You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people’s brains. It’s a less detailed copy, it’s coarse-grained.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
The only pleasurable part of taking the subway, as everyone will agree, is concocting elaborate fantasies about what it would be like to be married to the most interesting strangers you see there.
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
What’s fascinating about D.C., the exteriors are these elaborate structures, this gorgeous architecture and beautiful stonework, and then you go inside and it’s crap-looking – apart from the White House, which is beautiful.
Most pieces take between two and three weeks and involve more than 40 people from the fabric cutters to the embroiders to the sewers. It’s an elaborate undertaking.
In summary, the Romans were opposed to tyranny in any form; and the feature of government to which they gave the most thought was an elaborate system of checks and balances.
‘Game of Thrones’ has kind of got the Midas touch, certainly for the lead actors and those recurring guest stars. It’s the show that can do no wrong because it’s so well produced. My contribution is short, but I think, in my mind, it was sweet because it involved such elaborate scenes.
An elaborate system of etiquette and social standards flowered around the home phone: how long a child might be allowed to stay on the phone, how late one could call without being impolite, and of course, the dread implications of a late night call which violated that norm.
I belong to a Bohri Muslim family, and for us, food is our biggest celebration. We are used to elaborate five- to six-course meals.
Structure that really pays off is all based on emotion. I don’t write down an elaborate plan. It’s really done by feel. It’s one area of my writing that I think I’ve got surer at as I’ve evolved.
My go-go dancing was not your typical go-go dancing: I really was doing performance art. I would do dramatic, elaborate lyricals across the bar. I learned a lot, actually, as an artist during that time.
Writing a love song when I was 19 is very different than writing a love song when I’m 25. You’re more sophisticated; you can elaborate and pinpoint special things a little clearer.
Ashwin and I don’t like elaborate weddings, so we had a court marriage.
Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.
You can solve problems, but the solutions don’t always have to be elaborate or expensive.
I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.
Spoken language’s elaborate rhythms and inflections convey more meaning per word than the printed word.
Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.
The Metropolitan Opera, of course, is the gold standard in opera. The Met experience includes the huge stage, the vast audience, the elaborate sets. Anyone who saw ‘Faust’ there – I did – knows exactly what hell is like, complete with fire, smoke and terror.
My mother’s family were full-on Irish Catholics – faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women’s rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.
We need no elaborate statistical proof that trade depends on prosperity in the industrial countries.
I live a pretty domestic and normal life. I make my kids breakfast most mornings, but nothing too elaborate – soft-boiled eggs and oatmeal.
You will find hardly any improvising on camera anywhere in my films. It’s very structured, but it’s all worked out from elaborate improvisations over a long period, as you know.
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