Diagonal Quotes

• The line of life is a ragged diagonal between duty and desire.

  William Rounseville Alger

  Life, Desire, Lines

  98 Copy quote

• A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall; that is, side to floor, for instance.

  Dan Flavin

  Wall, Light, Pieces

  89 Copy quote

• He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side.

  Plato

  Plato, Math, Men

  60 Copy quote

• At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.

  Larry Wall

  Levels, Language, Perl

  Usenet article, 1997.

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• There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  War, Sacrifice, Boys

  Barbara Kingsolver (2009). “Animal Dreams: A Novel”, p.14, Harper Collins

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• The diagonal gives a three-dimensional feeling to dancers that cannot be achieved when they are only front and back. On the diagonal, more movement is automatically visible.

  Lucinda Childs

  Giving, Dancer, Feelings

  Source: www.kcet.org

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• If the simple positions of ballet are demonstrated straight on, they seem quite dull and lifeless, but when put on a diagonal, they begin to take on all kinds of possibilities.

  Lucinda Childs

  Simple, Ballet, Dull

  Source: www.kcet.org

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• Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  D Day, Human Nature, Humans

  Barbara Kingsolver (2009). “Animal Dreams: A Novel”, p.14, Harper Collins

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• I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.

  David Mitchell

  Fall, People, Balance

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas: A Novel”, p.168, Random House

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• My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world.

  Roy Lichtenstein

  Color, Use, World

  Roy Lichtenstein, Jack Cowart, Katonah Museum of Art, Dixon Gallery and Gardens (2009). “Lichtenstein in process”

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• I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.

  Sylvia Plath

  Blood, Two, Touching

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.60, Hamilton Books

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• The streets of L.A. undulate over short hills as though a finger is poking the landscape from underneath ... laid over this crosshatch are streets meandering on the diagonal creating a multitude of ways to get from one place to another by traveling along the hypotenuse. These are the avenues of the tryst which enable Acting Student A to travel the eighteen miles across town to Acting Student B's garage apartment in nine minutes flat after a hot-blooded phone call at midnight.

  Steve Martin

  Phones, Creating, Acting

  6 Copy quote

• The attempt to apply rational arithmetic to a problem in geometry resulted in the first crisis in the history of mathematics. The two relatively simple problems -- the determination of the diagonal of a square and that of the circumference of a circle -- revealed the existence of new mathematical beings for which no place could be found within the rational domain.

  David van Dantzig

  Determination, Simple, Squares

  6 Copy quote

• God is in the mountains. Impassive, immovable, jagged giants, separating the celestial from the terrestrial with eternal diagonal certainty. As if silently monitoring the beating heart of the creator from the universe's perfect birth. Stood in the thin air and the awe, one inhales God, involuntarily acknowledging that we are but fragments of a whole, a higher thing. The mountains remind me of my place, as a servant to truth and wonder. Yes, God is in the mountains. Perhaps the pulpit too and even in the piety of an atheist's sigh. I don't know; but I feel him in the mountains.

  Russell Brand

  Atheist, Heart, Air

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• I have heterochromia, meaning that one eye has two split colours. It's a diagonal cut in half. It's amazing how many people don't know that until they meet me and we talk long enough for them to see it.

  Dan Payne

  Eye, Cutting, Two

  Source: www.realstylenetwork.com

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• I review all I know, but can synthesize no meaning. When I doze, the Fact, the certain accomplished calamity, wakes me roughly like a brutal nurse. I see it crouching inflexibly in a corner of the ceiling. It comes down in geometrical diagonal like lightning.It says, I remain, I AM, I shall never cease to be: your memory will grow a deathly glaze: you will forget, you will fade out, but I cannot be undone.Thus every quarter hour it puts the taste of death in my mouth, and shows me, but not gently, how I go whoring after oblivion.

  Elizabeth Smart

  Memories, Nurse, Facts

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