Most Understated Quotes & Sayings

Sam Temple kept a lower profile. He stuck to jeans and understated T-shirts, nothing that drew attention to himself. He had spent most of his life in Perdido Beach, attending this school, and everybody knew who he was, but few people were quite sure what he was. He was a surfer who didn't hang out with surfers. He was bright, but not a brain. He was good-looking, but not so that girls thought of him as a hottie.
The one thing most kids knew about Sam Temple was that he was School Bus Sam. He'd earned the nickname when he was in seventh grade. The class had been on the way to a field trip when the bus driver had suffered a heart attack. They'd been driving down Highway 1. Sam had pulled the man out of his seat, steered the bus onto the shoulder of the road, brought it safely to a stop, and calmly dialed 911 on the driver's cell phone.
If he had hesitated for even a second, the bus would have plunged off a cliff and into the ocean.
His picture had been in the paper. — Michael Grant

The Stockholm street style is distinctive, with ensembles that exemplify the city's understated elegance. — Aslaug Magnusdottir

Mirabelle? Mirabelle Bevan? Well, I'll be blowed!"
Mirabelle started, almost spilling her drink. It took her a moment to realize who the handsome man was, now his hair was greying at the edges and he was out of uniform. Puffing laconically on a cigarette, martini in hand, he wore a lounge suit and an understated silk tie with a discreet regimental insignia woven into the fabric.
"Eddie," she smiled. "What are you doing here? — Sara Sheridan

They whirled around in the light dance of a duchess entering a ball - majestic yet understated - a spiraling splash of purity of color that took shape under nature's watch. A newly-sculpted garden burst forth, glistening in an afternoon sun. It welcomed the dusty pink rose, who stood beside its fellows, basked themselves in their own serenity of white, triumphant red, or cheery yellow. It swayed in the breath of a wind, caressing each and becoming more. It was a mixture of quiet and thunderous, light and dark, shyness and boldness. It was a mixture of the quiet strength and overwhelming courage that the human soul might wish to one day possess. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

Glamour to me is about remaining graceful and understated. — Kate Winslet

We all recall what is or was important to us and are astonished when it slips other people's minds. Perhaps we dismiss as irrelevant matters of crucial concern to those we love. That's life as most of us experience it, and which few movies document with such understated acuity as 'Boyhood' does. — Richard Corliss

Fuck, he'd looked good. Really good. All golden-boy California hotness, big and blond and sexy as fuck. With those soulful brown eyes - surprising on a blond guy. It's an understated sexiness, though. Jamie Canning never flaunted his looks in all the time I'd known him. Sometimes I think he's not even aware of how goddamn attractive he is. — Sarina Bowen

My life had a tendency to spread, get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls ... — Margaret Atwood

It is greatly understated to compare humans to an absorbent sponge, a glowing fuse; they are each an innumerable harmony, a living self that has an effect on all of the forces that surround them. — Johann Gottfried Herder

The writer of 'The Red Road,' Aaron Guzikowski, deserves the credit. The fact that the dialogue is so understated is what makes this show so appealing, especially as an actor. — Martin Henderson

Of course one's sense of identification with the nation is inflected by all kinds of particulars, including one's class, race, gender, and sexual identification. ... But [regarding] national character ... , aside from references to a national aesthetic - literary, musical, and choreographic, there are two poles I reference: minimalist and maximalist. I love them both - the cryptic poems of Emily Dickinson folded up in tiny packets and hidden away in a box, the sparse, understated choreographies of Merce; but also the "trashy, profane and obscene" poems of Whitman and Ginsberg, [and] Martha Graham's expressionism. I am, myself, a minimalist. But I love distortion guitar and the wild exhibitionism of so many American artists. Also, these divisions are false. Emily Dickinson, in fact, can be as trashy and obscene as the best of them! Anyway, Dickinson and Whitman are at the heart of this narrative. They are the Dancing Queen and the Guitar Hero. — Barbara Browning

In Advance of All Parting is a tough, unsentimental examination of marital grief. Musically elegant and inventive, understated and passionate, the poems give us a profound glimpse into how the events of a life can form a center of gravity that fixes the self in its force field. Theres a cold, truth-telling clarity about them that makes them as unsettling as they are beautiful. Ansie Baird has created a richly-drawn world in which this elemental drama plays out, and the result is vivid, startling poems in which pain has left its indelible tracks. — Chase Twichell

You do care, you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it all. — J.K. Rowling

Gabbe stepped forward. "Cam's right. I've heard the Scale speak of these shifts." She was tugging on the sleeves of her pale yellow cashmere cardigan as if she would never get warm. "They're called timequakes. They are ripples in our reality."
"And the closer he gets," Roland added, with his usual understated wisdom, "the closer we are to the terminus of his Fall, the more frequent and the more severe the timequakes will become. Time is faltering in preparation for rewriting itself."
"Like the way your computer freezes up more and more frequently before the hard drive crashes and erases your twenty-page term paper?" Miles said. Everyone looked at him in befuddlement. "What?" he asked. "Angels and demons don't do homework? — Lauren Kate

The role of race cannot be understated in an era of fervent social Darwinism. For decades the Balkans had enacted in microcosm the racial hatreds at great-power level. In consequence the Balkan states were likely, indeed expected, periodically to blow a head gasket over racial and religious differences and threaten a major confrontation by dragging their powerful sponsors into the local mess. — Paul Ham

Even the most understated ceremony involves a certain respect for ritual and pageantry. No one plays more of a significant role than the bride's attendants. — Vera Wang

