29 Quotes About Nuance

In order to think through things clearly, we need other opinions and viewpoints in order to navigate into the nuance. We need civil debate to present opposing viewpoints and point out our blind spots. We need the ability to speak freely and civilly to one another.

If I’ve learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself.

She is eager to rewrite the pages. They are too grandiose, too preachy. She has come to appreciate short sentences.

The challenge was that it was harder to be subtle than strident.

That is the way it is, we always fall in love because of a detail, a nuance. It is a marker we set up for ourselves in the midst of the confusion, in the infinite space of love. The greatest passions come from such little causes.

We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers, we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.

If I say to some kids roughhousing in church, "Don't kill anyone," they know what concern I am addressing. They know I'm exaggerating for emphasis and not speaking in general terms—that I'm not, for example, commenting on the morality of military service. Stripped of the rich context we share, the mere words, "Don't kill anyone" could easily be understood to mean don't kill anyone, anytime, ever.

Practice of nuance means asking painful, difficult questions—questions that might reveal something new or bring a position into different relief or otherwise illuminate our perspectives.

One never discusses art save with people who are already in agreement, and then it is a matter of nuances.