Quotes About Obscurity

Only yesterday I was full of worldly fancies, although religion had already some share in my thoughts: glory was still my daydream. Today my hopes are higher, and I covet here below nothing but obscurity and peace.

Staring at herself in the mirror, she found that she'd lost the ability to see herself through her own eyes. She was only what humans would see. Not a girl or a woman or someone in between. They wouldn't see her loneliness or fear or courage, let alone her humanity. They would see only obscenity. Calamity.

He was quiet, and had a shadow's talent for passing unremarked,

of night crowded into the slanting places beyond the reach of the dawn.

The thing about the Mirror is that no one knows where it is. In fact, no one knows what it is." "It's a mirror," Simon said. "You know – reflective, glass. I'm just assuming.

I sell Damascus steel, folded and intricate, dug up from the earth, practically useless, desirable only to lovers of the arcane, the beautiful, the old. No

No one cared who they'd been before, or even who they were now. Sometimes it felt like they lived at the bottom of the world. People at the bottom of the world mind their business, mostly.

She filled herself entirely with the molten dark.

It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values—the permanence of memory. —JOSEPH CONRAD

Let me be like a thing left in a corner and forgotten

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes, can "knock" the other's "hustle"—can give his game away. It is still not possible to overstate the price a Negro pays to climb out of obscurity—for it is a particular price, involved with being a Negro; and the great wounds, gouges, amputations, losses, scars, endured in such a journey cannot be calculated.

I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.

I understand why people achieve a level of fame and disappear, I never understood it before, but it's an attractive prospect to walk away from it all.

There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.

In darkness lies a mystery that has the power to shine brighter than true light. ?

Madness is blackness.

I have been in the spotlight, and I have been out of it.

I did what I could to inflate the rumor I was on my way to stardom. What I was on my way to, by any mathematical standards known to man, was oblivion, by way of obscurity.

There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand; and through the lust of human wit obscure things are more easily credited.

As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.

La verdadera sabiduría consiste en «querer ser ignorado y tenido por nada» –en «gozar en el desprecio de sí»–. Yo quería que, como el de Jesús, «mi rostro estuviera verdaderamente escondido y que nadie en la tierra pudiera reconocerme». Tenía sed de sufrir y de ser olvidada.

The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.