Ostensibly Quotes

#1. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly "inert" letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless - as mysterious as a talking stone.

David Abram

#2. The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts ... Most of it is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all.

Jane Jacobs

#3. On an independent film you're lucky if you get one, but ostensibly the job is the same. There's very little difference, apart from the knowledge that there's a captive audience at the end of it - which you can't always guarantee with a movie.

Charles Dance

#4. Bobby Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller are having a row, ostensibly over the plight of New York's mentally retarded, a loose definition of which would include everyone in New York who voted for Bobby Kennedy or Nelson Rockefeller.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#5. Here's my unsolicited advice to any aspiring screenwriters who might be reading this: Don't ever agonize about the hordes of other writers who are ostensibly your competition. No one else is capable of doing what you do.

Diablo Cody

#6. A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

Susan Sontag

#7. I think it is a pity to lose the romantic side of flying and simply to accept it as a common means of transport, although that end is what we have all ostensibly been striving to attain.

Amy Johnson

#8. Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.

Matt Taibbi

#9. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#10. I find it shocking that anybody can be brought down in D.C. for gossip, ostensibly. I thought that was the coin of the realm there. That's like getting hit with lightning on a cloudless day.

Dennis Miller

#11. For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.

Christopher Hitchens

#12. I wanted to hate Jake, of course, but as I watched them together, smiling and fumbling all over each other, I didn't hate him. I wanted to be him, sure, but I tried to remember I was ostensibly on a date with someone else.

John Green

#13. Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.

Zygmunt Bauman

#14. John and Kirsty sat on the couch in her living room; two ostensibly broken people who, for just a few hours, had made each feel other feel decidedly less so.

Holly Sharp

#15. Twas ostensibly ominous in the overview
To be 'orribly and onerously overrun.

Ian McEwan

#16. As a result, ostensibly liberated women often found themselves struggling with three full-time jobs: working inside the home, working outside the home, and trying to be thin.

Debora L. Spar

#17. Laws ostensibly directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the treatment of lawfully present immigrants and citizens who share the ethnic, racial, or national origin characteristics of undocumented immigrants.

Pratheepan Gulasekaram

#18. There are a lot of songs that would ostensibly be a good candidate for parody, yet I can't think of a clever enough idea.

Al Yankovic

#19. He must rest his weight on his elbows when they make love, ostensibly to avoid hurting her breasts but actually to keep her from having to touch or feel too much of him. While

Toni Morrison

#20. I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

Karen Joy Fowler

#21. Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button.

Christopher Lasch

#22. I'm British - ostensibly British - but I don't know where I really belong, you know?

Robert Plant

#23. The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things.

Simon Schama

#24. You see a fleeting perfection of form merging with a significant substance, and you make a clicking noise only a hair's breadth away. You have judged something, reported something, ostensibly truthfully ... And when you made a clicking noise you said something eloquently if you are skilled.

Burk Uzzle

#25. The abstraction, ostensibly, is simply for me the penetration of something that is more profound in many ways than rigidity of a form. A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.

Beauford Delaney

#26. Do we ever get what we really want? Do we ever achieve what our powers have ostensibly equipped us for? No: everything works by contraries.

Nikolai Gogol

#27. What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.

Moby

#28. In today's world, marketers reach inside the home and attempt to figure out not what's good for your daughter, because that is not their business, but what deep desires they can manipulate, stimulate and ostensibly satisfy in order to produce cold, hard cash.

Maggie Gallagher

#29. Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.

Neal Stephenson

#30. We wanted to establish a new fan base over here. And second, we wanted to challenge ourselves. We wanted to bring what is ostensibly new music to fresh ears and see what lights them up.

Bob Weir

#31. He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits.

Saul Bellow

#32. Mr. Applebaum, who is ostensibly teaching us precalculus but is mostly teaching me that pain and suffering.

John Green

#33. THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY is ostensibly an autobiography but in truth it is much more than that. In this remarkably fine new translation, Anthea Bell perfectly captures Stefan Zweig's glorious evocation of a lost world, Vienna's golden age, in which he grew up and flourished.

Ronald Harwood

#34. These are the beautiful people, who, befitting their rank as gods and goddesses of a powerful modern mythology, lead beautiful lives in beautiful houses, attired in beautiful clothes and, ostensibly, thinking only beautiful thoughts.

Helen Lawrenson

#35. The next day we ate too much In-N-Out Burger and lay in bed beside each other and I cried ostensibly because I'd miss him when I left, but truly I felt dead inside

Lena Dunham

#36. I was arrested in September 2011 and detained for nine months before I was found guilty in June 2012 under Ethiopia's overly broad Anti-Terrorism Proclamation, which ostensibly covers the 'planning, preparation, conspiracy, incitement and attempt' of terrorist acts.

Eskinder Nega

#37. Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity, gizmos, eating, hanging out, things that make noise - all are now the norm, often edging out much else.

Jerry Saltz

#38. If we are lending money that ostensibly we don't have to kids who have no hope of making it back in order to train them for jobs that clearly don't exist, I might suggest that we've gone around the bend a little bit,

Mike Rowe

#39. Darling, whose book is this to be?"
"Ostensibly yours, my sweet"
"I see
rather like my life since I met you?"
"Yes darling

John Wyndham

#40. We find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt ends
the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

Friedrich Engels

#41. 'Divergent,' directed by Neil Burger, displayed an admirable seriousness and some grim verve in laying out the boundaries of novelist Veronica Roth's dystopia - six segregated but ostensibly harmonious regions defined by their inhabitants' skills.

Richard Corliss

#42. It was a hairline crack, one might never have noticed, except for the fact it grew wider and wider, until there was a canyon between them. A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed?

Jodi Picoult

#43. Fucking holidays, William thought. Occasions to rethink your life, ostensibly, but how were you supposed to do that when other people kept dragging you back toward whoever you used to be?

Garth Risk Hallberg

#44. Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine.

John Shirley

#45. Because Mr. Applebaum, who is ostensibly teaching us precalculus but is mostly teaching me that pain and suffering must be endured stoically, says, "You feel what, Tiny?".

John Green

#46. In other words, to whatever extent migrants are crossing the border and thereby (ostensibly) taking other people's jobs, it is only because the economy of Mexico has been considerably undermined by the policies of our country.

Tim Wise

#47. The War on Drugs and the War on Homelessness are on a collision course that no one in the media or in public life are willing to acknowledge. Ostensibly aimed at decreasing the use of illegal drugs, the War on Drugs succeeds only in increasing homelessness.

Thomas Szasz

#48. ...some of the most important work that we can do as scholars may more closely resemble contemporary editorial or curatorial practices, bringing together, highlighting and remixing significant ideas in existing texts than remaining solely focused on the production of more ostensibly original texts.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

#49. Fear forces us to spend our lives dealing with it, ostensibly to overcome it. But that is a trick. Only fear (the illusion of separation) would want us to work to be unafraid, precisely because it is not possible for a separate self to be unafraid!

Cheri Huber

#50. Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it's purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it's going to fail.

Nick Flynn

#51. You'd just be amazed what people will do. You really would. And not crazy people. Ostensibly normal people. When the right person touches the right button in someone, you can get them to do almost anything.

Annie Parisse

#52. My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a sign-writer.

Sherwood Anderson