Ambiguity Quotes - Page 5

• Whenever there's chaos, there's ambiguity, and where there's ambiguity, there's fear. And fear gets manipulated.

  Robert Redford

  Chaos

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• The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

  Ron Carlson

  Heart, Tolerance, Stories

  Ron Carlson (2007). “Ron Carlson Writes a Story”, Graywolf Press

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• The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

  William Empson

  Art, Roots, Poetry

  William Empson (1966). “Seven Types of Ambiguity”, p.3, New Directions Publishing

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• Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

  Terry Eagleton

  Alternatives, Kind, Possibility

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.117, John Wiley & Sons

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• Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Women, Often Is, Ambivalence

  Lillian B. Rubin (1981). “Women of a certain age: the midlife search for self”, Harpercollins

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• I have never had a problem dealing in areas of ambiguity. I can make a decision and not have it all lined up just right.

  Jerry Jones

  Decision, Problem, Areas

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• Photography's ability to blur truth and fiction is one of its most compelling qualities. But when misused... this ambiguity can have severe, even lethal consequences.... Photography's ambiguity, beautiful in one context, can be devastating in another.

  Taryn Simon

  Beautiful, Photography, Quality

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• No matter how physically faint, a photograph involuntarily whisper of something exquisitely carnal. The weeks, the years, whatever stretches of time separating our present from the photographs retire into the transparence of the shot and seem erased by it. We almost have to shake ourselves to overcome the feeling that we peer out at the other place, in that different age. Yet we are always aware of this illusory dislocation, for such is the ambiguity, in principle, that seduces us over and over again in the photographic experience.

  Max Kozloff

  Years, Feelings, Age

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• I believe that some of my best images have [the] ambiguity which is an essence of life. In this sense I am not interested in trying desperately to make Art but I am interested in relating to the marvelous extravagance of Life.

  John Gutmann

  Art, Believe, Essence

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• As we progress along the intercultural journey, we become self-reflective about habits of heart and mind and the ways these are expressed in daily life. We develop strategies for encountering change, unfamiliarity and ambiguity in creative ways. We begin to realize that what is taken, as "common sense" is really "cultural sense". Our life becomes richer and deeper for having encountered differences.

  H. Ned Seelye

  Taken, Heart, Journey

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• Read Mann's notes, which contain precise accounts of cholera and its symptoms, and observe how careful he is throughout his fiction in getting medical details straight - then you might begin to wonder whether cholera is the only candidate for the cause of Aschenbach's death. What results from this, I think, is a deeper appreciation of Mann's brilliance in keeping so many possibilities in play. The ambiguity is even more artful than people have realized.

  Philip Kitcher

  Appreciation, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Most people aren't sure what's going to happen on a first date. Given that ambiguity, every woman must be totally aware at every moment that she is responsible for every choice she makes... protect yourselves. See trouble coming.

  Camille Paglia

  People, Choices, Firsts

  Playboy Interview, May 1995.

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• Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women--the quality of shifting from child to woman, theseeming helplessness one moment and the utter self-reliance the next that baffle us, that seem most difficult to understand. These are the qualities that make her a mystery, the qualities that provoked Freud to complain, "What does a woman want?

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Children, Often Is, Self

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• There's no gray area in law enforcement. Evil exists in the world and it must be dealt with. And those on the side of good can feel righteous in their approach to eliminating evil. There's no ambiguity there.

  Benjamin Bratt

  Law, Evil, Sides

  Source: pittsburghurbanmedia.com

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• Ambiguity is really important to me. Part of the difficulty facing photographers is that almost any subject matter has accumulated a representational history, so to find a new discursive space, a space to wander around those subject matters, is a real challenge.

  Larry Sultan

  Real, Space, Challenges

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• There's a reticence necessary when you consider the suffering of others. Into the space created by that reticence, you bring in those things that best help us confront ambiguity: music, painting, film, and so on.

  Teju Cole

  Suffering Of Others, Space, Helping

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

  Don DeLillo

  Religious, Book, Writing

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• We are living in times of great uncertainty. Likely no more so than in previous times but the sense of ambiguity may be more pervasive in light of the financial crash from which we have yet to recover. That means leaders need to step up their game. They need to more specifically in providing direction and in delivering inspiration.

  John Baldoni

  Inspiration, Mean, Leader

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• Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Heart, Acting, Action

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• No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician - and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member - pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.

  Leon Botstein

  Artist, Faculty Members, Physicians

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• To me the ambiguity is, maybe our perception of ourselves is always going to be different than somebody else's perception. There will always be that disparity.

  Simon Helberg

  Perception, Different, Disparity

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• Mann is widely recognized as a master of irony and ambiguity, yet it's remarkable how quickly people foreclose options he carefully leaves open. Lots of readers - including eminent critics - jump to conclusions: that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy is a central background text, that Aschenbach is an inferior writer, that he's never been attracted by pubescent male beauty before, that he dies of cholera.

  Philip Kitcher

  People, Tragedy, Males

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• There are some audiences who are uncomfortable with the ambiguity, though. They want a film to chew their food for them, they want Hollywood endings that tie everything together in the end and answer all of the questions. They are usually people on one extreme of the political spectrum or other and they haven't been happy because the film is not polemical enough on their side. They aren't usually people who aren't interested in understanding points of view that they disagree with - they just want to attack their opponents - and I'm ok with them not liking the film.

  Marshall Curry

  People, Political, Understanding

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• Also, I'm drawn to moments of ambiguity, when things could go right or they could go wrong. I'm interested in discomfort. Discomfort is a place where we're still close enough to comfort to understand our unhappiness. Most of the things we desire are things that can destroy us.

  Laurel Nakadate

  Desire, Comfort, Moments

  Source: therumpus.net

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• leaders seem to have a high tolerance for ambiguity. Recognizing that the brain does not work in a completely linear fashion, leaders demonstrate a comfort with the chaos of exploding ideas, many of them seemingly unrelated to the stimulus that caused them.

  Marlene Caroselli

  Leadership, Fashion, Ideas

  Marlene Caroselli, William J. Rothwell, Dale C. Brandenburg (1990). “The Language of leadership”, Center for Professional development

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