Obtrusive Quotes

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Fear may oust people into the dimness of disruption. Let us instead transcend darkness and create room for light to shine. Now is the moment, and the "now" is the stepping stone that allows us to forge ahead, with abundance of awareness and understanding, and without obtrusive egos. (β€œFear of the white page”)
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Erik Pevernagie
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To him who feels himself preordained to contemplation and not to belief, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
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In the beginning, some people try to appear that everything about them is "in black and white," until later their true colors come out.
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Anthony Liccione
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The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.
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Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
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Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination.
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Bertrand Russell (Sceptical Essays (Routledge Classics))
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This harsh little man β€” this pitiless censor β€” gathers up all your poor scattered sins of vanity, your luckless chiffon of rose- color, your small fringe of a wreath, your small scrap of ribbon, your silly bit of lace, and calls you to account for the lot, and for each item. You are well habituated to be passed by as a shadow in Life's sunshine: it its a new thing to see one testily lifting his hand to screen his eyes, because you tease him with an obtrusive ray.
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Charlotte BrontΓ« (Villette)
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He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.
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Edith Wharton (Tales of Men and Ghosts)
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She was appalled by West Egg’s raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
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The presence of obtrusive materiality is antithetic to the sustaining of a fantasy space.
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François-Xavier Gleyzon (David Lynch: In Theory)
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That’s the glorious thing about music. It speaks to the very heart of things in the most absolute and obtrusive way.
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Erin Hahn (You'd Be Mine)
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No dream will make you fully happy, because every time you reach your dream, you will feel some kind of obtrusive emptiness alongside happiness!
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Mehmet Murat ildan
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You are well habituated to be passed by as a shadow in Life's sunshine: it is a new thing to see one testily lifting his hand to screen his eyes, because you tease him with an obtrusive ray.
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Charlotte BrontΓ« (Villette)
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Numerous spine conditions can now be treated with negligibly obtrusive surgery, taking into consideration quicker recuperation and mending time and less danger of intricacies for some patients.
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laspinegroup
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Life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
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Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling in the sun one day. In Marseilles that day there was a villainous prison. In one of its chambers, so repulsive a place that even the obtrusive
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Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit)
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On the whole, he thinks that Barclay's devotion to his wife was greater than his wife's to Barclay. He was acutely uneasy if he were absent from her for a day. She, on the other hand, though devoted and faithful, was less obtrusively affectionate.
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Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection [newly updated] (Book Center))
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Most of our caste in this country, if they only knew it, are Confucian rather than Christian. Belief in ancestors, and tradition, respect for parents, honesty, moderation of conduct, kind treatment of animals and dependents, absence of self-obtrusion, and stoicism in face of pain and death.
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John Galsworthy (Flowering Wilderness (The Forsyte Chronicles, #8))
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He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody.
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Algernon Blackwood (Ancient Sorceries)
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There are apparently two types of successful soldiers. Those who get on by being unobtrusive and those who get on by being obtrusive. I am of the latter type and seem to be rare and unpopular: but it is my method. One has to choose a system and stick to it; people who are not themselves are nobody.
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George S. Patton Jr.
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Superficially, the figure in the smoking-room was that of a long, weedy young man - hairless as to his face; scalped with a fine lank fleece of neutral tint; pale-eyed, and slave to a bored and languid expression, over which he had little control, though it frequently misrepresented his mood. He was dressed scrupulously, though not obtrusively, in the mode, and was smoking a pungent cigarette with an air that seemed balanced between a genuine effort at self-abstraction and a fear of giving offence by a too pronounced show of it. In this state, flying bubbles of conversation broke upon him as he sat a little apart and alone. ("The Accursed Cordonnier")
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Bernard Capes (Gaslit Nightmares: Stories by Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Richard Marsh, and Others)
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He began to write a new type of short lyric, which he sometimes called a β€œKunst-Ding”: a poem in which the obtrusive interferences of an authorial self and all subjective, accidental occasions have been replaced by an inwardly tensile, self-contained sculptural presence, delimited by strong contours but filled with an utmost of interacting visual and visible reality.
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Rainer Maria Rilke (Rilke and Andreas-SalomΓ©: A Love Story in Letters)
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Boxer, feeling that his attentions were due to the family in general, and must be impartially distributed, dashed in and out with bewildering inconstancy; now, describing a circle of short barks round the horse, where he was being rubbed down at the stable-door; now feigning to make savage rushes at his mistress, and facetiously bringing himself to sudden stops; now, eliciting a shriek from Tilly Slowboy, in the low nursing-chair near the fire, by the unexpected application of his moist nose to her countenance; now, exhibiting an obtrusive interest in the baby; now, going round and round upon the hearth, and lying down as if he had established himself for the night; now, getting up again, and taking that nothing of a fag-end of a tail of his, out into the weather, as if he had just remembered an appointment, and was off, at a round trot, to keep it.
