Quotes About Omission

Since the beginning of time man has done three things when he communicates both in speaking and in the written form. He will Generalize, Omit & Exaggerate.

His face wears the blows delivered by life. Half his pain lies in what he omits from his story; the other half sits on his face with a tenebrous weight. I am struck by the thought that we live the life we have and then that of those we love, so that at all times we are aware of either existing suffering or imminent suffering. Even in these far away mountains, despair is still despair.

The art of drawing is the art of omission.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

No artist knows everything... but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.

Omittance is no quittance.

People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.

It is difficult to remember all, and ungracious to omit any.

The Germans have a word for it: Todgeschweigen. Killed by not being mentioned.

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

If you come into a room and say, this is what we're not talking about, it follows that you're talking about nothing else.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.

The trouble with all this, she said to him, is that it leaves so much out.

In Manchuria, I had learned one important fact about propaganda: the key information isn't what you put in, but what you leave out.

Kind of late to help him now. I missed my chance. Sins of omission, they will call it where I'm headed for.

Perhaps I have not mentioned the tennis courts.

Leaving out isn't the same as lying.

It was a mistake," I assure him, "for about ten different reasons I'm not going to list.

To avoid contact with someone so as not to have to address the truth is a form of lying by omission, regardless of good intentions.

A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.