Imprecision Quotes

An early flourish of confidence is useful. Then there's the small crudities - the slubs and bumps that come with outdoor work - the odd charm of imprecision. ~ Robert Genn

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, ~ T. S. Eliot

The magic of life is its imprecision, the multiple narratives constantly unfolding before us. Every step we take, every decision we make, reshuffles the deck of our lives and sets a new trajectory of possibility in motion. ~ Jamie Metzl

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. ~ T. S. Eliot

With a perfect memory did not come a perfect mind, or resolute decisions. Sometimes with perfection on one end of the equation, one was left with stark imprecision on the other. Perhaps it was nature's way of balancing things. ~ David Baldacci

It seems to be a characteristic of all great work that it creators wear a cloak of imprecision. ~ Fred Hoyle

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Leap Before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savior-faire,
Bu to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear. ~ W.H. Auden

The time of the photograph is [always] after. This imprecision accommodates the numerous successions, the end upon seismic end, in a time without time, un[re]countable: still. In this, it is a perfect crime, "l'anéantissement anéanti, la fin… privée d'elle-même. ~ Nathanaël

Terribly undignified," Qibli said in a haughty voice, tipping his snout at the racing dragons. "We would never allow such higgledy-piggledy shenanigans in the Ice Kingdom." "Was that supposed to be me?" Winter asked him. "Terribly unimpressive, if so. I haven't once said 'higgledy-piggledy' in my entire life. We would never allow such linguistic imprecision in the Ice Kingdom." Qibli barked a delighted laugh and did a loop in the air. ~ Tui T. Sutherland

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. ~ T. S. Eliot

The imprecision in the way languages express time is related to the imprecision in the way we experience and remember it. Though no one experiences time as coarsely as the handful of distinctions in a tense system would suggest, we don't live by a mental stopwatch either. ~ Steven Pinker

Does this current deterioration and corruption of language, imprecision of thought, and so forth scare you - or is it just a decadent phase?

AUDEN

It terrifies me. I try by my personal example to fight it; as I say, it's a poet's role to maintain the sacredness of language. ~ W. H. Auden

We don't even know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Let's say that it belong to me as much as it belongs to anyone alive today. If I am, strictly speaking, living. The old word was undead, you know, but aren't all living things undead. I dislike imprecision. ~ Rachel Caine

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered. ~ David Markson

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

What is a spell after all but a way of coaxing syllables together so persuasively that some new word is spelled ... some imprecision clarified, some name Named ... and some change managed. ~ Gregory Maguire

Morning. Vast. Imprecision. Fog has covered everything in gray
absolute. This has lasted. Doubt looms over the mind. Absence
is harder to accept than death. ~ Etel Adnan

Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. ~ Zadie Smith