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Charles Dickens (The Cricket on the Hearth)
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He liked to join in any game that was afoot, so long as it was simple, such as dominoes or draughts, but was so good natured that he always let his opponents win. Not that he said so, but we were always aware of it, and could see him making mistakes on purpose. To poor Arthur we owed our disgust with obtrusively unselfish people, and our understanding of mother's oft-repeated maxim: 'Please yourself, your friends will like you the better.
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Molly Hughes (A London Child of the 1870s)
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Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted society where the economic no longer monopolised so much time and energy. That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. When you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by an affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as these predecessors ever did. Marx's work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure.
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Terry Eagleton (Why Marx Was Right)
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Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw--that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian.
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Rebecca Mead (My Life in Middlemarch)
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A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful
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George Eliot (Silly Novels by Lady Novelists)
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Here I will mention one more strange thing; but whether this peculiarity was owing to my shadow at all, I am not able to assure myself. I came to a village, the inhabitants of which could not at first sight be distinguished from the dwellers in our land. They rather avoided than sought my company, though they were very pleasant when I addressed them. But at last I observed, that whenever I came within a certain distance of any one of them, which distance, however, varied with different individuals, the whole appearance of the person began to change; and this change increased in degree as I approached. When I receded to the former distance, the former appearance was restored. The nature of the change was grotesque, following no fixed rule. The nearest resemblance to it that I know, is the distortion produced in your countenance when you look at it as reflected in a concave or convex surfaceβ€”say, either side of a bright spoon. Of this phenomenon I first became aware in rather a ludicrous way. My host's daughter was a very pleasant pretty girl, who made herself more agreeable to me than most of those about me. For some days my companion-shadow had been less obtrusive than usual; and such was the reaction of spirits occasioned by the simple mitigation of torment, that, although I had cause enough besides to be gloomy, I felt light and comparatively happy. My impression is, that she was quite aware of the law of appearances that existed between the people of the place and myself, and had resolved to amuse herself at my expense; for one evening, after some jesting and raillery, she, somehow or other, provoked me to attempt to kiss her. But she was well defended from any assault of the kind. Her countenance became, of a sudden, absurdly hideous; the pretty mouth was elongated and otherwise amplified sufficiently to have allowed of six simultaneous kisses. I started back in bewildered dismay; she burst into the merriest fit of laughter, and ran from the room. I soon found that the same undefinable law of change operated between me and all the other villagers; and that, to feel I was in pleasant company, it was absolutely necessary for me to discover and observe the right focal distance between myself and each one with whom I had to do. This done, all went pleasantly enough. Whether, when I happened to neglect this precaution, I presented to them an equally ridiculous appearance, I did not ascertain; but I presume that the alteration was common to the approximating parties. I was likewise unable to determine whether I was a necessary party to the production of this strange transformation, or whether it took place as well, under the given circumstances, between the inhabitants themselves.
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George MacDonald (Phantastes)
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What Broch understood by kitsch (and who else before him had even looked into the question with the keenness and profundity it demands?) was by no means a simple matter of degeneracy. Nor did he think of the relation between kitsch and true art as comparable to that of superstition to religion in a religious age, or of pseudo-science to science in the modern mass age. Rather, for him kitsch is art, or art at once becomes kitsch as soon as it breaks out of the controlling value system. L'art pour l'art in particular, appearing though it did in aristocratic and haughty guise and furnishing us - as Broch of course knew - with such convincing works of literature, is actually already kitsch, just as in the commercial realm the slogan "Business is business" already contains within itself the dishonesty of the unscrupulous profiteer, and just as in the First World War the obtrusive maxim "War is war" had already transformed the war into mass slaughter. There are several characteristic elements in this value philosophy of Broch's. It is not only that he defined kitsch as "evil in the value system of art." It is that he saw the criminal element and the element of radical evil as personified in the figure of the aestheticizing literary man (in which category, for instance, he placed Nero and even Hitler), and as one and the same with kitsch. Nor was this because evil revealed itself to the writer understandably first of all in his own "value system." Rather, it was because of his insight into the peculiar character of art and its enormous attraction for man. As he saw it, the real seductiveness of evil, the quality of seduction in the figure of the devil, is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon. Aesthetic in the broadest sense; the businessmen whose credo is "Business is business" and the statesmen who hold with 'War is war" are aestheticizing literati in the "value vacuum." They are aesthetes insofar as they are enchanted by the consonance of their own system, and they become murderers because they are prepared to sacrifice everything to this consonance, this "beautiful" consistency.
