Ambiguity Quotes - Page 12

• Images work on so many different levels. As a writer you feel them, try not to get in their way or narrow them down to anything other or less complex. A writer is a curator of sorts - once you've brought the images together you try to stand at a respectful distance and let them speak for themselves. Try not to mess with their ambiguities and contradictions. They are what they are, irreducible. This is their integrity.

  Laurie Sheck

  Integrity, Distance, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If I had to fall in love with all the actresses I play with and live the situations I have to play, I would be lost ! I need to be solid and know who I really am to have fun in making something else. I noticed, while talking with other actors, that they often let ambiguity float. I don't like ambiguity, it's dangerous. I need distance. I also think that the result would prevent the audience from identifying to the characters. If you feel the things too strongly, you simply close the doors.

  Olivier Martinez

  Falling In Love, Fun, Distance

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

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• This artistic uprising we had the other night in Washington Square park: there was poetry, there was dance, there was song, there was spoken word; and people left feeling so inspired and so energised. We have to get ourselves out of this syndrome of trauma and being re-traumatised. Art releases this energy. It exposes us to wonder again, and magic again, and ambiguity - all the things we need to really keep going and fighting and resisting in these times.

  Eve Ensler

  Song, Art, Fighting

  Source: www.fanpop.com

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• Many writers and artists portrayed the poor sympathetically, and even fought on their behalf, but they themselves were not of that class. Gay life is perhaps even more subject to ambiguity, since it so often involves crossing classes.

  Luc Sante

  Gay, Artist, Poor

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I love doing movies, but right now, television is the way Hollywood was in the late '60s and early '70s. The dream era I would have loved to have been part of in Hollywood then is happening right now, but it's happening on television, with these big complicated story arcs and real character-driven shows and sheer ambiguity left and right.

  Patton Oswalt

  Dream, Real, Complicated

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• Words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there's a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there's more efficiency.

  Marjane Satrapi

  Differences, Filters, Might

  Interview with Joshuah Bearman, believermag.com. August 1, 2006.

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• I think that being mindful of your own biases tends to lead you into ambiguity, not clarity, and that following those ambiguities is the only way to approach the universal.

  James Arthur

  Thinking, Clarity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Life is easier in black and white. It's the ambiguity of a world defined in grays that has stripped me of my confidence and left me powerless.

  Amy Plum

  Black And White, World, Life Is

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• My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love.

  Mike Mills

  Dad, Writing, Gay

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• I love ambiguity. People are that way. People are very hard to work out. No one is just strong or just fragile, or anything like that.

  Emily Blunt

  Strong, People, Work Out

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. January 19, 2010.

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• Early in my career, a critic said that I needed to "explain" the irony in my work, suggesting that I needed to add text next to the images to help people understand what I was trying to say. At first I was dismayed that I wasn't making work with a clear enough message. That's when I realized that that was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do - that I wasn't responsible for a misinterpretation of my work, that there should be some ambiguity to it. They either got it, or they didn't.

  Cindy Sherman

  Opposites, Careers, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• It would be gross understatement to say that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not a model of clarity. It is in many important respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self-contradiction.

  Antonin Scalia

  Self, Important, Would Be

  "Bells Lose High Court Ruling" by Joanna Glasner, www.wired.com. January 25, 1999.

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• Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.

  Lewis Thomas

  Technology, Space, Would Be

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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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, Concrete

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The result is - document destruction - we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.

  Alan Kay

  Able, Destruction, Results

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• I think the ambiguity of similarity and difference is very powerful. It's the same scene in different times of year read across the grid, and, of course, different locations reading vertically. But you can get confused and lost in the series. You force the mind, which is always comparing and contrasting, to stumble ... That ambiguity is very powerful. One is getting lost and refinding oneself.

  David Hockney

  Powerful, Confused, Reading

  Interview with Michael Govan, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 5, 2013.

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• I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something - being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.

  Brian Eno

  Nice, Track, Mexican

  Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

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• I think, as we all learn as a child, you have to learn to tolerate ambiguity better and I'm still terrible at it and I hate it; even the word ambiguity makes me sick to me stomach.

  John Hodgman

  Children, Hate, Thinking

  "Bewildered Maine resident John Hodgman takes another crack at our 11 Questions". The A.V. Club Interview, www.avclub.com. September 3, 2015.

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• As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Passion, Character, History

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• It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously.

  Stephen Fry

  Funny, Laughter, Humor

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• Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!

  Lionel Trilling

  Life, Notebook, Hate

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• In Maureen Owen's perfectly titled Erosion's Pull, words and lines map, unmap, and revamp our everyday postcontemporary geographies: ironies and ambiguities, surrealistic conundrums, kaleidoscopic comedies, puzzlements, certain and uncertain loves and losses.

  Susan Howe

  Loss, Erosion, Everyday

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• In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Teacher, Art, Needs

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• We walk from nowhere to nowhere, but at least during our journey we have time to think on how to be able to change this ambiguity!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Change, Journey, Thinking

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• One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.

  John Green

  Jobs, People, Everyday

  Interview with Jade Chang, www.goodreads.com. December, 2012.

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