Elusive Quotes - Page 10

• I don't write songs about a specific, elusive thing. I write about love, and everyone knows what it is like to have your heart broken.

  Adele

  Song, Writing, Heart

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• In America, religious dissent is as vital as it is elusive. Like the secretions of the pituitary, the juices of dissent are essential to ongoing life even if we do not always know precisely how, when or where they perform their tasks, and the not knowing - the flimsy, filmy elusiveness - is supremely characteristic of America's expressions of religious dissent. For in the United States no stalwart orthodoxy stands ever ready to parry the sharp thrust or clever feints of dissent.

  Edwin Gaustad

  Religious, Clever, Expression

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• The truth is that trout fishermen scheme and lie and toss in their sleep. They dream of great dripping trout, shapely and elusive as mermaids, and arise cranky and haggard from their fantasies. They are moody and neglectful and all of them a little daft. Moreover they are inclined to drink too much.

  John D. Voelker

  Dream, Lying, Sleep

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• Amid the welter of vague political abstractions ... where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not only following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort ... a certain broad consistency in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. Nationalism, internationalism, colonialism, its three closest congeners, are equally elusive, equally shifty, and the changeful overlapping of all four demands the closest vigilance.

  J. Allan Hobson

  Political, Consistency, Definitions

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• I believe in good. It is an ephemeral and elusive quality. It is the center of my beliefs, but it cannot be strengthened by talking about it.

  Edward Teller

  Believe, Talking, Quality

  Edward Teller (1987). “Better a shield than a sword: perspectives on defense and technology”, Free Pr

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• The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.

  Marcel Proust

  Dream, Memories, Real

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.191, Modern Library

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• The desert wears... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting -- but waiting for what?

  Edward Abbey

  Waiting, Doe, Desert

  Edward Abbey (1968). “Desert Solitaire”, p.241, Simon and Schuster

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• As for the subject matter in my painting.. ..it is very often an incidental thing in the background, elusive and unclear, that really stirred me.

  William Baziotes

  Matter, Painting, Backgrounds

  William Baziotes (1978). “William Baziotes: A Retrospective Exhibition : an Exhibition”

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• A child is nothing like a racing car. . . . Souping up babies doesn't work that way. The child is what she is. There is a certainirreducible if elusive core. Pushing, pulling, stretching, and shrinking will not really change it. There may be spectacular interim results. The baby may say the alphabet before she walks, master two-times or even ten-times table at three. In the long run, however, this forced precocity tends to be irrelevant. . . . Whatever gains there are become unimportant. The losses can be irrevocable.

  Stella Chess

  Running, Baby, Children

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• In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.

  Barbara Hurd

  Letting Go, Dream, Home

  Barbara Hurd (2003). “Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination”, p.43, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Humility is an elusive virtue. The more we pursue it - and the more we seem to acquire it - the more we take pride in our accomplishment, and we find ourselves back at square one.

  Mike Aquilina

  Humility, Pride, Squares

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• Whatever you want is as elusive as you make it.

  Daniel Gillies

  Want

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• At that elusive moment when we transcend our ordinary performance and feel in harmony with something else-whether it's a glorious sunset, inspiring music or another human being-our studies have shown that what we are really coming in sync with is ourselves. Not only do we feel more relaxed and at peace, but this entrained state increases our ability to perform well and offers numerous health benefits.

  Doc Childre

  Music, Sunset, Ordinary

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• I shared this idea that fashion starts with a movement, an allure: elusive, defined through perfect proportions.

  Hedi Slimane

  Fashion, Ideas, Perfect

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• I never sit and fill a journal with lyrics. Most of the time I'm trying to write a feeling, not a story. I'm not necessarily trying to describe the details of a place or event so much as the feeling of the thing. It is a kind of weird alchemy that is elusive until it feels right.

  Matt Berninger

  Writing, Feelings, Trying

  Source: the-talks.com

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• So yeah, how do I think of my environment and what happens with sound art? I love to play with the idea of elusive and intangible things. That could be psychological. It could be perceptual. It could be just the way your ears help you just navigate around.

  DJ Spooky

  Art, Thinking, Play

  Source: bigthink.com

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• The good writer and the good actor are always searching for what is essential. It is a never-ending task because what is essential is always elusive and, therefore, fascinating.

  Glenda Jackson

  Essentials, Tasks, Actors

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• Everybody dreams, but memory for dreams is famously elusive. Even Sigmund Freud, without the benefit of modern technology's electroencephalogram, or EEG, did not know that adult humans dream 90 minutes per night, and that newborns spend eight hours per day dreaming (out of their 16 hours of sleep). REM sleep helps grow the brain!

  Charles McPhee

  Dream, Memories, Sleep

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Creative, Synthesis, Planning

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.43, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• Always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary. The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea.

  Rachel Carson

  Ocean, Swings, Sea

  Rachel Carson, Sue Hubbell (1998). “The Edge of the Sea”, p.1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Education, College, Men

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• That Ms. Farahani found Mr. Mohassess and persuaded him to share his story is a terrific coup, even if a great deal of his life's work remains elusive.

  Manohla Dargis

  Stories, Share, Found

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• Most of you have been where I am tonight. The crash site of unrequited love. You ask yourself, How did I get here? What was it about? Was it her smile? Was it the way she crossed her legs, the turn of her ankle, the poignant vulnerability of her slender wrists? What are these elusive and ephemeral things that ignite passion in the human heart? That's an age-old question. It's perfect food for thought on a bright midsummer's night.

  Sybil Adelman

  Love You, Unrequited Love, Passion

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I think love is one of the most elusive things in the world. I don't know that there's a perfect formula for it and that's what makes the stories interesting.

  Ashton Kutcher

  Love Is, Thinking, Perfect

  "Valentine's Day - Ashton Kutcher and Topher Grace interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• Science is like a love affair with nature; an elusive, tantalising mistress. It has all the turbulence, twists and turns of romantic love, but thats part of the game.

  Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

  Happiness, Romantic Love, Games

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