Opaque Quotes - Page 3

• The Iranian leaders describe the American government exactly the way American analysts describe the Iranian one, as an opaque, factionalized system with competing power centers, over which the president exercises very limited authority.

  Ali Khamenei

  Exercise, Government, Leader

  Source: www.newyorker.com

  33 Copy quote

  Show source

• Experimental music scores are enigmatic, opaque, demanding, irritating, humorous, childlike; the best, like Cardew's Treatise, are also inspiring, giving rise, on occasion, to a music of vitality, intelligence and elegance.

  John Tilbury

  Humorous, Giving, Vitality

  9 Copy quote

• If you look at the portion of the GPU available to compute throughout the frame, it varies dramatically from instant to instant. For example, something like opaque shadow map rendering doesn't even use a pixel shader, it's entirely done by vertex shaders and the rasterization hardware - so graphics aren't using most of the 1.8 teraflops of ALU available in the CUs. Times like that during the game frame are an opportunity to say, 'Okay, all that compute you wanted to do, turn it up to 11 now.'

  Mark Cerny

  Opportunity, Games, Shadow

  10 Copy quote

• Forget what you learned about poetry in school. (That it's complex, opaque, a problem to be solved in 1500 words by tomorrow.) Poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. It holds the cadence of common life. It has a passion for truth and justice and liberty; it is a buoy to people in ordinary trouble: to a friend whose life has gone skidding into the meridian, who has been struck by bad news, who is frying eggs and hash browns and has whiny child clinging to his pant leg.

  Garrison Keillor

  Children, Heart, School

  12 Copy quote

• Our technologised society is becoming opaque. As technology becomes more ubiquitous and our relationship with digital devices ever more seamless, our technical infrastructure seems to be increasingly intangible.

  Honor Harger

  Technology, Digital, Becoming

  "Learn to look - art and tech demand it" by Honor Harger, www.theguardian.com. August 1, 2013.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• For many years, we have had these campaign finance reforms, and they have been failures. Money is more coursing through our system than ever before. Incumbents have used the laws to advantage themselves. And one of the reasons I think they have been failures is we have tried to crush down the money in places like the political parties, and it has squished out into opaque super PACs and sort of hidden channels.

  Mark Shields

  Crush, Party, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had tried, as I thought as a nun, to open myself to God and God seemed totally uninterested in me. The heavens remained closed and opaque. I now realize, of course, that I had a very, very inadequate idea of God. I was expecting clouds to part, a little sort of whisper in my ear, and of course, that's not what God is. God is not another being; we are talking about something much more profound.

  Karen Armstrong

  Ideas, Clouds, Talking

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The literature now is so opaque to the average person that you couldn't take a science-fiction short story that's published now and turn it into a movie. There'd be way too much ground work you'd have to lay. It's OK to have detail and density, but if you rely on being a lifelong science-fiction fan to understand what the story is about, then it's not going to translate to a broader audience.

  James Cameron

  Average, Fans, Details

  "James Cameron: The ‘Avatar’ sequel will dive into the oceans of Pandora". Interview with Patrick Kevin Day, herocomplex.latimes.com. April 20, 2010.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.

  Will Durant

  Book, Eye, Night

  Will Durant (1931). “Adventures in Genius”

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Self, Veils, Faces

  6 Copy quote

• Blinded by the opaque veil of mortality, her eyes are always sealed, like a tomb She wants to know- wants to feel that fire, the brightness of the moon So she searches for light, only to realize its in her, like an ember equipped to ignite.

  Jessica Sorensen

  Eye, Moon, Fire

  7 Copy quote

• When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

  Joan Didion

  Children, Writing, Wish

  FaceBook post by Joan Didion from Mar 10, 2012

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The magical story is not a microscope but a mirror, not a drop of water but a well. It is not simply one thing or two, but a multitude. It is at once both lucid and opaque, it accepts both dark and light, speaks to youth and old age.

  Jane Yolen

  Dark, Mirrors, Light

  Jane Yolen (1981). “Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie and Folklore in the Literature of Childhood”, Philomel

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

  William Faulkner

  Country, Men, Land

  William Faulkner (1985). “Novels, 1930-1935”, Library of America

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.

  Karen Armstrong

  Unique, Mind, Trying

  8 Copy quote

• A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Hands, Broken, Unity

  8 Copy quote

• Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

  Gloria Naylor

  Hurt, Memories, Glasses

  Gloria Naylor (2005). “The Women of Brewster Place”, p.35, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.

  Shirley Geok-lin Lim

  Mother, Teacher, Color

  "Walking with Her Muse: An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim". Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 July 2014, Pages 123 - 135, academic.oup.com. June 22, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Before I met No I thought that violence meant shouting and hitting and war and blood. Now I know that there can also be violence in silence and that it’s sometimes invisible to the naked eye. There’s violence in the time that conceals wounds, the relentless succession of days, the impossibility of turning back the clock. Violence is what escapes us. It’s silent and hidden. Violence is what remains inexplicable, what stays forever opaque.

  Delphine de Vigan

  War, Eye, Blood

  Delphine de Vigan (2010). “No and Me”, p.156, A&C Black

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Media, Theory

  9 Copy quote

• The corporeal element in man is a large screen and partition that prevents him from perfectly perceiving abstract ideals; this would be the case even if the corporeal element were as pure and superior as the substance of the spheres ; how much more must this be the case with our dark and opaque body. However great the exertion of our mind may be to comprehend the Divine Being or any of the ideals, we find a screen and partition between God and us.

  Maimonides

  Dark, Men, Mind

  Moses Maimonides (2012). “The Guide for the Perplexed”, p.264, Courier Corporation

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee.

  Ken MacLeod

  Two, Long, World

  Ken MacLeod (2012). “Learning The World: A novel of first contact”, p.113, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us, a datum in the strict sense of the word, something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.

  William James

  Lying, Data, Wish

  William James, Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, Ignas K. Skrupskelis (1978). “Essays in Philosophy”, p.59, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Art pierces opaque subjectivity, the not seeing of conventional life, and discloses reality.

  Langdon Brown Gilkey

  Art, Reality, Subjectivity

  7 Copy quote

• The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Imagination, Shadow, Body

  Leonardo da Vinci (2013). “Life, art and science, the thoughts of Leonardo”, p.89, Lulu.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source