Mumbling Quotes
It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion.
Robertson Davies
Those who seem to think that the Bush administration had something to do with 9-11... I can prove that they didn't. They are totally incompetent! 9-11 was a brilliantly executed strike on the United States. I can't imagine anybody... I can't even imagine... Can you imagine Cheney, mumbling around, orchestrating something like that?
Gore Vidal
A great deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Past, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one--the knowledge and the dream.
Ambrose Bierce
There are a great many Tory Liberals in the Liberal party. There is a Toryism in Liberalism as great and as deep, though as unconscious, as any in the Carlton Club. There are men who sit still with the fly-blown phylacteries bound round their obsolete policy, who do not remember that, while they have been mumbling their incantations to themselves, the world has been marching and revolving, and if they have any hope of leading or guiding it they must march and move with it too.
Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery
If you want a peaceful place to dwell
Cold Mountain is guaranteed forever
A light wind blows softly in the pines
The sound is good when you are close
One old man sits beneath the trees
Reading Lao Tzu and Huang Ti, mumbling
I could not find the world if I searched ten years
I've forgotten the road by which I came.
Hanshan
But to poetry - You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. And the prayerful state is just being passive with it, mumbling, being around there, lying on the grass, going swimming, you see. Even getting drunk. Get drunk prayerfully, though.
Robert Penn Warren
It's not a clash between civilisations but within them - in the Muslim world, between what's left of moderate traditional Islam and an extreme strain of that faith that even many of their co-religionists have difficulty living with; and in the West between those who think this culture is worth defending and those who'd rather sleepwalk to national suicide while mumbling bromides about whether Western hedonism is to blame for 'lack of services for locals' in Bali. To read Robert Frisk and Margo Kingston is like watching a panto cast on drugs: No matter how often the baddies say, 'I'm behind you!', Robert and Margo reply, 'Oh, no, you're not!'
Mark Steyn