Ethel Watts Mumford Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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My first Comic-Con was when I first met Joss Whedon: He introduced me to that world and I'd never been to a convention before that. He and a bunch of the 'Buffy' and 'Angel' writers were all going down in a big van and he invited me along.
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When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.
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People would ask me why I was doing what I was doing – but I always told them that I just loved to skate. There was no other explanation.
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The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.
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A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior.
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The farther we go, the more the ultimate explanation recedes from us, and all we have left is faith.
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Hopefully my music is medicine, some type of antidote for something or some kind of explanation or just to feel good.
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The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.
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A young professor I watched in action at one of our large eastern colleges used to stand with his back to the class and mumble explanations of blackboard problems. He was "let out" at the end of two years because students refused to attend his classes. He was given an evasive reason for his dismissal and he left with justifiable bitterness toward the administration. If someone had told him the truth he could have avoided this denouement. Sometimes professors go on for years without any conception of remediable faults which irritate their listeners.
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As a writer I'm not an explainer, really. I'm a narrator. I mistrust explanation.
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There isnt always an explanation for everything.
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Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
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He who believes needs no explanation.
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Anyone can repeat a technical explanation they read in a text-book or blog post.
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Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.
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If you want something done, ask. If you want something done quickly, ask, and then begin counting down from ten with no explanation.
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We stand at the end of the Age of Reason. A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising.
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From the beginning, I knew intuitively that if nothing else, music was safe, and that nobody could tell me anything about it. Music didn't need a middleman, whereas all the other things in school needed some kind of explanation.
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In drawing an inference or conclusion from facts proved, regard must always be had to the nature of the particular case, and the facility that appears to be afforded, either of explanation or contradiction. No person is to be required to explain or contradict, until enough has been proved to warrant a reasonable and just conclusion against him, in the absence of explanation or contradiction.
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To do my job well, I have to be a good listener. The listening is so much more important than the talking.
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The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.
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Only this is true, that beauty is very beautiful, and softens, and inspires, and rouses, and lifts up, and never fails.
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An ounce of convention is worth a pound of explanation.
