Quotes About Clarity

But if being on the level didn't shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.

How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?

When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

Everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn't give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool.

Mystification is simple. Clarity is the hardest thing of all. You trust the mystifier more if you know his deliberately choosing not to be lucid. You would trust Picasso all the way because he could draw like Ingres.

Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.

The trouble was, how could you know what question to ask? It seemed to her that you were in a position to ask a really correct question only if you already knew the answer, and what was the point of that?

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

Still, I'm not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.

He felt life more clearly too—even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle.

But what helps? What do we need to know? Not everything. Everything confuses. Directness also confuses. The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert is usually looking away in his portraits and photographs. He's looking away so that you can't catch his eye; he's also looking away because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder.

One of my sons writes books I can read, but cannot understand, and the other writes books I can understand, but cannot read.

Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

You still don't get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying.

I often wondered about Nigel, and why things seemed so much clearer to him. Was it more, or less, intelligence; more, or less, imagination; or simply a more stable personality?

finding another woman can bring an exceptional clarity of mind to a man all of a sudden.

He became nervous, things blurred in his mind, and he would sometimes make a decision simply in order to have the matter settled rather than because he knew what he wanted.

But then, as she told herself, who would learn better than she that hindsight is a prism that alters everything?

It was the brightest entry into darkness.

He was older, bolder. He knew of whores and wars, violence and vendettas. He knew precisely what he wanted, always. He wanted her.

You ought to choose fewer words that contain S for the time being. You are spitting all over me.

she echoed with longing, like struck crystal.

they were coming into focus to each other. As though each of them was a sun, burning away each other's obscuring mists.