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Hannah Arendt (Men in Dark Times)
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One of the first things to catch your eye on arriving in Rugeley is the obtrusively large red shopfront advertising private detectives. Is your partner cheating? Ask about our tracking service, reads the huge white lettering in the window. The shop also advertises lie-detector tests for hire. This is the paranoid world of The Jeremy Kyle Show writ large. Fidelity and faithfulness have been slowly chipped away by more ephemeral, market-driven principles promising instant gratification. You ditch one lover and take another, just as you might throw away an iPhone and buy a newer model in an emotional flight of fancy. For working-class communities this adds yet another layer of impermanence to an already insecure existence, especially for those men whose sense of masculine inadequacy is reinforced by the lack of any purposeful employment.
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James Bloodworth (Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain)
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I hadn’t thought of it before, but the Good Doctor is very much like water, fitting in wherever he needs to. Ever-present, but never obtrusive. Calming, comforting, yet inescapable.
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Heather Day Gilbert (Miranda Warning (A Murder in the Mountains, #1))
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It is a matter of bad taste under all circumstances to beg much instead of to give much: the mixture of humble servility with a courtly-rabble-like obtrusiveness, with which e.g., Saint Augustine grovels before God in his Confessions, reminds us that human beings perhaps are not alone among animals with religious feelings: dogs have a similar "religious feeling" for human beings.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Fragments (Spring 1885-Spring 1886))
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We often feel how poor the edifice would be were it built exclusively of our rituals and deeds which are so awkward and often so obtrusive. How else express glory in the presence of eternity, if not by the silence of abstaining from noisy acts?
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Abraham Joshua Heschel (The Sabbath (FSG Classics))
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There are apparently two types of successful soldiers,” Patton had recently written his son. β€œThose who get on by being unobtrusive and those who get on by being obtrusive. I am of the latter type.” True enough,
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Rick Atkinson (The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945 (The Liberation Trilogy))
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life itself is ESSENTIALLY appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
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One would think the more obtrusive setting would create the greatest impact, but instead it is the solitude that presses with more force.
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Elizabeth Crook
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When people sit up and take off their eyeshades, they should be reminded that it is now time to work on their problems, which may need to be restated to them. There should be no more music unless it is requested by a participant. If requested, it should be kept at a very low volume. Participants may choose to sit or lie down, to work with eyes closed or open, or to make notes or sketches. Every person finds his or her own way. The facilitator’s job for the next few hours will be like that of a good airline steward or a waiter in a four-star restaurant: attentive to the participants’ needs, but not obtrusive. Some participants may ask for paper and pens or other aids, ask for a snack, or ask the facilitator to make note of an idea. Others will not want to be intruded upon. Discourage conversation. Remind people that they are there to work on their own projects.
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James Fadiman (The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys)
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Reacher said, β€œOur nearest tanks are a thousand miles from Yemen or Afghanistan, and they take weeks and weeks and thousands of people to move. It would be easier to bring Yemen or Afghanistan to them. Also faster and less obtrusive.
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Lee Child (Night School (Jack Reacher, #21))
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To listen through aural debris to Francesco Tamagno (1850–1905), Verdi's original Otello, or to Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), the last castrato, is a fascinating experience but one that cannot be endured for much longer than holding one's head down a wishing well. The pitch is wobbly, the static obtrusive and any impression of the singer's musicality requires an imaginative leap on the listener's part.
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Norman Lebrecht (The Life and Death of Classical Music: Featuring the 100 Best and 20 Worst Recordings Ever Made)
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Moreover, in my view, obtrusive and intrusive leadership becomes counterproductive by interfering with the free interplay of individual talent and interest.
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Ricardo Semler (The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works)
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The homeowner’s greater willingness to place the large, obtrusive sign on their lawns after agreeing to the smaller ones demonstrates the impact of our predilection for consistency with our past behaviors. Little investments, such as placing a tiny sign in a window, can lead to big changes in future behaviors.
