Decoration Quotes - Page 6

• One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

  Graham Greene

  Real, Character, Writing

  Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy (1992). “Conversations with Graham Greene”, p.42, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Well, I think I learned a valuable lesson. Always take down your Christmas decorations after new years or you might get filleted by a hooker from God.

  Dean Winchester

  New Year, Thinking, Years

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• [Heraclitus' language] dispenses with lightness and artificial decoration, foremost out of disgust for humanity and out of [his own] defiant feeling.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Feelings, Humanity, Language

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• Properly understood, style is not a seductive decoration added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. The necessary elements of style are lucidity, elegance, and individuality; these three qualities combine to form a preservative which ensures the nearest approximation to permanence in the fugitive art of letters.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Art, Essence, Seductive

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• Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.

  William Zinsser

  Self, Adjectives, Detectives

  William Knowlton Zinsser (1980). “On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• When I think about the reference to baroque, I'm most interested in how art was integrated into domestic life. That's why I like fresco, because fresco is part of the wall. It's art, but it's decoration at the same time.

  Camille Henrot

  Art, Wall, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

  Edward Tufte

  Boredom, Audience

  Edward R. Tufte (2003). “The cognitive style of PowerPoint”, Graphics Pr

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• Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration.

  Martin Filler

  War, Machines, World

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• I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Art, Butterfly, Night

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• ...but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.

  James Agee

  Strong, Wall, Cutting

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• She surrounded herself with books at work and at home. Her living space was a testament to her first and abiding love with shelves jammed with books tables crowded with them. She saw them not only as knowledge entertainment comfort even sanity but as a kind of artful decoration.

  Nora Roberts

  Book, Home, Space

  Nora Roberts (2003). “Key Of Knowledge”, p.26, Penguin

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• It is very frustrating not to be understood in this world. If you say one thing and keep being told that you mean something else, it can make you want to scream. But somewhere in the world there is a place for all of us, whether you are an electric form of decoration, peppermint-scented sweet, a source of timber, or a potato pancake.

  Daniel Handler

  Sweet, Mean, World

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• Beauty, then, is not mere decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action, since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These considerations should make us realize the care which is needed, if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendour.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Essentials, Elements, Care

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• Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.

  Albert Camus

  Running, Distance, Long

  Albert Camus (2006). “The fall”, Penguin Modern Classics

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• The Christmas season reminds us that a demonstration of religion is always much better than a definition of it...especially in front of the kids.
  Perhaps the best Yuletide decorations are to be wreathed in smiles and wrapped in hugs.
  The miracle of Christmas is that a baby can be so decisive.
  It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty founder was a child himself.

  Charles Dickens

  Christmas, Baby, Children

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• They say that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a homosexual. Truth be told, we don't love him because of that, but he was a great musician, and we all love his music. So what? I assure you that I work with these people. I sometimes award them with state prizes or decorations for their achievements in various fields. We have absolutely normal relations, and I don't see anything out of the ordinary here.

  Vladimir Putin

  Gay, Awards, Tchaikovsky

  "Tchaikovsky May Have Been Gay, Putin Reluctantly Admits" by • Alexander Abad-Santos, www.theatlantic.com. September 4, 2013.

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• The so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing, lying, cruelty-all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is the one who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful lying and mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with decorations and public acclaim.

  John T. Flynn

  Christian, Strong, War

  John T. Flynn (1944). “As We Go Marching”

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• But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.

  Immanuel Kant

  Art, Divorce, Garden

  "Critique of Judgment".

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• People like to come up to me and tell me that I’ve got nice ink. Except these tattoos aren’t just decorations. They are declarations. Every tattoo I have tells its own story about who I am. Drug-free. Honor. And a war against the system.

  CM Punk

  Tattoo, War, Nice

  "Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW)", July 11, 2006.

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• I love the excess of Christmas. The shopping season that begins in September, the bad pop star recordings of Christmas carols, the decorations that don't know when to come down.

  Mo Rocca

  Christmas, Stars, Shopping

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• You should not say anything that you cannot put your totality behind. The total value of you is that whatever you say, you stick with it. When you don't stick with what you say, you have no value, and your decoration and your jewelry and your sex and your person have no value. Real communication is the faculty of a human that whatever you say, you stick with it.

  Harbhajan Singh Yogi

  Sex, Real, Communication

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• Being a winner is more than getting a first place trophy, it is acting like the effort was an honour and the trophy is just a decoration.

  Bryan Mosley

  Inspirational, Sports, Athlete

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• When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

  Steven Pinker

  Cat, Judging, Ordinary

  Steven Pinker (2003). “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language”, p.409, Penguin UK

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• I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

  Wayne Shorter

  Music, Thinking, Jazz

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• When, during the Second World War, the island of Malta came through three terrible years of bombardment and destruction, it was rightly awarded the George Medal for bravery: today Israel should be awarded a similar decoration for defending democracy, tolerance and Western values against a murderous onslaught that has lasted twenty times as long.

  Andrew Roberts

  War, Islands, Israel

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