Variation Quotes - Page 7

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.

John Updike

Home, Sunshine, Simple

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Perhaps it is to prepare to hear some day the music of the spheres that I am always turning my ears to the music of streams. There is indeed a music in streams, but it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined. Or imagined toward, for it is hardly for men at all. Nature has a patient ear. To her the slowest funeral march sounds like a jig. She is satisfied to have the notes drawn out to the lengths of days or weeks or months. Small variations are acceptable to her, modulations as leisurely as the opening of a flower.

Wendell Berry

Flower, Men, Funeral

Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.19, Counterpoint

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I think if you read the story as bad guy turns good guy, then clearly it is a cliché. But my experience, when I spent three years working with young people in the townships on issues principally around HIV/AIDS, is that people are usually neither entirely good or bad. They are usually variations of both. Just because someone is a carjacker doesn't mean they are a ruthless cold-blooded murderer.

Gavin Hood

Mean, Thinking, Years

Source: www.spiegel.de

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That truth which you swallow from others will not be yours...you have to realize truth and work it our for yourself according to your own nature...All must struggle to be individuals-strong, standing on your own feet, thinking your own thoughts, realizing you own Self. No use swallowing doctrines others pass on-standing up together like soldiers in jail, sitting down together, all eating the same food, all nodding their heads at the same time. Variation is the sign of life. Sameness is the sign of death.

Swami Vivekananda

Strong, Struggle, Thinking

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If I take a lick from so and so, I'm not going to get that many variations from it, because their phrases are just based on a scale. That's why I say Wes Montgomery has more substance than others. I find myself listening to the older players. You see one bar of theirs and you can get one hundred more licks out of it.

Emily Remler

Player, Listening, Bars

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In the target seats we have been going like a bomb and there is a great deal of confidence. I think there's going to be a great deal of regional variation throughout the UK.

Menzies Campbell

Thinking, Target, Bombs

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I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

James A. Michener

Writing, Thinking, Careers

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The thoughts which the word "God" suggests to the human mind are susceptible of as many variations as human minds themselves.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mind, Humans, Susceptible

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Homer, Euripides, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1929). “The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”

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There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock's (the film is complete in the director's mind) and Coppola's (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola's approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began.

Walter Murch

Ideas, Two, Perfection

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The Fundamental Regulator Paradox ... The task of a regulator is to eliminate variation, but this variation is the ultimate source of information about the quality of its work. Therefore, the better the job a regulator does the less information it gets about how to improve.

Gerald Weinberg

Jobs, Hard Work, Science

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His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses; present, past, and future. God's knowledge has no change or variation.

Saint Augustine

Past, Three, Past Present And Future

Saint Augustine (2003). “City of God”, p.589, Penguin UK

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Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch).

Michael Snow

Individuality, Sound, Western Music

Michael Snow, Louise Dompierre (2010). “The Collected Writings of Michael Snow”, p.189, Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

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You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

John Steinbeck

Monsters, Chaos, Forget

John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.66, Penguin

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Granted there are only seven stories in the universe. And I agree with that. But give me a great variation of those stories. And literate.

Debra Winger

Giving, Stories, Granted

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I tend to write out the first iteration of a lyric here and then go over here and make variations on it, on the page opposite.

James Taylor

Writing, Opposites, Pages

"Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.

Erwin Schrodinger

Space, Body, Shapes

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My serve can get better, for sure. It's not just about serving bombs, but positioning, variation in speed, in spin.

Rafael Nadal

Get Better, Bombs, Speed

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People rarely speak of children; you hear of 'cohort groups' and 'standard variations,' but you don't hear much of boys who miss their cats or 6-year-olds who have to struggle with potato balls.

Jonathan Kozol

Children, Struggle, Cat

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Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

Dean Koontz

Character, Long, Empathy

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An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. It's not taxing to the listener's intelligence because if you haven't heard it the first time round, it'll come around again.

James Fenton

Small Numbers, Ideas, Example

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I worked with my coach to develop some new spiral variations to make my program more interesting. Each one is different and you'll have to wait until January to see them.

Sasha Cohen

Sports, Interesting, Waiting

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In nearly every religion I am aware of, there is a variation of the golden rule. And even for the non-religious, it is a tenet of people who believe in humanistic principles.

Hillary Clinton

Religious, Believe, People

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Imagine an extrahuman observer looking at us. Such an extrahuman observer would be struck precisely by the uniformity of human languages, by the very slight variation from one language to another, and by the remarkable respects in which all languages are the same. And then he would notice we do not pay any attention to that because for the purpose of human life it is quite natural and appropriate just to take for granted everything that is common. We don't concern ourselves with that, all we worry about are differences.

Noam Chomsky

Differences, Worry, Would Be

Source: chomsky.info

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Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.

Jack Horner

Dinosaurs, Had Enough, Determine

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He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.

Willa Cather

Flower, Dark, Sea

Willa Cather (1999). “Death Comes for the Archbishop”, p.279, U of Nebraska Press

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