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Nir Eyal (Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products)
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Each of us has an innate power within to soar above any obtrusive mountains and clouds in our way. Our fear of failing is usually the real limitation of personal growth or success. ACT LIKE YOU ALREADY WON -The mindset of successful people (The mindset theory-Do you have and open or fixed mindset.6/pg59)
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MILLICENT OLAGHERE (ACT LIKE YOU ALREADY WON: The Mindset of Successful People; Diminish Your Fears Now.)
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Our profession is a blessed one because it affords the flexibility for everyone to do their job a little differently. There are not two of us who could deliver a lesson in an identical fashion because what we do is driven by our idiosyncratic differences as teachers and as people, such that it would be impossible to do so. As a result, a β€˜recipe’ for improving lessons would be inherently obtrusive and perhaps condescending.
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Isabella Wallace (Talk-Less Teaching: Practice, Participation and Progress)
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That is the whole history of politics. You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under.
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Yvette Cooper (She Speaks: Women's Speeches That Changed the World, from Pankhurst to Thunberg (A Guardian Book of the Year))
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It will, doubtless, be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert age to browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectly intolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands. It may, indeed, be rather less obtrusive at home if it is disciplined in school; and anyhow, elders who have abandoned the wholesome principle that children should be seen and not heard have no one to blame but themselves.
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Dorothy L. Sayers (The Lost Tools of Learning)
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She touched a lower note. It was deep and throbbing, full of sorrow and anger. Gingerly, with one hand, she tapped out a simple, slow melody on the higher keys. Echoesβ€”shreds of memories arising out of the void of her mind. Her rooms were so silent that the music seemed obtrusive. She moved her right hand, playing upon the flats and sharps. It was a piece that she used to play again and again until Arobynn would yell at her to play something else. She played a chord, then another, added in a few silver notes from her right hand, pushed once on a pedal, and was gone. The notes burst from her fingers, staggering at first, but then more confidently as the emotion in the music took over. It was a mournful piece, but it made her into something clean and new. She was surprised that her hands had not forgotten, that somewhere in her mind, after a year of darkness and slavery, music was still alive and breathing. That somewhere, between the notes, was Sam. She forgot about time as she drifted between pieces, voicing the unspeakable, opening old wounds, playing and playing as the sound forgave and saved her.
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Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass (Throne of Glass, #1))
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As women come to attain more leadership positions, this less obtrusive style of authority might begin to alter our perception of some of the dominance cues so long associated with power.
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Robert Greene (The Laws of Human Nature)
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Their boats ride the lenient Current together, in and out of the Shadows, ever in easy reach of rescue, the Boy shepherding them with Willow Wands, no more obtrusive in this Naval History than Gods in a Myth.
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Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon)
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She watched with envy as dancers bobbed and swayed to the raging music like an undulating wave in an angry sea. Pungent odors of sweat and incense mingled with the less obtrusive smells of whiskey and flash pots from the stage. Laser lights and strobes flashed like lightning in time to the thunder of heavy bass and drums. The whole place thrummed with energy as if on the brink of an explosion. Any other time, she might have felt out of place in her conservative cream silk blouse and knee-length taupe skirt amidst the metal-studded leather and ripped denim. The women frowned at her attire while the men gave her a wide berth as if she might burst into religious sermon if they came too close. With a resigned shrug, she raised a hand to pat the sleek French twist in her hair lest one of the unruly locks escape its prison. Satisfied that every hair held its place, she turned her gaze to the crowd around her. β€œHey there, pretty girl.” One of the bartenders set a gin and tonic with two slices of lime in front of her before she had spoken a word. She tried to hand him a ten-dollar bill but he waved it away with a shrug and a wink. β€œYour drinks are on the house tonight.” As he returned to the other end of the bar, her gaze followed him. This particular broad-shouldered bartender was the reason most females came to Felony, and she was no exception. His name was Jack. They had a passing acquaintance limited to brief discussions of the weather and sports, mingled with occasional flirtatious remarks. Although she had a huge crush on him, she’d never admitted it to anyone including herself. Jack represented everything that was absent from her life; spontaneity, promiscuity… adventure. He was the green grass on the other side of her self-imposed fence, a temptation that she coveted but would never taste.
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Jeana E. Mann (Intoxicated (Felony Romance, #1))
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No wonder we call an experience like this a breakdown. It may sound familiar to anyone who has suffered depression, and it can also occur in various neurological disorders. For Heidegger, it would be an extreme case of the collapse of everyday Being-in-the-world, a collapse that makes everything obtrusive, disarticulated, and impossible to negotiate with our usual blithe disregard.
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Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist CafΓ©: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others)