Gestures Quotes - Page 6

• It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.

  Leslie Jamison

  Writing, Character, Plot

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• You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his

  Kenneth Burke

  Attitude, Men, Order

  Kenneth Burke (1969). “A Rhetoric of Motives”, p.55, Univ of California Press

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• All human action is expressive; a gesture is an intentionally expressive action. All art is expressive - of its author and of the situation in which he works - but some art is intended to move us through visual gestures that transmit, and perhaps give release to, emotions and emotionally charged messages. Such art is expressionist.

  Norbert Lynton

  Art, Moving, Giving

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• Tasting is an act of pleasure and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.

  Muriel Barbery

  Art, Writing, Pleasure

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• We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture.

  Thomas Merton

  Faith, Believe, Struggle

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• I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending - an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.

  William Kentridge

  Art, Optimism, Political

  Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge (1998). “William Kentridge”, Societe Des Expositions Des Beaux

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• Sometimes my husband will surprise me with flowers for no reason. Unexpected romantic gestures are very important and keep things exciting.

  Adriana Lima

  Husband, Flower, Important

  Source: www.pretapregnant.com

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• There is only one way to receive transmission. When I tell you something, do it immediately, without the least wavering thought. That's it. Learn. Open your heart and act. Thought stops action. It perverts it into calculated gesture stripped of grace and efficiency.

  Daniel Odier

  Heart, Grace, Wavering

  Daniel Odier (1997). “Tantric Quest: An Encounter with Absolute Love”, p.44, Simon and Schuster

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• Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Powerful, Commitment, Silence

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• The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly, not that it engages in gestures of superficial equality.

  William Rehnquist

  Constitution, Superficial, Treats

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• Truly, more than removing the partition between vectors and values, we would have needed to talk about strengthening crisscrossed lacings: an intertwined kind of understanding that would de-ideologize 'ideologies,' desanctify sanctities, but also mentalize the material bases of systems of inscription, and psychoanalyze not souls but tools. That is, in one and the same gesture, make our mnemo-technic equipment intelligible as mentality and our mental equipment intelligible as technology.

  Regis Debray

  Technology, Understanding, Soul

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• I think it is the fact that birds are two-legged, like us, which gives them something of our balance and gesture and makes them nearer to us.

  Quentin Blake

  Thinking, Two, Giving

  "Dances with frogs", www.theguardian.com. April 19, 2003.

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• Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.

  Rae Armantrout

  Bird, West, Spontaneous

  Rae Armantrout (2009). “Versed”, p.97, Wesleyan University Press

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• Typographical design should perform optically what the speaker creates through voice and gesture of his thoughts.

  El Lissitzky

  Voice, Design, Typography

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• You can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is manipulate that surface - gesture, costume, expression - radically and correctly.

  Richard Avedon

  Real, Expression, Costumes

  "Avedon's Women" by Joan Juliet Buck, www.harpersbazaar.com. December 13, 2013.

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• I love words very much. I've always loved to talk, and I've always love words — the words that rest in your mouth, what words mean and how you taste them and so on. And for me the spoken word can be used almost as a gesture.

  Martha Graham

  Mean, Mouths, Taste

  "Martha Graham Reflects on Her Art and a Life in Dance". archive.nytimes.com. March 31, 1985.

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• Even if you close your eyes, you'll still hear Donald Trump sniffing. Linguists might call [these visuals] paralinguistics, every form of information including facial gestures and facial features. Obviously these things get scrutinized in tremendous detail, so that a cough can be of outsized importance. [But] that's all part of the package.

  Ben Zimmer

  Eye, Details, Might

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• Australians are decent people with the right instincts and they wish everybody well; but if all is not well, it is none of their business and they will not lose too much sleep over it. The shrug of the shoulders has become - only temporarily, I daresay - the national gesture of Australia.

  George Mikes

  Funny, Humor, Sleep

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• I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.

  Lucian Freud

  Drama, People, Creative

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• If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Book, Writing, Two

  Source: www.barnesandnoble.com

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• There is something myopic and stunted in focussing only on the meaning of words and sentences. And this myopia is especially unfortunate when combined with a rather abstract view of a language as a set of elements and rules for combining these. For the result is to divorce enquiry into meaning from attention to the way words - and gestures, facial expressions, rituals and so on - are embedded in practices, in what Wittgenstein called 'the stream of life'.

  David E. Cooper

  Divorce, Expression, Practice

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The two most powerful things in existence: a kind word and a thoughtful gesture.

  Kenneth Langone

  Inspirational, Powerful, Thoughtful

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• It may be meaningless, but at least it's a gesture.

  Dave Barry

  May, Statistics, Meaningless

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• What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.

  Pema Chodron

  Honesty, Kindness, World

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• Gesture will survive whatever kind of light you have. Gesture can triumph over anything because of its narrative content.

  Jay Maisel

  Photography, Light, Triumph

  Jay Maisel (2014). “Light, Gesture, and Color”, p.2, New Riders

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