Specificity Quotes

• Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

  Walter Mosley

  Metaphor, Teach, Condensation

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• Specificity is the soul of narrative.

  John Hodgman

  Soul, Narrative

  John Hodgman (2017). “Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches”, p.58, Penguin

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• I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

  Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Writing, Thinking, Universal

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• As has repeatedly been stated, the underlying hypothesis, which in a number of cases has been supported by direct experimental evidence, is that each gene controls the production, function, and specificity of a particular enzyme.

  Edward Lawrie Tatum

  Numbers, Enzymes, Genes

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• At MTV, it's very nice sometimes to be able to be very specific. Specificity really makes a news story interesting because you can color it in that personality.

  Tabitha Soren

  Nice, News Stories, Color

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• Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is.

  Chip Kidd

  Design, Problem, Given

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• The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Real, Book, Proof

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• The Universe responds to specificity.

  Romany Malco

  Universe

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• We have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings.

  George Saunders

  Moving, Thinking, People

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• I think people can be trusted to know what makes them unhappy. Maybe we don't always know what we want exactly, but we can usually say what we don't with a fair amount of specificity.

  Ann Aguirre

  Thinking, People, Unhappy

  Ann Aguirre (2009). “Doubleblind”, p.97, Penguin

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• I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.

  Lily Tomlin

  Inspirational, Funny, Life

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• It is unlikely that you'll have anything emerge from MEF (Major Economies Forum) by way of detailed programmatic specificity.

  Kevin Rudd

  Way, Economy, Unlikely

  "Rudd bamboozles Germans with 'programmatic specificity'". Perth Now, July 9, 2009.

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• Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.

  George Saunders

  Reading, Writing, Skills

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.

  Nicholson Baker

  Stories, Want, Able

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke". Interview with James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

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• The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty.

  Gail Caldwell

  Honesty, Lying, Writing

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• Becaise I love God, I want to handle his truth with accuracy, clarity, and specificity. I want to build bridges of understanding from the wisdom of the Word to the details of people's lives. And because I love people, I will not be satisfied with lobbing grenades of general truth at them. Rather, through good questions, committed listening, and careful interpretation, I will enter their world with the understanding necessary to bring Christ's help to where it is really needed.

  Paul David Tripp

  Bridges, People, Understanding

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• If the results of the present study on the chemical nature of the transforming principle are confirmed, then nucleic acids must be regarded as possessing biological specificity the chemical basis of which is as yet undetermined.

  Oswald Avery

  Dna, Principles, Acid

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• I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

  William Gibson

  Writing, Lazy, Fiction

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• This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Feminist, Allies, Losing

  Source: www.iaphitalia.org

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• That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Girl, Art, Museums

  Interview with M.I.A., www.interviewmagazine.com. November 19, 2008.

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• I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Thinking, Our Lives, Abstraction

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.

  James Sallis

  Running, Memories, Motivation

  James Sallis (2012). “Black Hornet”, p.13, Oldcastle Books

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• All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Effectiveness, Color, Individuality

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• The being level speaks the language of art, music, color shape and pattern directly -- a language that requires no words -- is not limited by words -- nor does it have the specificity of words and thus cannot be broken onto parts that can be manipulated or analyzed by the intellect. It must be swallowed, whole not parsed, sorted and justified.

  Thomas Campbell

  Art, Color, Broken

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• I truly believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among . . . then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home . . . If we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put . . . then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Believe, Home, Commitment

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