Quotes About Obscurity

A hunter of shadows, himself a shade.

My name is Nobody.

Tu ne tenais pas de discours grandiloquents sur la fraternité, mais tu portais toujours une attention aux obscurs, aux vulnérables, pas uniquement parce que toi-même tu te rangeais parmi ceux-là, mais parce que les puissants pleins de certitude, ceux qui veulent à tout prix attirer la lumière sur eux, te faisaient craindre que ce monde ne devienne vraiment irrespirable.

Il y a des écrivains qui réunissent cent mille personnes à leur enterrement et il y a ceux qui n'ont jamais suscité la ferveur que d'une poignée de passeurs, confrérie clandestine dont les membres se transmettent le flambeau d'une génération à l'autre. (p. 143)

When you're invisible, no one can see that you're different.

He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing.

Yet what best protected privacy wasn't concealment but apathy - the fact that other people simply weren't interested.

And I am so dull and dirty. Like a small brown toad. He does not see me. How could he see me, when she is before him? Glowing and gilded in gold.

Invisibility was my favorite state of existence.

Dave Van Ronk is not an obscure figure. He's the biggest figure on an obscure scene, playing a kind of niche music that we knew and liked.

Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known.

David Lynch plucked me from obscurity. He cast me as the lead in 'Dune' and 'Blue Velvet,' and people have seen me as this boy-next-door-cooking-up-something-weird-in-the-basement ever since. I was 23 when I first met him, in his bungalow on the Universal lot, and could never have predicted we would have such an enduring relationship.

I like to show subjects inside a sealed veneer. There's a sense that you can't get in.

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

Natten har kommit in, sötaktig, tvekande. Man ser den inte, men den finns där, den beslöjar lamporna; man andas in någonting tjockt i luften: det är den. (s. 55)

The Schwarzkogler in question turned out to be Rudolf, an Austrian who considered himself an artist, and in order to prove it he reportedly sliced his penis off a little bit at a time and took photographs of the process. This was such an artistic triumph that he continued his career, until his masterpiece finally killed him.

They put it here because this guy is such a bugero.

College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

Always at the end of a queue, in the shadow of others, she believed she was not significant enough to cast a shadow of her own.

As a student in Beijing in 1996, I sometimes marveled at the sheer obscurity of the movies that somehow made it onto pirated discs in China.

It never occurred to me that being a stunt girl would get me recognized in any way, because the whole purpose of a stunt person is to not be known.

Even if you do succeed most people wouldn't notice anyway.

Don't try to be seen, God may be hiding you on purpose.

Maps? There are no maps. I go by dark ways, unclean ways. If such a map existed, it would be beyond price. Nameless cults would battle in the low places of the earth for such a price. Dreamers would starve themselves in endless visions seeking its location. Such a map would have to be drawn on the skin of a black he-goat, in virgin's blood, with a brush made of dragon's eyelashes. The cartographer would go mad, and it would profane the hands that touched it.