Quotes About Clarity

Do you think you're the only one groping? We're all in the dark together. Wait until God please to clear the sky.

Do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.

He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.

She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air.

She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.

Two ways to be a light for all, is to be a flaming candle or the mirror that reflects it

As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought—she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.

She seemed always to have seen him through a blur - first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference - and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable.

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.

She would never again know what it was to feel herself alone. Everything seemed to have suddenly grown clear and simple.

to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it seemed, understood without knowing.

What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.

Nothing is such an enemy to accuracy of judgment as a coarse discrimination; a want of such classification and distribution as the subject admits of.

The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface. [Alluding to Joseph Priestley's Observations on Air]

it were better to get simplicity, if certainty is not to be had

But let it be considered that hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea.

Intellect stood aside and informed him of this fact.

Well, we seem to have it.

Critics always praise precision in writing, and some great writers (Joyce, Beckett, Gustave Flaubert) are masters of clarity—but one of the great (and seldom mentioned) resources of fiction is vagueness.

But I can see. I can see everything. I can see things that mom and dad can't. Or won't.

Everything can be simplified. With enough simplification and enough patience on the part of the parent, anything can be simplified to the point that even very young children can begin to understand it.

I think if you have to think about anything very long, you've obviously done yourself an injury, as it were.

I wanted to tell you somethin, and I have been workin my mind so the words will tumble out in a straight line. You know how that can be, John. I do, Barnum. Just set them words one by one and they'll do fine and we'll get where we got to go.