Quotes About Subtlety

la mejor victoria es vencer sin combatir"

He has already struck the match, his hands cupped to protect the small flame against the currents of the air but also to smuggle more of his body into the exchange, under cover of courtesy. Frazer always cups his hands around the flame and leans near, even when indoors in a place with no drafts. Some men embrace all the retrograde aspects of gallantry because they've intuited that to be gallant is to take sexual hold of a woman, however obliquely. She thinks Frazer is one of these men.

In one of its aspects, art is a technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of attention. The history of the arts is tantamount to the discovery & formulation of a repertory of objects on which to lavish attention. (Oscar Wilde pointed out that people didn't see fogs before certain nineteenth-century poets & painters taught them how to; & surely, no one saw as much of the variety & subtlety of the human face before the era of the movies.)

Charm. The most insidious weapon in all the human armoury.

It was the sort of kiss that seduced with subtlety, sent tingles through her body and left her desperate for more.

tiny movements that spoke volumes and seemed to envelop them in a fine mist of Pretty.

You should give no indication that we wish the three-way division of Bosnia.

She knew that if you wanted somebody to believe something, there was no point forcing it down their throat. Far better to give them a hint, a glimpse, a taste, then snatch it away from them. The faster you ran, the more they would give chase, and the more likely to believe the hard-won information when they caught it.

The two women exchanged a slight and hasty smile. And that flash of a smile was enough for Faith to understand that Mrs. Vellet was not dry, and Miss Hunter was not cold, and to sense a moment of rightness like two notes in accord, the tiniest fragment of a melody that she did not understand.

Satan didn't lose any of his beguiling ways when he became the fallen prince. He took his charm, his subtleties, and his clever plots to use on us.

Bill had always been a placid pond of a friend with a few boulders of madness lurking beneath the surface, but unlike me he knew how to keep the jagged edges out of sight.

Style is what happens when simplicity is achieved.

It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go.

Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past.

What's interesting is to be sexy but not know it. You'll be in a restaurant, and some girls will walk in and you can tell that they really want to be sexy. It's written on their faces because that's all they want to show. There's a fear that one might not look further.

Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.

I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.

A bad bitch was so slick that she made him think he was calling the shots while she planted the seeds and was the owner of all his thoughts.

A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.

For a new fount to be successful it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty.