Character Quotes - Page 22

• Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

  Jane Yolen

  Writing, Athlete, Exercise

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• She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, each one flung out like a little piece of sand, one from this direction, another form behind, more and more, until his looks, his character, his soul would have eroded away . . . I was afraid that some unseen speck of truth would fly into my eye, blur what I was seeing and transform him from the divine man I thought he was into someone quite mundane, mortally wounded with tiresome habits and irritating imperfections.

  Amy Tan

  Eye, Men, Imperfection

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• Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Fool, Tricks

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• It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.

  Tom Stoppard

  Indolence, Rigour

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• Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

  Wallace Stegner

  People, Towns

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.77, Penguin

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• The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

  Mary Karr

  Fighting, Water, Forever

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• Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she shouldn't.

  Shannon Hale

  Real, Years, Two

  Shannon Hale (2013). “Austenland: A Novel”, p.9, A&C Black

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• A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

  Boris Pasternak

  Art, Moving, Reading

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• I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.

  Ann Brashares

  Writing, Comedy, Broke Up

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• It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance.

  Ian Mcewan

  Powerful, Fate, Tuning

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• O light! This the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

  Albert Camus

  Summer, Drama, Fate

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.202, Vintage

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• A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Men, Self, Self Control

  Henry Hazlitt (1922). “The Way to Will-power”

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• Having a place means that you know what a place means...what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense...Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness

  Gary Snyder

  Mean, Consciousness, Integrating

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• Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

  David Sedaris

  Judging, Judge Of Character, My Friends

  David Sedaris (2000). “Me talk pretty one day”

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• The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.

  Lin Yutang

  Pity Love, Feelings, Purpose

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• To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.

  Thomas Merton

  Love, Life, Wisdom

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.60, New Directions Publishing

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• ... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

  Milan Kundera

  Thinking, People, Essentials

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• You know what would help this boy?" Demeter mused. "Farming." Persephone rolled her eyes. "Mother-" "Six months behind a plow. Excellent character building.

  Rick Riordan

  Mother, Eye, Boys

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• Dad's Theory of Arrogance--that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway Play.

  Marisha Pessl

  Dad, Play, Arrogance

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.197, Penguin

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• All your scholarship, all your study of Shakespeare and Wordsworth would be in vain, if at the same time you do not build your character, and attain mastery over your thoughts and actions.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Spiritual, Would Be, Mastery

  "Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore".

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• My God, that scene in Monster Inc. where the monsters realise that their entire world is founded on hurting children -look at that for a change! Two galumphing cartoon characters making a shattering realisation about their world and their role in sustaining it. A truly epic moment. It's stunning.

  Russell T Davies

  Hurt, Children, Epic

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• I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes... in a total misapprehension of character at some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why, or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge.

  Jane Austen

  Mistake, Stupid, Gay

  Jane Austen (2015). “Sense and Sensibility: Ignatius Critical Editions”, p.92, Ignatius Press

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• The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Thinking, Way, Fiction

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• Redemption is something you have to fight for in a very personal, down-dirty way. Some of our characters lose that, some stray from that, and some regain it.

  Joss Whedon

  Dirty, Fighting, Redemption

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• I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact.

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Men, Trying

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