Quotes About Clarity

How much easier it would have been if he and Sandy could have fought: a skirmish in the night, some harsh words, some measure of the truth actually spoken aloud.

The war drops its question mark.

Though it will seem simple at first, it's actually quite complicated. No, no, it will seem complicated at first, but it's actually quite simple.

Cold demanded a sharper, simpler view of things: in those temperatures death hovered at the margins, offering clarity, providing precision. But it blurred things, too: the border between dreams and wakefulness, the way it pulled life from fingers and toes, and released them reluctantly, temporarily. The way the wind came, like news from another, more tenuous world, and stirred the trees.

A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them

Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood, isn't it?

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

I have known the sun when I saw it, even though clouds dimmed its face.

La luz dentro de ella era como un faro, y nunca más volvería a la oscuridad.

All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away, how can you hope to see?

We only see what we want to see.

One can think of the truth as eine vertiefung – a sort of deep valley which may not be visible from a distance but which will come upon you quite suddenly. There are many ways to arrive there.

In a world full of uncertainties, is it not inherently satisfying to come to the last page with every i dotted and every t crossed?

pointing the way ahead and throwing pure, white light on to his immediate surroundings. Alex was at the start of a long tunnel

But at the same time I recalled something Holmes had said to me many times, namely that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

That's what he said. So if she could see him across the road, that means her eyesight was perfectly good. She made up the whole thing.

Whodunnits are all about truth: nothing more, nothing less. In a world full of uncertainties, is it not inherently satisfying to come to the last page with every i dotted and every t crossed? The stories mimic our experience in the world. We are surrounded by tensions and ambiguities, which we spend half our life trying to resolve, and we'll probably be on our own deathbed when we reach that moment when everything

It was as if he had recognised how few pleasures he had in his life, making him all the more determined to cling on to the few that remained. Murder and cigarettes. That about summed him up.

away from him. We wouldn't want there to be any more misunderstandings, would we?' 'I thought you said I had carte blanche.

It could have happened like that.' Why did Hawthorne have to sound so unsure when it was perfectly obvious to me?

There are, I think, occasions when you know that you have arrived at the end of a long journey, when even though your destination is concealed from sight, you are somehow aware that when you turn the corner that lies just ahead of you, there it will be.

But I'm not going to play fucking University Challenge with you now or at any time. I've got a dead woman and somebody strangled her in her own front room and that's all that matters to me right at this moment.