Obscure Quotes - Page 16

• This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Moving, Men, Garden

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book House (2016). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Complete Novels (Book House)”, p.393, Book House

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• Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

  Iain Banks

  Lying, Opposites, Giving

  Iain M. Banks (2010). “Look To Windward”, p.23, Hachette UK

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• A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric.

  Thomas Huxley

  Real, Science, Men

  Quoted in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (1900)

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• You — you strange — you almost unearthly thing! — I love as my own flesh. You — poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are — I entreat to accept me as a husband.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Husband, Things I Love, Flesh

  Charlotte Bronte (2013). “Jane Eyre”, p.321, Simon and Schuster

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• During the Qin Dynasty, all books not relating to practical concerns such as agriculture or construction were ordered burned by the emperor to guard against "dangerous thought." Whether accounts of zombie attacks perished in the flames will never be known. This obscure section of a medical manuscript, preserved in the wall of an executed Chinese scholar, might be proof of such attacks.

  Max Brooks

  Wall, Book, Flames

  Max Brooks (2003). “The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead”, p.186, Broadway Books

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• The truth was obscure, Too profound and too pure, To live it you had to explode

  Bob Dylan

  Truth, Philosophy, Profound

  Song: Where Are You Tonight?

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• It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.

  Leonard Cohen

  Ocean, Heart, Reality

  Leonard Cohen (2008). “Book of Longing”, p.125, McClelland & Stewart

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• I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

  Bill Gates

  Nice, Book

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• When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

  Moby

  Growing Up, Book, Pretentious

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• Speakers are not supposed to waste time on platitudes, but the capacity of this generation for ignoring the obvious and concentrating on the negative and the obscure is immense.

  Arthur Hays Sulzberger

  This Generation, Negative, Generations

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• I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure.

  Vikram Seth

  Book, Want, Not Interested

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• Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not TV. Art of all kinds is an interactive challenge. The person who makes the work and the person who comes to the work both have a job to do. I am never wilfully obscure, but I do ask for some effort.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Art, Jobs, Book

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• I wanted to play football or be a boxer, but my dad didn't want that because of all the impact. But in 1992 I was watching short track, and it was obscure, but they looked like superheroes in their tight outfits, and I thought it was amazing. I wanted to do that. I made the national team at 14.

  Apolo Ohno

  Football, Dad, Team

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• The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.

  Andre Breton

  Beautiful, Facts, Whimsical

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• In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

  Barack Obama

  Greatness, Men, Journey

  First Presidential Inaugural Address, Delivered 20 January 2009

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• By a route obscure and lonely Haunted by ill angels only, Where an eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule -- From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE, out of TIME.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Lonely, Angel, Night

  Edgar Allan Poe (2014). “Complete Collection of Edgar Allan Poe - 170+ eBooks (Complete Tales, Poems, Novels, Essays, Miscellaneous, Play)”, p.745, Ageless Reads

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• And would it not be proud romance Falling in some obscure advance, To rise, a poppy field of France?

  William Alexander Percy

  Fall, Romance, Proud

  William Alexander Percy (2013). “Collected Poems”, p.171, Knopf

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• What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

  William Blake

  Life, Men, Weak Man

  William Blake (2008). “The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake”, p.702, Univ of California Press

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• A Constitution should be short and obscure.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Power, Political, Politics

  Napoleon Bonaparte (2010). “The Corsican: The Virtual Diary of Napoleon Bonaparte”, p.88, Fireship Press

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• Don't look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them.

  Constantin Brancusi

  Art, Passion, Joy

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• A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.

  James Buchan

  Oil, Water, Today

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• Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of - heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.

  Charles de Lint

  Empathy, Mind, Wizardry

  "Into the Green". Book by Charles de Lint, 1993.

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• Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mean, Class, Giving

  Orthodoxy ch. 4 (1908)

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• On the other hand, the artist has much to do in the realm of color construction, which is so little explored and so obscure, and hardly dates back any farther than to the beginning of Impressionism.

  Robert Delaunay

  Artist, Hands, Color

  "Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics". Book by Herschel Browning Chipp, p. 318, 1968.

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• From Obama's book, "The Audacity of Hope:" "I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex - nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount."

  Barack Obama

  Sex, Book, Reading

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