Quotes About Background

I have the background singers of Ray Charles, the background singers of Smokey Robinson, and the background singers of Barry White and I built a choir around that.

If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate, we hardly listen at all to what is being said...One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of silence, in which this whole background is in abeyance, is quite; then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate

My mixed-race background made me a broad person, able to relate to different cultures. But any woman of colour, even a mixed colour, is seen as black in America. So that's how I regard myself.

To assert that it is possible to establish peace between men of different nations is simply to assert that man, whatever his ethnical background, his race, religious beliefs, or philosophy, is capable of reason. Two forces within the individual contribute to the development of his conscience and of his morality: reason and sensitivity.

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.

... some of my people could have been left [in Africa] and are living there. And I can't understand them and they don't know me and I don't know them because all we had was taken away from us. And I became kind of angry; I felt the anger of why this had to happen to us. We were so stripped and robbed of our background, we wind up with nothing.

I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing.

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

I was glad to have had some dance background because some of the dances are pretty wild.

The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine.

Whatever you do has to be commercial and it can't be too distracting - it has to be background music, basically.

I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

I was coming from a theater background. I had an obsession with classic film and cool, interesting, intelligent television. I didn't really understand the way the mainstream television industry worked. I just thought "The wire is so good that it's going to be a huge hit, and we'll get awards up the yin-yang forever." That's what I thought!

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.

I entered this career having no background or connection to acting.

I come from a middle class background. I have travelled a lot by trains and have lived in the world. It is a world I cannot get away from; I would not even want to.

It is not that love is blind. It is that love sees with a painter's eye, finding the essence that renders all else background.

[Donald Trump] can`t reach out and push off at the same time when he says - he says we want the ban on assault weapons, because they`re so very dangerous, and background checks on guns, given the level of violence in the country, he says he wants more guns to make us more secure.

I feel like my own background in improv and doing documentaries makes me really comfortable with a situation where you're letting things unfold and you don't have to be a jerk, stomping his feet, trying to get his way on everything.

I am not sure one is capable of reflecting absurdity without having a strong sense of meaning. Absurdity makes sense only against a meaningful background. It is the deeper meaning that is shedding light on the absurdity. There must be a vanish point, a metaphysical horizon if you will where absurdity and meaning merge.

Odd that I couldn’t catch any of your dream,” Bones went on. “Normally your dreams are like background music to me.

Unbeknownst to me, two readers of the posts, both published authors, contacted their agent, Bill Jensen, within 24 hours of each other, encouraging him to drop me a line. Which he did. He shared his extensive publishing background with me, and prayerfully offered to work out a proposal and to see if God opened any publishing doors? I never get over the unexpected ways of God.

They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn't know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.

In November [2016], Americans are gonna have to make a decision about what we care about and who we are. We get these spasms of politics around immigration and fearmongering and then our traditions and our history and our better impulses kick in. That's how we all ended up here. 'Cause I guarantee you at some point every one of us has somebody in our background who people didn't want coming here. And yet here we are.

When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.

Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.

The Romans thought of themselves as the chosen people, yet they built the greatest army on Earth by recruiting warriors from any background.

My concern is to develop a North American type of anarchism that comes out of the American tradition, or that at least can be communicated to Americans and that takes into consideration that Americans are not any longer people of European background.

There are clearly people for whom Stoicism immediately "clicks," it comes natural, and others for whom it doesn't. Then again, Stoicism isn't the only positive philosophy of life. Buddhism is an excellent alternative, if it speaks more clearly to one's personality or cultural background.

I love the plus (fashion) industry! It embraces a lot of women who would otherwise disappear into the background. I truly love what I do!

One of the most memorable moments was when I first saw earth because I had seen many pictures, many videos of earth from space, and being able to see that with my own eyes had a completely different effect, and sort of almost sensing life emanating from our planet in the dark background of the space, it was a really memorable experience.

The one that came really easy was the Japanese lover, because he's like a ghost in the book. He's always in the background like a spirit, like a shadow, almost. There's a very delicate line there.

The technical stuff is easy to deal with, it's just supplemental to the plight - it's not a real thing, it's just background to what we're really trying to do.

I like the fact that this kind of family has been seen in a movie a million times: teenage kids, the family is a bit strained and they don't have enough money, but in the background the guy used to be a Gene Simmons type.

I imagined myself living in New York in some sort of open, large but sparse studio apartment with a lot of blond wood and a futon on the floor and a bubbling samovar of tea in the background and a big beard - living alone but with my beard - and doing theater. That's what I thought my life would be.

It's unfortunate that some people do not see what entertainers do in the background, but many of us do so much work with causes. You know some people have chewed me out, saying things like, "Oh why could you post pictures in your dresses and meanwhile they killing black men on the street?" I'm thinking, excuse me do you know what I did today? Do you know what I'm doing right now while I'm reading this post? So I think a lot of celebrities get a bad rap because people see the surface.

The most reckless sinner against his own conscience has always in the background the consolation that he will go on in this course only this time, or only so long, but that at such a time he will amend. We may be assured that we do not stand clear with our own consciences so long as we determine or project, or even hold it possible, at some future time to alter our course of action.

In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.

Given that the label "immigrant literature" is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label.

The information hack contains facts discovered by the FBI in doing background checks for people seeking positions with the federal government. It's a treasure trove which can easily be used for blackmail and other reasons by the enemy.

I was obsessed with being popular when I was in high school and never achieved it. There's photos from our high school musicals and things, and I'm comically in the deep background, wearing a beggar's costume.

I welcome anyone that wants to come into the WWE and try it, because, I was the type of person that was not welcome with open arms. People didn't want me to come in because I was from a Reality background. But I'm the first person that says, bring anybody in.

Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background.

You don't see a wonderful shot in a comedy. Why? Because they don't want to distract you from what matters, which is the joke. It has to be funny, so usually all the things in the background don't matter.

History is basically really looking back and finding out what happened to an individual, a community, a family, a group in a certain event. And so that's why I go, "Wow. That's what acting really is. You find out the background, you get the joy of creating a fictional history of a fictional character and you get to tell a story." So I felt that acting is making history come alive and it became my mode of trying to figure out what this craft of acting is really all about.

Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.