Character Quotes - Page 36

• As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.

  David Sedaris

  Beats, Dressers, Being Judged

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• We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.

  Tobias Wolff

  Men, Today Is The Day, Bed

  Tobias Wolff (2004). “Old School”, p.14, Vintage

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• Children pay little attention to their parents' teachings, but reproduce their characters faithfully

  Mason Cooley

  Children, Teaching, Parent

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• Someone who can search for something is happy. Searching gives a meaning to life. Nowadays it’s not so easy to find something you might be looking for. The most important thing, however, is the search itself, the way you take. It’s not so important where it leads. that’s why my characters are always looking for something, maybe only a cat, a sheep or a wife, but that is at least the beginning of a story.

  Haruki Murakami

  Cat, Sheep, Giving

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• Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Animal, Men, Compassion

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “101 Facts of life”, p.15, Publishdrive

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• Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there's a man who sits behind a counter and says, "All right, you can have a telephone but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline."

  Jerome Lawrence

  Distance, Men, Thinking

  "Fictional character: Henry Drummond". "Inherit the Wind", www.imdb.com. 1960.

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• In the christian view, the ultimate evidence for the existence of God is Jesus Christ. If there is a God, we characters in his play have to hope that he put some information about himself in the play. But Christians believe he did more than give us information. He wrote himself into the play as the main character in history, when Jesus was born in a manger and rose from the dead.

  Timothy Keller

  Christian, Jesus, Believe

  Timothy Keller (2008). “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism”, p.135, Penguin

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• I'm a writer and, therefore, automatically a suspicious character.

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Suspicious

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• Great, now I’ve turned into a manga character who repeated everything everyone said.

  Ilona Andrews

  Said

  Ilona Andrews (2012). “Magic Dreams: A Penguin Special from Ace”, p.10, Penguin

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• She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

  Anna Godbersen

  Strong, Writing, Desire

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• Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Real, Book, College

  Louisa May Alcott (2018). “Louisa May Alcott Collection”, p.1224, Youcanprint

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• When you do nothing you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better.

  Maya Angelou

  Hope, Honesty, Integrity

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• You could know a man not by what his friends said about him, but by how he treated his servants.

  Cassandra Clare

  Men, Said, Servant

  Cassandra Clare (2011). “Clockwork Angel”, p.64, Simon and Schuster

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• I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Dream, Book, Towns

  Fernando Pessoa, Iain Watson (1991). “The book of disquiet: a selection”, Quartet Encounters

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• The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.

  Oscar Wilde

  Simplicity

  Oscar Wilde (2000). “The Plays of Oscar Wilde”, p.380, Wordsworth Editions

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• This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Thinking, Depressed Person

  Translation of the Zeit Online interview, www.thehowlingfantods.com. January 26, 2007.

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• A good character is something you must make for yourself. It cannot be inherited from parents. It cannot be created by having extraordinary advantages. It isn't a gift of birth, wealth, talent or station. It is the result of your own endeavor. It is the reward that comes from living good principles and manifesting a virtuous and honorable life.

  L. Tom Perry

  Good Life, Integrity, Parent

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• Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.

  Gary Paulsen

  Song, Stupid, Book

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• Anyone that has character leaves a mark on another. Would you like to leave the world without making a ripple?

  Nora Roberts

  World, Mark, Ripple

  Nora Roberts (2015). “Lessons Learned”, p.27, Harlequin

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• I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Writing, Men, People

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2015). “Anne of Green Gables Collection: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of the Island, and More Anne Shirley Books”, p.541, Xist Publishing

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• Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.

  Gregory Maguire

  Roots, Dying, Calm

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• After that, all the while Millie was eating the pudding... we both tore Christopher's character to shreds. It was wonderful fun.... He drove everyone mad in Chrestomanci Castle by insisting on silk shirts and exactly the right kind of pajamas. 'And he could get them right anyway by magic,' Millie told me, 'if he wasn't too lazy to learn how.... But the thing that really annoys me is the way he never bothers to learn a person's name. If a person isn't important to him, he always forgets their name.' When Millie said this, I realized that Christopher had never once forgotten my name.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Fun, Names, Mad

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• You say often you wish a library; here I gif you one; for between these two lids (he meant covers) is many books in one. Read him well, and he will help you much; for the study of character in this book will help you to read it in the world, and paint it with your pen.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Book, Two, Library

  Louisa May Alcott (2005). “Little Women ; Little Men ; Jo's Boys”, p.365, Library of America

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• Margaret liked this smile; it was the first thing she had admired in this new friend of her father's; and the opposition of character, shown in all these details of appearance she had just been noticing, seemed to explain the attraction they evidently felt towards each other.

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Smile, Father, Details

  Elizabeth Gaskell (2010). “The Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (20+ Books)”, p.1419, BookCaps Study Guides

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• I love this quote uttered by the character Widget in The Night Circus. He credits it to Herr Thiessen but knows it is a literary quote by the another author. "Wine is bottled poetry

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Wine, Night, Credit

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