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Elusive Quotes

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Elusive Quotes

“How can one discover what he feels?" "I thought he might perhaps behave — quite differently with you?" "No, no. We seem to know each other well but I think that's just because I parade my feelings. He's affectionate, detached, passive, absolutely passive." "He's never told you about that place?" "He's never talked about himself at all.”

SadIris MurdochPassiveElusiveDetachedAmbiguousThe Nice And The Good
Book:The Nice and the Good
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“Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self--to the mediating intellect--as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, "the blues" which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form.”

SelfPainExistenceDepressionIllnessIntellectMoodGloomElusiveBluesIncomprehensible
Book:Darkness visible: a memoir of madness
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“There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to recognize it and be able to hold it and to extend it. But for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter. And so we let each thing go, thinking vaguely that it will always be given to us to try again. Thus works of art, and thus whole lives of men, are spoilt by blinking and moving quickly on. I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already 'done' them: not because they were bad, but because they already belonged to the past and I had lost interest. My thoughts were soon stale to me. Some things I ruined by starting them too soon. Others by thinking them so intensely in my head that they were over before they began. Projects would change in a second from hazy uncommitted dreams into unsalvageable ancient history. Whole novels existed only in their titles.”

WritingInspirationArtistWriterCreative ProcessIris MurdochElusiveThe Black PrinceCrucial Moment
Book:The Black Prince
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“In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.”

WorldMindHomeDreamBodyWaterMeditationMagicIdentityLetting GoWoodsCirclesTreasureChestsSlipsOur ThoughtsGlimpseFleetingElusiveSleepySwampsIrisesTreasure Chests
Book:Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
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“My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.”

GivingWritingArtIdeasReasonStoriesCertainLiteratureWonderSightSatisfactionScaryImpressionEtcVagueAdventurousElusiveExpectancyWriting StoriesScenic
Book:H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection (160 Works Including Early Writings, Fiction, Collaborations, Poetry, Essays & Bonus Audiobook Links)
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“The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams.”

ShouldRealReasonDreamRealityImaginationMemoriesDestroyedReason WhyNo ReasonConformOur DreamsArbitraryOur MemoriesElusiveSelected
Book:In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV: Sodom and Gomorrah (A Modern Library E-Book)
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“Amid the welter of vague political abstractions ... where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not only following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort ... a certain broad consistency in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. Nationalism, internationalism, colonialism, its three closest congeners, are equally elusive, equally shifty, and the changeful overlapping of all four demands the closest vigilance.”

PoliticalCertainThreeTermFourDemandApproachRelationDefinitionsFollowingNationalismBroadsColonialismClosestConsistencyVagueObscureImperialismAbstractionElusiveVigilanceKindredOverlappingInternationalism
Author:J. Allan Hobson
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