Elusive Quotes - Page 7

• It doesn't matter if you're good. If you're just good, you won't succeed. If you have patience and persistence and talent and that's it, you will not have a successful career as an actor. The elusive thing you need is luck.

  Bryan Cranston

  Successful, Persistence, Careers

  "The Last Stand of Walter White". Interview with Brett Martin, www.gq.com. July 15, 2013.

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• In the field one has to face a chaos of facts, some of which are so small that they seem insignificant; others loom so large that they are hard to encompass with one synthetic glance. But in this crude form they are not scientific facts at all; they are absolutely elusive, and can be fixed only by interpretation, by seeing them sub specie aeternitatis, by grasping what is essential in them and fixing this. Only laws and generalizations are scientific facts, and field work consists only and exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic social reality, in subordinating it to general rules.

  Bronislaw Malinowski

  Science, Reality, Law

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• I think comedy's something you can't learn. It's an instinct, which makes it rather elusive.

  Julie Walters

  Thinking, Comedy, Instinct

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• Efficiency in government is a more elusive concept than efficiency in the private economy, which may be measured relatively easily as output per units of input. What is the government's 'output?'

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Government, May, Input

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• It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.

  Joseph Conrad

  Stars, Loneliness, Eye

  Joseph Conrad (1905). “Lord Jim”, p.167, McClure, Phillips & Company

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• That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Swimming, Dark, Men

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1951). “Speak, Memory: A Memoir”

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• Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

  Lukas Foss

  Creative, Age, Seven

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• It doesn’t matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Memories, Crazy, Past

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.81, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue in U.S. society, whether domestic or foreign.

  Noel Ignatiev

  Keys, Race, White

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• It is like a dream. I didn't sleep for two nights because I was under so much pressure. That elusive medal is probably what has kept me going. I had none of the self-doubts which have bothered me in the past. I was totally positive.

  Michaela Dorfmeister

  Dream, Sleep, Past

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• It is a rare man who can prevail in the face of comfort. Freedom is fragile and elusive, for rarely does the appreciation of it exceed the pleasure of being able to tell others what to do. There is but one tick on the accuracy scale between 'optimism' and 'denial.'

  Terry Rossio

  Appreciation, Men, Optimism

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• I have found that fate is as liquid and elusive a word as love. Plato thought they were the same ... Novalis wrote that fate and soul are two names for the same principle.

  Liz Greene

  Plato, Fate, Destiny

  Liz Greene (1985). “The Astrology of Fate”, p.14, Weiser Books

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• Well, the manhunt continues for that elusive evil mastermind, but I'm telling you Enron CEO Kenneth Lay remains at large.

  David Letterman

  Evil, Ceo, Mastermind

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• But the voice goes on, calling us, beckoning us, luring us to think that there might be such a thing as justice, as the world being put to rights, even though we find it so elusive. We're like moths trying to fly to the moon. We all know there's something called justice, but we can't quite get to it.

  N. T. Wright

  Thinking, Moon, Voice

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• Nature has put itself the problem how to catch in flight light streaming to the earth and to store the most elusive of all powers in rigid form. To achieve this aim, it has covered the crust of earth with organisms which in their life processes absorb the light of the sun and use this power to produce a continuously accumulating chemical difference. ... The plants take in one form of power, light; and produce another power, chemical difference.

  Robert Mayer

  Differences, Light, Use

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• The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it becomes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest.

  Josiah Royce

  Real, Unique, Thinking

  Josiah Royce (1952). “The Religious Philosophy of Josiah Royce; Edited, with an Introductory Essay, by Stuart Gerry Brown”

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• Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. ... I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. Poverty is an elusive thing, and a paradoxical one. We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

  Dorothy Day

  Writing, Simple, Reality

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• Voice is one of the most elusive qualities in any story. We recognize it when we hear it, but it's hard consciously to create an authentic voice. Somehow voice seems to be the natural manifestation of all the narrative decisions we've made so far. We discover it more than we fabricate it.

  Philip Gerard

  Writing, Voice, Decision

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• If you had come to me a hundred years ago, do you think I should have dreamed of the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it! I use it every day, I transact half my correspondence by means of it, but I don’t understand it. Thnk of that little stretched disk of iron at the end of a wire repeating in your ear not only sounds, but words-not only words, but all the most delicate and elusive inflections and nuances of tone which separate one human voice from another! Is not that something of a miracle?

  William Crookes

  Mean, Thinking, Should Have

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• I wrote much more quickly when I was younger. Over the years I've required more time in order for the pieces to arrive in a place I am happy with. The process cannot be rushed. I have to live with a piece for quite a while to feel it ultimately is where it needs to be - though anything resembling complete satisfaction remains elusive.

  Michael Hersch

  Years, Order, Satisfaction

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. April 14, 2014.

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• Love is when there is no denying "it"...that magical, elusive feeling that really seizes us and takes us from the inside.

  Stephanie Ellis

  Love Is, Feelings

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• The Canadian Identity, it seems, is truly elusive only at home. Beyond the borders Canadians know exactly who they are, within they see themselves as part of a family, a street, a neighbourhood, a community, a province , a region, and on special occasions like Canada Day and Grey Cup weekend and, of course, during the Winter Olympics, a country called Canada. Beyond the borders, they pine; within the borders, they more often whine

  Roy MacGregor

  Country, Home, Winter

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• All doctrine is ultimately the death of joy - even when the doctrine is the elevation of the light above the serious, because joy is too varied and elusive ever to confine itself to one or the other.

  David Bennun

  Light, Joy, Doctrine

  Source: thequietus.com

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• The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies.

  Tom Robbins

  Lying, Special You, Identity

  "(Revisiting) The Syntax of Sorcery: An Interview with Tom Robbins". Interview with Tony Vigorito, realitysandwich.com. May 9, 2014.

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• Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren't yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic's day consists of trying to keep that window open.

  Roger Ebert

  Hangover, Drunk, Trying

  Roger Ebert's review of "Smashed", www.rogerebert.com. October 17, 2012.

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