Rambling Quotes

• Be not careless in deeds, nor confused in words, nor rambling in thought.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Confused, Confusion, Confusing

  "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, Book VIII, (51), (c. 161 - 180 AD).

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• By my rambling digressions I perceive myself to be growing old.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Age, Growing, Perceive

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• One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.

  Jane Austen

  Inspiring, Nature, Eye

  Jane Austen (1833). “Mansfield Park”, p.185

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• Generating exciting new ideas burns 325 calories per hour and has no carbs. Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour. Rambling aimlessly about a point that someone has already made burns only 3 calories per hour.

  Mike Brown

  Wall, Ideas, Use

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• From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

  William Butler Yeats

  Dream, Memories, Air

  William Butler Yeats (1931). “Later Poems”, p.114, Library of Alexandria

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• We're interested by public personas and private personas, otherwise we wouldn't put on with actors rambling on with the same kind of stuff, over and over again, saying variations of the same thing. I'm always amazed by how fascinated people still are by actors because it's the same version of events that actors describe, all the time.

  Toby Jones

  People, Events, Variation

  "Toby Jones Talks THE GIRL, the Process of Finding Alfred Hitchcock, THE HUNGER GAMES, HARRY POTTER, and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. October 20, 2012.

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• There's some end at last for the man who follows a path; mere rambling is interminable.

  Seneca the Elder

  Journey, Men, Hiking

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• I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.

  David Mamet

  Youth, Enough, Fortunate

  "Q&A with film director David Mamet". SI.com Interview, www.si.com. April 8, 2008.

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• And we certainly don't have full conversations on cellphones. You know? Usually the reception is so bad, but it's only bad on your side. The person talking to you has no clue. They're just rambling on and on. You've got your finger jammed in your ear, you're shushing people on the streets. You're ducked behind a dumpster so you can hear about your friend's new hair cut. What about the bangs are they shorter?! Are the bangs shorter?! The bangs!

  Ellen DeGeneres

  Cutting, Talking, Your Side

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• To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

  Ray Bradbury

  Beautiful, Book, Writing

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• Some writers find that they don't know their themes until they've finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward balancing on that tightrope: not too contrived, not too rambling; does what I'm saying about the world below me actually add up to anything? Other writers pay attention to these things as they write the first draft. Either way, an awareness of the macro and micro levels of theme can provide one more tool for thinking about what you should write, and how.

  Nancy Kress

  Eye, Writing, Thinking

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• I generally have a real strong idea or a strong punchline, and I just try to get to it by rambling around, as I don't like to memorize words.

  Norm MacDonald

  Strong, Real, Ideas

  Interview with Steve Heisler, tv.avclub.com. April 12, 2011.

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• I just sit here and tell the story as though I can't help it. There's always something in the day that reminds me, that sets me off all hot and guilty and scared and rambling and wistful, like I am now.

  Tim Winton

  Art, Hot, Stories

  Tim Winton (2011). “In the Winter Dark”, p.1, Pan Macmillan

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• If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along.

  Carl Sagan

  Religious, Political, Able

  Interview with Charlie Rose, May 27, 1996.

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• Only the other day I was inquiring of an entire bed of old-fashioned roses, forced to listen to my ramblings on the meaning of the universe as I sat cross-legged in the lotus position in front of them.

  Prince Charles

  Rose, Bed, Lotuses

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• If you come across an insane person who's talking gibberish, you can't make any sense of it at all and that would be one way that enlightenment is different. If you read Dogen, a lot of his stuff is very strange and is coming from a different place than what we're used to, but at the same time, it's not senseless ramblings and that's part of what attracted me to Dogen. I didn't get it, but it was sane. It's not some guy raving about UFO's or Moses living in his bathtub, it's was actually something sane that I just didn't get, if that makes sense?

  Brad Warner

  Talking, Insane Person, Guy

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• Here is my recipe for a mood enhancer. Take a friend, preferably one with a really annoying fringe and outsize pants, and when she is rambling on swiftly, push her into a ditch and run away.

  Louise Rennison

  Running, Recipes, Pants

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• I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. And Mother. And God.

  Johnny Cash

  Love, Mother, Song

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• We all experience many freakish and unexpected events - you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be glimpsed later on. When you are an old guy, you can look back, and maybe this rambling life has some through-line. Others can see it better sometimes. But when you glimpse it yourself, you see it more clearly than anyone.

  Viggo Mortensen

  Fate, Guy, Suffering

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• Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.

  Gregory David Roberts

  Dream, Wish, Midnight

  Gregory David Roberts (2004). “Shantaram: A Novel”, p.137, Macmillan

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• Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure, the climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

  Christopher McCandless

  Spiritual, Home, Adventure

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• Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another.

  Bruce Holland Rogers

  Art, Book, Perfect

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• A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn't found. But that was no biggie. You either threw those relics out or took them to Goodwill.

  Stephen King

  Years, Storage Space, House

  Stephen King (2014). “A Good Marriage”, p.18, Simon and Schuster

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• Let us not write at a loose rambling rate, in hope the world will wink at all our faults.

  Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

  Writing, Style, World

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• This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.

  Aleister Crowley

  Taken, Complaining, Rubbish

  Aleister Crowley (2010). “The Diary of a Drug Fiend”, p.149, Weiser Books

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