For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn’t outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!
Acting is such a strange, vague profession, but my kids know it’s hard labour.
The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
My parents and I – I’m an only child – are not particularly religious, but I was christened and raised in that vague and characteristically Canadian form of Protestantism known as the United Church.
I never outline my novels before I write. I do have a vague sense of beginning, middle, and end at the outset of each book, but for me, writing has always been a very character-driven process.
I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here ‘freelance’ and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter.
I like to keep my private stuff pretty vague.
If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.
The desire to share is not a vague, windy sentiment, not when you see the massive rise in live concerts in response to the phenomenon of downloading music… People want to get rid of the headphones and be part of a shared experience.
People often misuse the term ‘Regency’ to describe art or antiques dating from a vague period between the 1790s and the 1830s, but technically the period only lasted between 1811 and 1820.
Many have a vague idea that they must make some wonderful effort in order to gain the favor of God. But all self-dependence is vain. It is only by connecting with Jesus through faith that the sinner becomes a hopeful, believing child of God.
If I could be more vague I’d write more about people in my life, but I hate hurting feelings or making people feel uncomfortable. I’ve done that before. Unless they’re sad songs. Those get finished fast, but the mean ones often end up at the back of the bottom drawer and it’s probably for the best.
I am concerned that the vague guidelines and policies used by the NSA for intelligence collection and sharing, in conjunction with elusive direction from the Administration, have led to intelligence being collected on sitting members of Congress for political purposes.
These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.
I do accept that, with – with respect to those vague terms in the Constitution such as equal protection of the laws, due process of law, cruel and unusual punishments. I fully accept that those things have to apply to new phenomena that didn’t exist at the time.
When I start writing, I’ll have a vague concept or I’ll just have a title, and the song just goes on its own direction. Usually it goes in many directions within each song. They get really convoluted sometimes.
Better to say something simply instead of giving people a bunch of vague metaphors to mull over.
I make lists to keep my anxiety level down. If I write down 15 things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten.
I’ve found that in fiction – and this is just the kind of writer I am – I can’t really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can’t approach creative nonfiction like that.
When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.
We cannot sacrifice innocent human life now for vague and exaggerated promises of medical treatments thirty of forty years from now. There are ways to pursue this technology and respect life at the same time.
The definition of gumbo is almost as slippery as that of Creole. Just as gumbo can contain pretty much any kind of meat or seafood, Creole is a vague and inclusive term for native New Orleanians, who may be black or white, depending on whom you’re asking.
I have a hard time getting motivated to do something that seems like a career move. I’ve gotten into vague trouble with my agents for turning down work that I thought was exploitative.
At Harvard, where students tend to respond to real-world celebrities with the vague sense that they could do a better job themselves, the recipe for celebrity is complex.
The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that ‘abstract’ is identified with ‘vague’ and ‘unreal,’ and ‘inwardness’ with a sort of traditional beatitude… The conception of the word ‘plastic’ has also been limited by individual interpretations.
I met my birth mother as an adult, but she was always quite vague about my birth father. I knew he had been married to someone else, that he’d had children, but that was about it.
My muse is my wife. It’s not some vague thing that flutters around the astrosphere or wherever it is. Sometimes as a songwriter you need something to hang a song on, to give it some kind of presence and form. For me, Susie is that.
As a child, I had a serious illness that lasted for two years or more. I have vague recollections of this illness and of my being carried about a great deal. I was known as the ‘sick one.’ Whether this illness gave me a twist away from ordinary paths, I don’t know; but it is possible.
The term ‘innovative’ or ‘innovation’ is often vague or ambiguous. But in our definition, innovation means to make something which people think impossible possible.
No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.
Puberty was very vague. I literally locked myself in a room and played guitar.
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
We’re teaching our kids that attributes as vague and relatively meaningless as a toothy smile or a fine head of hair make a fine statement about a person.
All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.
The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
Was I in a nativity play? I think I was an angel; I was a very blonde child, so I tended to get typecast. I have a vague memory of wearing wings.
All I had when I began writing the first book was rather vague images conjured up by the notion of a man in a kilt, so essentially I began with Jamie, although I had no idea what his name was at the time.
I was born in Africa but brought up in the north-east of England. Most of my childhood was spent living on a council estate that overlooked the Tyne and I went to the same junior school as Paul Gascoigne, of whom I have a vague memory.
The planet Mars – crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms – has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planetological theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin.
I remember having this vague idea that what mathematicians did was that some authority, someone, gave them problems to solve, and they just sort of solved them.
I’m very nervous about taking jobs. I always make sure that, if I’m going to work with somebody, that they really understand what it is that I want to do. I’d rather not take the job than be vague about how I’m going to do something and run into trouble later on. It’s a hard thing to negotiate.
Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition.
I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
As a consequence of these hesitations and of the vague character of such innovations, the Commission on Human Rights itself had doubts from the beginning about its role and its functions in general.
When I write a tune – and it’s been like this for many years – I always hear in the back of my head some sort of vague, orchestrated, fully fleshed-out big-band version of the song with other parts going on.
We tried war, we tried aggression, we tried intervention. None of it works. Why don’t we try peace, as a science of human relations, not as some vague notion – as everyday work.
The terrorist threat is so cloudy, faceless, and vague, so manipulable by political purposes, so definitely present but indefinitely manifested, that it sometimes feels interchangeable with everyday dread itself.
