nebulous QUOTES

1 " our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life "

― Erich Maria Remarque , All Quiet on the Western Front

2 " What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms. "

― Thomas Sowell , The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

3 " The skies gave way to the full ascendence of morning and clouds skittered across the expanse, the variations on a nebulous theme woven on a celestial loom. "

― , Recollection of Shared Days: Stories of Celebration

4 " Jesus calls all sinners to repent. True repentance is not a nebulous response of sorrow; it requires definite actions. Repentance so transforms the mind that it results in a changed life. Repentance does not merely say “I’m sorry” (similar to what we say when we accidentally step on someone’s foot). Rather, true repentance says from the heart, “I’ve been wrong and grieve over my sin, but now I see the truth, and I will change my ways accordingly. "

― Joel R. Beeke , Why Christ Came: 31 Meditations on the Incarnation

5 " The contemporary art world is what Tom Wolfe would call a " statusphere." It's structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affliction, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attribution such as the size of one's art collection. "

6 " ...few truly understood how disheartening it was to be cut off from worlds so strange and distant they remained to us fantasies rather than distant realities, too surreal and foreign to be touched. Their minds were fixated on what they knew to be real, unable to create the atmospheres of the nebulous realms that lay just beyond our reach, just beyond the dimming horizon, our celestial limits. "

― Moonshine Noire

7 " Like much of the identitarian Left, feminists want to replace old etiquette rules with a new system of politically-driven language policing, controlled by them and predicated on nebulous hurt feelings and speculative " harm." Having long overturned the hectoring, socially-conservative establishment, they now want to assume its place. "

8 " It's a nebulous thing, but it is my belief—my experience also—that women do not have the need to collect that men have. "

― Deborah Meyler , The Bookstore

9 " A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos—like amber in which a memory gets trapped. "

― Michael Chabon

10 " We communed together a moment, one with the other—I was deeply fascinated. At our first encounter I am sure I had a nebulous presentiment that I would one day go to it in spite of my hesitation, in spite of all the efforts put forth to hold me back,—and the emotion that overwhelmed me in the presence of the sea was not only one of fear, but I felt also an inexpressible sadness, and I seemed to feel the anguish of desolation, bereavement and exile. With downcast mien, and with hair blown about by the wind, I turned and ran home. I was in the extreme haste to be with my mother; I wished to embrace her and to cling close to her; I desired to be with her so that she might console me for the thousand indefinite, anticipated sorrows that surged through my heart at the sight of those green waters, so vast and so deep. "

― Pierre Loti , Le Roman d'un enfant

11 " Hoping to apply what few marketable skills I'd acquired in school, I used my undergraduate's Hebrew to check into options in Israel. I was eager to travel, open to adventure, but as a non-Jew, I found that my possible motives were a cause for concern. In more than one interview I was asked a question that I would eventually hear word for word from Malpesh himself: Are you some sort of missionary? To my prospective employers I tried to explain that if I was to convert anyone it would only be to a nebulous wishy-washy agnosticism, but this honest answer did not earn me many callbacks. "

― Peter Manseau , Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

12 " I grimace, thinking someone should come up with a new phrase for 'I left the ocean without a kiwi-sized chunk of my lower-left butt cheek' to replace the rather nebulous term 'exploratory bite. "

― Elle Lothlorien , Alice in Wonderland

13 " ...alone is such a nebulous state when one is queen. "

― Rae Carson , The Crown of Embers (Fire and Thorns, #2)

14 " It was normal for it to rain, but in October- who could forget the rains of October?- now this disturbingly silent rain was falling. That was so nebulous that it was pretty; that, if it had not been wet, no one would have believed it was raining; that was so slow that it was possible to follow its fall with one's eyes. That which villagers called 'the rains of October' was the accumulation of the serenity of such a life. Eyes almost broke into tears on looking at the sun subdividing itself, at the end of the afternoon, in each drop of that snail's-pace precipitation, as if the great star had dissolved each day an infinitesimal bit more. "

― Ondjaki , The Whistler

15 " Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned—never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation. No amount of taxation is ever described as “greed” on the part of government or the clientele of government. "

― Thomas Sowell , The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

16 " The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden. "

― Thomas Mann , Death in Venice

17 " Each person is a vast territory of undiscovered mystery as nebulous and uncharted as the deepest oceans and expanses of space. "

― Bryant McGill , Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

18 " There are few moments of clarity more profound than those that follow the emptying of an overcharged bladder. The world slows down, the focus sharpens, the brain comes back on line. Huge nebulous difficulties prove on close calm examination to be merely cloud giants. "

― Tom Holt

19 " Standing at the window, reading the menu of Obediah's services, the Minotaur wishes he could believe in what she has to offer: a promise woven into deep lines of his palm, some turn of fate told by a card. But faith is a nebulous thing and charlatans a dime a dozen; it's always been that way. The Minotaur both envies and pities the devout. "

― Steven Sherrill , The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

20 " Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse? "

― Vladimir Nabokov , The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

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