Explanations Quotes (page 3)
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Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is...
Salman Rushdie
I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.
Federico Fellini
By now, I probably preferred secondhand books to new ones. In America such items were disparagingly referred to as “previously owned”; but this very continuity of ownership was part of their charm. A book dispensed its explanation of the world to one person, then another, and so on down the generations; different hands held the same book and drew sometimes the same, sometimes a different wisdom from it.
Julian Barnes
Katniss?" He drops my hand and I take a step, as if to catch my balance."It was all for the Games," Peeta says. "How you acted."Not all of it," I say, tightly holding onto my flowers."Then how much? No, forget that. I guess the real question is what's going to be left when we get home?" he says."I don't know. The closer we get to District Twelve, the more confused I get," I say. He waits, for further explanation, but none's forthcoming."Well, let me know when you work it out," he says, and...
Suzanne Collins
The Universe was a silly place at best...but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.
Robert A. Heinlein
I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was it going to do me? It wouldn't have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chicken pox. You think it's going to help, but the itch moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn't have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy forever, and I didn't want that.
Nick Hornby
The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching...
Malcolm Gladwell
Cain considers life and can find no explanation for it, there is that woman, who although clearly sick with desire is enjoying postponing the moment of surrender, which is not at all the right word, because lilith, when she does finally open her legs to allow herself to be penetrated, will not be surrendering, but trying to devour the man to whom she said, Enter.
Jose Saramago
Sorry,” she said, “I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know.”
“Explain protocol,” Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer.
“At the place we’re going, you need to watch your manners. Don’t say ‘explain this’ or ‘explain that.’”
“Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?” Nell said.
Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly...
Neal Stephenson