Reticence Quotes - Page 2

• Still, there is a basic reticence about his approach that feels refreshing in today's culture of maximum exposure. Brandt did not go to great lengths to turn people into icons, nor did he presume to show their “true nature” in something so transient as a photograph. Instead, he used photography's special qualities to suggest intimate things about his subjects, things that cannot be put into words, and may not even be possible to put into pictures.

  Sebastian Smee

  Photography, Icons, People

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• Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters. Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence. When a message has no clothes on How can it be spoken.

  Thomas Merton

  Attitude, Wind, Clothes

  Thomas Merton (1980). “The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton”, p.351, New Directions Publishing

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• When it comes to letting the world in on the secrets of his heart, he has about as much shrinking reticence as a steam calliope.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Heart, Secret, Shrinking

  P.G. Wodehouse (2012). “The World of Jeeves: (Jeeves & Wooster)”, p.272, Random House

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• Three years after my first trip to Haiti, I realized there was another emotional note that had to be reckoned with: the intense, vibrant color of these worlds. Searing light and intense color seemed somehow embedded in the cultures that I had begun working in, so utterly different from the gray-brown reticence of my New England background. Since then, I have worked predominantly in color.

  Alex Webb

  Emotional, Light, Color

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• The art of flirtation is dying. A man and woman are either in love these days or just friends. In the realm of love, reticence and sophistication should go hand in hand, for one of the joys of life is discovery. Nowadays, instead of progressing from vous to tu, from Mister to Jim, it's 'darling' and 'come to my place' in the first hour.

  Marya Mannes

  Art, Men, Discovery

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• It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

  John Dos Passos

  Rams, Fiction, Way

  John Dos Passos (2015). “The Best Times: An Informal Memoir”, p.222, Open Road Media

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• perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood. ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling.

  Dervla Murphy

  Children, Thinking, Artist

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• In the worship of Bacchus, we have sacrificed too freely.... Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius.

  Okakura Kakuzo

  Sweet, Queens, Ivory

  Okakura Kakuzo (2000). “The Book of Tea the Illustrated Classic Edition”, p.30, Tuttle Publishing

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