Quotes About Elusiveness

The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud.

Sometimes when she woke from a flabbergasting dream Liz would lie very still to see if she could net it before it fled; perfectly still, eyes closed, not moving her head, as if the slightest shift would tip the story-bearing liquid, break its fragile meniscus and spill the night's elusive catch.

The space where writing happens is a unique space that's hard to define, and when you're kicked out of it because you're travelling or distracted, it seems so elusive and hard to defend because you yourself doubt whether it existed.

Certainly man is a remarkably vain, variable, and elusive subject.10 It is hard to base any constant, uniform judgment upon him.

Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think." That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.

an event that had the consistency of smoke and lacked anything of substance.

But even her Greek property did not inspire Elisabeth to settle down. Hardly had the castle been completed that she set out again, not unlike the way she had behaved about the Hermes Villa, which she no longer especially liked.

I'm a fish swimming by...catch me if you want me.

The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.

The seeker is never so popular as the sought. People want what they can't get.

Apparently, Ellory had been right yesterday when he told me that Chekov was a ghost—Prague, Johannesburg, Rome, Hong Kong—Alexei would materialize out of nowhere, do his work, and then disappear. But at least now, thanks to the video surveillance cameras at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, we had a photo of him.

And always, I could see that, despite his weakness for her or because of it, he seemed uncatchable, as if he might slip away at any moment.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.

Bigfoot didn't answer but there were times Doc could hear his silences, and this one was saying Too Much You Can't Know About So Fuck Off.

A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men.... Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.

This is the fundamental wisdom that suffuses Iris Murdoch's fiction from Under the Net onward. True virtue, true goodness, true love flow from respect for the strangeness and the mystery of other people and the world that surrounds us. They flow from the refusal to inflict our own designs on them, to deny their innate elusiveness, their impenetrable quiddity.

Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, Offer no angles to the wind. They slip, diminished, Neat, through loopholes Less than themselves.

Mark Twain cannot be defined.

Money is as shy and elusive as the "old time" maiden.

The best people are the ones you never meet.

and declining all efforts at closeness or intimacy. "James just doesn't seem to want me," I wrote in my diary. "Bastard, I hate him. Why do I love him so? Why don't I love a Giver? I suppose I need enough elusiveness to keep me feeling as unworthy as I believe myself to be. Perhaps James has

Quiet as a shadow Light as a feather Quick as a snake Calm as still water Smooth as summer silk Swift as a deer Slippery as an eel Strong as a bear Fierce as a wolverine Still as stone

Luck is like a cat." Susan wagged her forefinger at him, as if she were correcting a child who should know better. "The more you go after it, the more it eludes you. You can chase what doesn't want you, but you only catch what chooses to be in your palm.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,And when you reach the scene of the crime—Macavity's not there!