Messy Quotes - Page 4

• I stake the future on the few humble and hearty lovers who seek God passionately in the marvelous, messy world of redeemed and related realities that lie in front of our noses.

  William McNamara

  Lying, Humble, Reality

  William McNamara (1977). “Mystical passion: spirituality for a bored society”

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• Most professionals specialize in only part of the complex community revitalization process. Incomplete efforts usually create messy, expensive, demoralizing failures. Few specialists understand how to bring a place back to life with a holistic approach. If anyone understands the complete revitalization process, it's Storm Cunningham. He's spent over a decade rigorously studying successes and failures worldwide. He can look at a community, regional, or organizational regeneration or redevelopment process, and quickly spot what's wrong...what's missing.

  Lindsey Davis

  Effort, Community, Missing

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• In historical fact, all of history's despots, combined, never managed to get things done as well as this rambunctious, self-critical civilization of free and sovereign citizens, who have finally broken free of worshipping a ruling class and begun thinking for themselves. Democracy can seem frustrating and messy at times, but it delivers.

  David Brin

  Thinking, Self, Civilization

  David Brin, Matthew Woodring Stover (2013). “Star Wars on Trial: Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time”, p.48, BenBella Books, Inc.

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• Man is messy, but any creature that can create space vehicles can probably cope.

  George Will

  Men, Space, Vehicle

  George F. Will (1992). “Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and at Home, 1986-1990”

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• The best time to tell your story is when you have to tell your story. When it's not really a choice. But then, when you get that first, messy, complicated version down, you have to read it over and be very tough on yourself and ask, 'Well what's the story here?' If you're lucky enough to have someone you trust looking over your shoulder, he or she can help you if [you] lack perspective on your own story.

  Jeannette Walls

  Writing, Perspective, Choices

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• What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim "You know exactly what I mean!" depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.

  Will Self

  Character, Mean, Class

  "Incidents along the road" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 6, 2009.

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• Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.

  Nicholson Baker

  Wikipedia, Facts, Incredibles

  Nicholson Baker (2012). “The Way the World Works”, p.188, Simon and Schuster

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• The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.

  Jennifer Egan

  Effort, Lines, Firsts

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• I am the god of being messy - I'm trying to get better. I was terrible in my 20s. My kids are much tidier than I am, I don't know where they get it from, maybe their mother.

  Kevin McKidd

  Mother, Kids, Get Better

  "Kevin McKidd: 'For my role in Rome I had to wear a little skirt - my wife liked that...'". www.mirror.co.uk. February 7, 2010.

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• This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing... Bodies are so messy and disappointing.

  Anne Lamott

  Confusing, Body, Disappointing

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• Despite the variety of my explorations, throughout it all it has been my contention that my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.

  Carrie Mae Weems

  Beautiful, Art, Powerful

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• I hadn't said goodbye. It had been easier, like always, to just disappear, sparing myself the messy details of another farewell. Now, my fingers hovered over my track pad, moving the cursor down to his comment section before I stopped myself. What was the point? Anything I said now would only be an afterthought. Elizabeth who goes by her middle name

  Sarah Dessen

  Goodbye, Moving, Farewell

  Sarah Dessen (2011). “What Happened to Goodbye”, p.24, Penguin UK

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• But sometimes you can't figure everything out because you can't ever really understand other people. You can't understand why they do what they do. You just have to accept a little mystery, Ben. People are mysterious, the world is mysterious. You can't know everything. You're not supposed to. This isn't a history book. It's just the world. It's a messy place.

  William Landay

  Book, People, World

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• A mother needs to be in the home even when the kids aren’t. A messy house sends a coded message to children: “I’m not loveable. Otherwise Mother would dust.

  Stephen Colbert

  Mother, Children, Home

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• The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ...it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.

  Marvin Minsky

  Mind, Agents, Way

  Marvin Minsky (1988). “Society Of Mind”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

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• What I can't understand is why you can't see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing - that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?

  Richard Dawkins

  Beautiful, Extraordinary Beauty, Ideas

  "Richard Dawkins: I Can't Be Sure God Does Not Exist". www.telegraph.co.uk. February 24, 2012.

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• Close friendships are one of life's miracles - that a few people get to know you deeply, all your messy or shadowy stuff along with the beauty and sweetness, and they still love you. Not only still love you, but love you more and more deeply. I would do anything for my closest friends, and they would do almost anything for me, and that is about as spiritual a truth as you can get.

  Anne Lamott

  Friendship, Spiritual, Love You

  "Interview with Anne Lamott, Author of Help, Thanks, Wow". Interview with Jana Llewellyn, www.friendsjournal.org. January 30, 2013.

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• Theta blew out another plume of cigarette smoke. “Not interested. Love’s messy, kiddo. Let those other girls get moony-eyed and goofy. Me? I got plans.

  Libba Bray

  Girl, Cigarette Smoke, Goofy

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• To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved.

  Osamu Dazai

  Love, Lying, Fall

  Osamu Dazai (1973). “No Longer Human”, p.47, New Directions Publishing

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• The composition happens as the work progresses. Often the messy background makes it easy to disperse shapes as needed. I'd rather it took over me than I took over it.

  Myfanwy Pavelic

  Progress, Shapes, Easy

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• Love is messy. If you really love someone, you can't avoid the pain. People die, people leave, things change, but sometimes it all works

  Danielle Steel

  Pain, Love Is, People

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• We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It's a messy business, life. It's hard to figure - full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.

  Henry Bromell

  Life, Pain, Heart

  "Northern Exposure". TV Series, www.imdb.com. 1990 - 1995.

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• Songs need to have a secret, cryptic, thematic thing about them, otherwise they are just messy and all over the place.

  Courtney Love

  Song, Secret, Needs

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• [B]inary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived.

  Ira Berlin

  Reality, Opposites, History

  Ira Berlin (2009). “Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America”, p.5, Harvard University Press

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• I took biology in high school and didn't like it at all. It was focused on memorization. ... I didn't appreciate that biology also had principles and logic ... [rather than dealing with a] messy thing called life. It just wasn't organized, and I wanted to stick with the nice pristine sciences of chemistry and physics, where everything made sense. I wish I had learned sooner that biology could be fun as well.

  Francis Collins

  Appreciation, Fun, Nice

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