Quotes About Clarity

I've always had a passion for tearing the bandages from other people's eyes. I've always insisted that those round me should see things as they are. I suppose it is that I need companionship in despair. I can't understand not despairing.

The really pure in heart know nothing of what goes on around them each day, each night; never realize what poisonous weeds spring up beneath their childish feet.

I felt at one and the same time quite close, within reach of my hand, and yet an infinite distance away, an unknown world of goodness. Often Isa had said to me: 'You, who see nothing but evil.... You, who see evil everywhere....' It was true, and it was not true.

So long as I know what's expected of me, I can manage.

The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and to waken her up a little.

If you are four you are four

and felt it as well to make his own freedom from responsibility quite clear without any delay.

She knew now why she had come up here. It was so that she might feel like this—as if she was upheld far away from things—as if she had left everything behind—almost as if she had fallen awake again. There was no perfume in the air, but all was still and sweet and clear.

Vicki shines with intelligence as brightly as with beauty, a clear open face, black eyes, and a smile that makes you see what she looked like as a nine-year-old.

You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.

You should read it over again," Robin said. "Especially the part where the person comes out of the spell and finally sees clearly.

You're going to tell me even if I've got to shake it out of you.

It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees—this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.

good writing should be grasped at once—in a second.

I felt that I was hearing the answer to a question that I hadn't known enough to ask.

The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the clichés and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversation, cannot and should not be used when our characters are talking. Rather, they should speak more fluently than we do, with greater economy and certitude.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential.

The brief sentence can be just as effective, since what matters is not complexity or decoration but rather intelligibility, grace, and the fact that the sentence should strike us as the perfect vehicle for expressing what it aims to express; the sentence should seem ideally suited to whatever story or novel or essay it happens to appear in.

what matters is not complexity or decoration but rather intelligibility, grace, and the fact that the sentence should strike us as the perfect vehicle for expressing what it aims to express…

Perhaps it was the approach of death that had opened his eyes wide and made him see so clearly.

Word of the Lord

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.

There are two ways of spreading light..to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.