Ambiguous Quotes

• I look for ambiguity when I'm writing because life is ambiguous.

  Keith Richards

  Writing, Looks, Life Is

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• I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.

  Bernardo Bertolucci

  Way, Life Is, Left

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.

  Sigmund Freud

  Creativity, Ideas, Innovation

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

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• May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

  May Sarton

  Fashion, What Matters, Trying

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.65, Open Road Media

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• In a very complex way, things have improved in the dramatic field. Before you had the good and the bad and you couldn't mingle them. Now it's more ambiguous.

  Isabelle Huppert

  Way, Fields, Dramatic

  Interview with Christopher Cook, www.theguardian.com. November 11, 2001.

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• These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.

  Felix Mendelssohn

  Soul, Misunderstood, Genuine

  Felix Mendelssohn's letter to Marc-Andre Souchay (October 15, 1842) as quoted in "Letters of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy from 1833 to 1847" edited by Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Dr. Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy (pp. 313-314), 1863.

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• I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.

  Stephen Rea

  Art, Thinking, Great Art

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• The meaning of this observation is unclear, but it raises the unfortunate possibility of ambiguous triplets; that is, triplets which may code more than one amino acid. However one would certainly expect such triplets to be in a minority.

  Francis Crick

  Minorities, May, Acid

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• Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.

  Jerry Garcia

  Scary, Doe, Stuff

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• I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

  James Ellroy

  Reader, Provoking, Response

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• Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  Life Is, Suspended, Acquire

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• I'm pleased the administration is endorsing the need for legislation dealing with the chemical sector. In the past, the administration's position has been ambiguous.

  Susan Collins

  Past, Needs, Administration

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• The ambiguous orientation of Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia.

  Kenzaburo Oe

  Country, Japan, Asia

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• The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

  Roman Jakobson

  Running, Taken, Giving

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• Despite elections and the experience of post-Soviet personal freedoms by the Russian people, the fate of democracy in Russia is perhaps more ambiguous now than at any time since the collapse of the Communist system.

  Richard Lugar

  Fate, Russia, People

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• I was perceiving myself as good as a man or equal to a man and as powerful and I wanted to look ambiguous because I thought that was a very interesting statement to make through the media. And it certainly did cause quite a few ripples and interest and shock waves.

  Annie Lennox

  Powerful, Men, Media

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• It opposes the dogmatic application to all cases of what is adequate only for piecemeal aggregates. The question is whether an approach in piecemeal terms, through blind connections, is or is not adequate to interpret actual thought processes and the role of the past experience as well. Past experience has to be considered thoroughly, but it is ambiguous in itself; so long as it is taken in piecemeal, blind terms it is not the magic key to solve all problems.

  Max Wertheimer

  Taken, Past, Keys

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• The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century-sex and paranoia.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, Sex, Moving

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• The film is ambiguous, an ambiguity that reflects on Japan today, and a world in which nothing is clear. Once I made the film [Takeshis'], I realized it was about this feeling of vague disquiet in Japan and in the rest of the world, a feeling that is gaining on us, getting less vague.

  Takeshi Kitano

  Japan, Feelings, World

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

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• We live in times that are in many ways ambiguous. Maybe that's why kids want precision in what they read - they don't like that moral ambiguity.

  Lois Lowry

  Kids, Want, Way

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• The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.

  Emily Blunt

  Looks, Mysterious, Enjoy

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

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• Science now finds itself in paradoxical strife with society: admired but mistrusted; offering hope for the future but creating ambiguous choice; richly supported yet unable to fulfill all its promise; boasting remarkable advances but criticized for not serving more directly the goals of society.

  J. Michael Bishop

  Hope, Future, Science

  J. Michael BISHOP (2009). “How to Win the Nobel Prize”, p.11, Harvard University Press

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• Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

  Harold Pinter

  Art, Giving, Frozen

  Harold Pinter (2009). “Various Voices: Sixty Years of Prose, Poetry, Politics, 1948-2008”

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• The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

  Nicolas Cage

  Character, Answers, Attractive

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• Testing is the process of comparing the invisible to the ambiguous, so as to avoid the unthinkable happening to the anonymous.

  James Marcus Bach

  Bugs, Invisible, Process

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