Character Quotes - Page 29

• Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting ideas without being sure they’ll work.

  Richard Bach

  Ideas, Following, Highest

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• Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters.

  Samuel Adams

  Patriotic, Men, Voting

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• Sir," returned Mrs. Sparsit, " I cannot say that i have heard him precisely snore, and therefore must not make that statement. But on winter evenings, when he has fallen asleep at his table, I have heard him, what I should prefer to describe as partially choke. I have heard him on such occasions produce sounds of a nature similar to what may be heard in dutch clocks. Not," said Mrs. Sparsit, with a lofty sense of giving strict evidence, " That I would convey any imputation on his moral character. Far from it.

  Charles Dickens

  Winter, Giving, Dutch

  Charles Dickens “Hard Times”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.

  Jane Austen

  Thinking, People, Prejudice

  Jane Austen (1853). “Pride and Prejudice”, p.119

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• The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.

  Miranda July

  Jobs, Writing, Ideas

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• A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels - the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

  Azar Nafisi

  Pain, Lying, Heart

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.132, Random House

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• If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.

  Wallace Stegner

  Art, Thinking, Light

  Wallace Earle Stegner (1987). “The American West as Living Space”, p.4, University of Michigan Press

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• Happy will the house be in which the relationships are formed from character.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  House

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• I'm definitely more of a 'think game' kind of girl. I'll read every single dialogue and codex entry and lore entry. I really do love projecting myself and creating my character.

  Felicia Day

  Girl, Thinking, Creating

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Heart, Forget Everything, Details

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• There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

  Charles Baxter

  Mistake, Sound, Action

  Charles Baxter (1997). “Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction”

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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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• Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

  Cornelia Funke

  Real, Reading, Pages

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• To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts — when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break — at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent — I am ever tender and true. (Mr Rochester to Jane)

  Charlotte Bronte

  Eye, Heart, Fire

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.213, Penguin

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• Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

  Salman Rushdie

  Friends, Mother, Loss

  "The Ground Beneath Her Feet". Book by Salman Rushdie, April, 1999.

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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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• We are all good friends. Friendship is what endures. Shared ideals, respect for the whole character of a human being.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Good Friend, Endure, Humans

  E. L. Doctorow, Paul Levine (2005). “Three Screenplays”, p.218, JHU Press

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• But in a country where you hang your dead up on walls and pride whether or not a man bears a javelin more than his character, how am I to persuade you out of a war? It would be suicide for Kildenree to war on Bayern and butchery for Bayern to attack Kildenree. If you don't believe me, then send me back. Or if you don't trust me to leave, I'll return to my little room on the west wall and tend your geese, and you can be sure that on my watch no thieves will touch my flock.

  Shannon Hale

  Suicide, Country, Wall

  Shannon Hale (2010). “The Goose Girl”, p.374, A&C Black

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• She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, 'truth, reverence, and good will,' then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Wise, Greatness, Men

  Louisa May Alcott (2009). “Good Wives: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.195, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus, formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we can't separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the way that he is doing it. To follow Jesus is as much, or maybe even more, about feet as it is about ears and eyes" (The Way of Jesus, Eugene H. Peterson, 22).

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Jesus, Mean, Eye

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• Music... will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Music, Joy, Sorrow

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• It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Trying, Events, Agents

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Slow Learner”, p.9, Penguin

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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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• Oh, I'm developing a beautiful character! It droops a bit under cold and frost, but it does grow fast when the sun shines. That's the way with everybody. I don't agree with the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness.

  Jean Webster

  Beautiful, Disappointment, Adversity

  Jean Webster (2016). “Daddy Long-Legs and Dear Enemy: Illustrated”, p.35, Jester House Publishing

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• The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

  Judy Blume

  Book, Writing, Care

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