Approximated Quotes & Sayings

Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr. — Lance Morrow

Assisi was like something, but like what? Like something one had always known, but never seen. Something perceived from afar, like a wind from the promised land that greeted the stranger and sojourner coming up out of bondage from Egypt. It was joy, no doubt about that. But a joy unlike any other joy he had ever experienced. Unexpected joy in a dark time. Curious joy. There was no other word that approximated it. A taste of sweetness like the fecundity of grape arbors in the terraces below, — Michael D. O'Brien

I don't have any dark desires. And I think most people don't. A few have dark desires and don't sublimate them. — Ruth Rendell

Sure I do," countered Lila cheerfully. "There's Dull London, Kell London, Creepy London, and Dead London," she recited, ticking them off on her fingers. "See? I'm a fast learner. — V.E Schwab

One concept the non-old have trouble getting their minds around is the difference between taste and judgment. It's fine not to like almost anything, except maybe Al Green. That's taste, yours to do with as you please, critical deployment included. By comparison, judgment requires serious psychological calisthenics. But the fact that objectivity only comes naturally in math doesn't mean it can't be approximated in art.
— Robert Christgau

Are you familiar," he said finally, "with the Bang?"
"The Big Bang?" Luka asked. "Or some other Bang I don't know about?"
"There was only one Bang," said Nobodaddy, "so the adjective Big is redundant and meaningless. The Bang would only be Big if there was at least one other Little or Medium-Sized or even Bigger Bang to compare it with, and to differentiate it from. — Salman Rushdie

The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city. — Tom Piazza

As a historian, I found myself all too often treating my historical subjects like fictional characters, malleable entities that could be made to do one thing or another, whose motivations could be speculated upon endlessly, and whose missing actions could be reconstructed and approximated based on assessments of prior and later behaviors. It was one of the hazards with working a fragmentary source base. You had little scraps, like puzzle pieces, and you could put them together as best you could. But no matter how faithful you tried to be to the historical record, there would always be that element of guesswork, of imagination, of (if we're being totally honest) fiction. — Lauren Willig

If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contrevention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. — Mary Douglas

Meaning can be usually be approximated, but often by sacrificing style. When I review my translations into Spanish, that's what I'm most concerned with, reading the sentences aloud in Spanish to make sure they sound the way I want them to. To be honest, I much prefer being translated into Greek or Japanese; in those cases, you have no way of being involved, and no pressure. — Daniel Alarcon

Petrie found nothing that disproved the pyramidologist's assumption that the Great Pyramid had been built according to a master plan. Indeed, he describes the Pyramid's architecture as being filled with extraordinary mathematical harmonies and concordances: those same strange symmetries that had so haunted the pyramidologist.

Petrie not only noted, for example, that the proportions of the reconstructed pyramid approximated to pi - which others have since elaborated to include those twin delights of Renaissance and pyramidological mathematicians, the Golden Section and the Fibonacci Series ... — John Romer

In his dreams he would be a hero. In his life he felt like a zero. — David Walliams

Sometimes, it's never an insult to be called what someone thinks is a bad name. — Harper Lee

The key to digital effects is to do things that are visually accurate but done cheaply and approximated. — Masi Oka

I love that I have my own business and I can't wait to tell Charlie when she's old enough that I did it all with her as my inspiration.-Carla Palmer, Cheekie Charlie — Holly Hurd

A ruin is not just something that happened long ago to someone else; its history is that of us all, the transience of power, of ideas, of all human endeavors. — George Schaller

Therein lies the insight: Even though you will continue moving forever - with each move taking you half the remaining distance to the wall - the total distance you travel can never be more than 2 feet, which is your starting distance from the wall. For mathematical purposes, the total distance you travel can be approximated as 2 feet, which turns out to be very handy for computation purposes. A mathematician would say that the sum of this infinite series 1 ft + ½ ft + ¼ ft + ⅛ ft ... converges to 2 feet, which is what our instructor was trying to teach us that day. — Charles Wheelan

Possessing a language meant possessing the world expressed in its words. Dispossessing it meant nothing less than the loss of a world and the beginning of bewilderment forever. "Language is the only homeland," said poet Czeslaw Milosz. My parents left the world that created them and now would be beginners for the rest of their lives, mumblers searching for the right word, the proper phrase that approximated what they felt inside. I wonder at the eloquence that must have lived inside them that never found a way out. — Alex Tizon

I approximated the Black Friday experience at home by hurling myself into a wall a number of times and then ordering online. — Kumail Nanjiani

Holy shit. This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer that can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted ... of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul? — Thomas Pynchon

I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe....The fact that reality can be described or approximated by simple mathematical expressions suggests to me that nature has mathematics at its core. — Clifford A. Pickover

Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful ... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment. — Anne Michaels

The thing about Vegas is, I don't have to fly anywhere, and that really helps. It means I stay in one place for three weeks at a time instead of flying backwards and forwards. — Elton John

Plague did not honor social class, and mortality among the nobility approximated that of the general population. — Robert Steven Gottfried

You can live through most anything as long as you have the right tranquilizers on hand. — Mary Guterson

On Fiction:
(Martin) had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. Both god and clod schools erred, in Martin's estimation, and erred though too great singleness of sight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story, "Adventure," which had dragged Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was in an essay, "God and Clod," that he had expressed his views on the whole subject. — Jack London

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth. — Rachel Kushner

The slower a clock, the nearer it approximated to the infinitely gradual and majestic progression of cosmic time - in fact, by reversing a clock's direction and running it backwards one could devise a time-piece that in a sense was moving even more slowly than the universe, and consequently part of an even greater spatio-temporal system. — J.G. Ballard

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated. — Frans De Waal

I would work with him to make Knight's troubles go away. In the meantime, I could jump a hot guy whenever I felt like it.
This was not a bad deal. — Kristen Ashley

The layers of his gleaming black hair were thick and neatly cut, and his tanned face glowed from a precise shave. He had a long, straight nose and a voluptuary's mouth.
And he had a pair of remarkable blue eyes that approximated no other shade she had ever seen. Except, perhaps, at the shop where the local chemist made batches of ink by boiling Indigofera plants and copper sulfate together for days until they formed a blue so dark and deep that it approached violet. And yet his eyes did not have the angelic quality one might associate with such a color. They were shrewd, seasoned, as if he had gazed far too often at an unsavory side of life that she herself had never seen. — Lisa Kleypas

God knows," Charpentier said, "I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours."
"Reform?" Camille said. "I'm not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer. — Hilary Mantel

That no matter what i did, I would always be missing something else. And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn't miss meant more to me than the things I missed. — David Levithan

One thing became crystal clear to me when I couldn't see you anymore. I realized that the only way I had been able to survive until then was having you in my life. When I lost you, the pain and loneliness really got to me. — Haruki Murakami

But somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade — Donna Tartt

I have taken the stand that nobody can be always wrong, but it does seem to me that I have approximated so highly that I am nothing short of a negative genius. — Charles Fort