fights against the mother she may, at the risk of injury to her instincts, attain to greater consciousness, because in repudiating the mother she repudiates all that is obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, and unconscious in her own nature.

  Carl Jung

  Mother, Father, Fighting

  Carl Gustav Jung (1981). “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious”, p.99, Princeton University Press

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