The importance of knowing for certain that you have been saved cannot be understated. We do not know how many days, hours, or minutes God has granted us here to have an opportunity to make a choice. — Kimberly McRae

People that complete other people's vision are understated. — Bjork

What I like about Yves Saint Laurent Black Opium is that it's an understated scent that's somehow familiar. — Edie Campbell

Whenever I'm in sync with the trends, it's always an accident. I still love wearing clothes I've had for ten years. I think understated luxury is the chicest thing. — Padma Lakshmi

The award for the most understated booth at AWE went to Occipital, a company that Ars learned about in 2014 when it released the Structure Sensor, a Kickstarter-backed light scanner that could be attached to an iPad for 3D scans of the world around you. Outside — Anonymous

Nobody is here without a reason ... I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy - from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated - but I always
wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it. — Lily Tomlin

I think it's so much sexier to be understated. It's more intriguing to be sexy in a less obvious way. — Emma Watson

Part of our brand is that we're pretty understated in what we do. If you look at other technology companies, they might preannounce things, and it will be a couple years before they really happen, and they don't happen in the way they said they would. — Larry Page

I think spending a lot of time with my mom, who's a talker and a storyteller, and my dad, who has kind of a soft-spoken, understated sense of humor, I think that's how I became what I am, which is sort of an understated storyteller. — Mike Birbiglia

Chelsea was about as understated as a jackhammer. — Kimberly Derting

You don't need a sex scene to have romance! My favorite kind of romance is the understated tension of unconfessed (and certainly unconsumated) love. I think it's always more addicting to read about people who I wish would get together than to read about people who already 'been there done that'. — R.A. White

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur. — Teju Cole

An elegant simplicity is an understated, organic aesthetic that contrasts with the excess of consumerist lifestyles. Drawing from influences ranging from Zen to the Quakers, it celebrates natural materials and clean, functional expressions, such as are found in many of the hand-made arts and crafts from this community. — Duane Elgin

The boss had a long list of reasons for letting me go
most of which, I am ashamed to admit, were generously understated. It's true, for instance, that I hogged the photocopier for hours on end and snapped at whoever politely
deferentially
inquired about how much longer I would be. I was intent on achieving definitively sooty, penumbral effects to ensure that copies looked like copies, and that, of course, took time. Some days I spent entire afternoons reproducing blank sheets of paper, ream after ream, to use instead of the "FROM THE DESK OF
" notepads the boss kept ordering for each of us. — Gary Lutz

What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch? — Lara St. John

Real life is - quieter, more understated. No one is backlot and nothing has a soundtrack and no one has someone cleverer than them writing their lines. And so they just say nothing and get on with it. More's the pity, if you ask me, I quite like the idea of my own soundtrack. — Matthew Crow

My affection for you does not depend on those small things.'
Affection? To hear him admit it, to actually utter words of love, however understated, astonished me. — Peter Goldsworthy

Understated jewellery is not for me. It's too itsy-bitsy. My husband is lucky, as I've never had a yen for real jewels. — Iris Apfel

Perseverance is a virtue that cannot be understated. — Bob Riley

My acting's very understated. I think my sad and happy don't play that differently onscreen. — Bret McKenzie

The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons - Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire - that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond's Aston Martin. The missile compartment has similarly retro-looking panels of buttons. They provided the setup for one of the more quotable things Murray said to me - a line that, were fewer precautions in place, could have joined "Houston, we've had a problem" or "Watch this" in the pantheon of understated taglines for calamity: "I wouldn't lean on that. — Mary Roach

It is precisely in that relationship to the Reader that you will find most of the classic faults of style: pretension, condescension, servility, obscurantism, grandiosity, vulgarity, and the like
even academicism. That's why most faults of style can be described in language relevant to human relations. Is your style frank and open ... does it have some understated agenda ... is it out to prove something it does not or cannot admit ... is it trying to impress ... show off ... is it kissing up ... groveling ... maybe just a tad passive-aggressive, with a mumbling half-audible voice that is unwilling to explain ... is it trying to convince ... overwhelm ... help ... seduce ... give pleasure ... inflict pain ... There is no area of the writer's work that is more responsive to the psychology of human connection than style. — Stephen Koch

Kabuki is the way that I so often write; Noh is how I would write if I were more 'spiritual,' more understated, or perhaps just older. — William T. Vollmann

I like to live life in an understated way because that's who I am - an ordinary guy who has experienced an extraordinary journey. — Simon Weston

Exceptional is too understated for you. I'll have to search for a better word. (Carlos) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

It was typical George Stout: detailed, timely, and understated. Here was a man that was never hurried. Who was careful. Punctual. Precise. An expert and a precisionist makes his analysis first, he always said, then his decision. — Robert M. Edsel

My early novels were very understated and English. Fourteen years ago, I met and married my American husband, and as I learned more about his background and culture, I became interested in using American voices. — Laurie Graham

In hindsight, though, I might have overdone it by adding that flour, which means before I depart for Abigail's cottage I need to tidy up this room." "If you're moving out, I'm moving with you," Thaddeus said, slipping up beside Millie and taking hold of her hand. Elizabeth was the next to move. She reached out and put her arm around Millie's middle, leaning in to rest her head against Millie's side. "I'm coming too," she said as she snuggled closer right as Millie smiled and placed a quick kiss on top of Elizabeth's paste-covered head. Everett's heart immediately took to the unusual act of lurching, no doubt due to the sight of Millie's understated affection. Ladies of society always made a big production out of kissing their children when company was present, but Millie . . . Her kiss had been the real thing, a show of regard for a child who'd caused her no small amount of trouble. Expecting — Jen Turano