Quotes About Nuance

Nothing is too controversial, but you have to think about how to do it with sensitivity. I don't try to be insensitive. I think really, really carefully about exactly what things mean and how they will affect people.

Femme people exist, and they are layered and they are complex and they are intelligent.

I am not a propagandist; my work has often had a political dimension but, hopefully, one that is not didactic and is open to interpretation.

Sometimes it's nice to have a song that can be taken more then one way, so it can be interpreted differently.

Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you're reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it's missing any of those things, it's not good — you're not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Se foutre la paix ne consiste donc pas du tout à se négliger, mais à accepter la complexité et la nuance du monde. C'est accepter les intempéries qu'un perfectionniste vit comme une attaque. C'est arrêter de s'autoévaluer et de s'autovérifier en permanence.

He could gaze upon a particular deep shade of green and pick out every nuance of the color. Zeluppian Fern Green, his mind would inform him. Gray, said his soul. Just a shade of gray with a greenish name. His well-trained tongue could pick out every flavor of a sweetmeat. Honey from bees fed only cowslip nectar, his mind would tell him, with cherries marinated for twenty-one years in peach-and-saffron brandy. Ash, said his soul. Ash and dust. Even

Life isn't that simple. People aren't that simple. You can't cut them into slices like a cake, then throw away the bits you don't like.

We don't have to have easy moralizing reactions to characters in literature.

The whole male solidarity and protective pedestal of privileges, their weaknesses, inviolable and fenced in by slogans, their inconsistency and charming disregard for the feelings of others proclaimed with no trace of nuance as they beat a big drum from morning to evening from the safety of their boys' network of connections.

Wit is better as a seasoning than as a whole dish by itself.

All good writing leaves something unexpressed.

And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words. He had never told anyone about it, and he probably never would.

Komatsu's view is that there are always two sides to everything, Tengo said. A good side and a not-so-bad side.

Sometimes, in this multifaceted world of ours, inconsistency can be more eloquent than consistency.

In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was joy.

I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.

I'm a brown girl from a Punjabi pind raised in Toronto. I don't expect literary critics and purists to understand the nuances of my experiences, and the experiences of the people around me... And my tradition holds that there is a magic in the written word. So how I write, what I write of, and why I write all comes naturally.

Right and wrong are both very subjective, it's all grey.

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.

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.

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.

Humans are the most complicated, nuanced things that exist. We can't be reduced to labels or summed up with five traits - even if they are the Big Five.