Outlines Quotes

• If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.

  R. L. Stine

  Block, Writing, Way

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Nature has no outline. Imagination has.

  William Blake

  Imagination

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• Earlier maps had underestimated the distances to other continents and exaggerated the outlines of individual nations. Now global dimensions could be set, with authority, by the celestial spheres. Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.

  Dava Sobel

  Kings, Distance, Enemy

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• The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

  George Eliot

  Ignorance, Acquaintance, Persons

  George Eliot (2016). “Daniel Deronda: Top Novelist Focus”, p.93, 谷月社

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• I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way but for me part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out.

  Joyce Maynard

  Adventure, Knowing, Way

  "Maynard turns eye to sisterhood". Interview with John Wilkens, www.sandiegouniontribune.com. August 25, 2013.

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• My outlines are always very goal-based. What do I want to have happen by the ending and how can I earn that.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Goal, Want, Happens

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• If you have a large number of unrelated ideas, you have to get quite a distance away from them to get a view of all of them, and this is the role of abstraction. If you look at each too closely you see too many details. If you get far away things may appear simpler because you can only see the large, broad outlines; you do not get lost in petty details.

  John G. Kemeny

  Distance, Learning, Views

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• The dimmed outlines of phenomenal things all merge into one another unless we put on the focusing-glass of theory, and screw it up sometimes to one pitch of definition and sometimes to another, so as to see down into different depths through the great millstone of the world.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Glasses, Depth

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• I'm a great believer in outlines.

  Tom Wolfe

  Believer

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• Normally, I spend a week on the outline and take two weeks to write the book.

  R. L. Stine

  Book, Writing, Two

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.

  Jim Bishop

  Future, Mirrors, Trying

  Jim Bishop (1966). “Jim Bishop, reporter”

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• If one really thinks about the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such.

  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  Thinking, Body, Ifs

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• Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

  Wallace Stegner

  Reality, Facts, Possibility

  Wallace Stegner (2000). “Angle of Repose”, p.338, Penguin

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• We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

  Marcel Proust

  Ideas, Mind, Packs

  Marcel Proust (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Marcel Proust (Illustrated)”, p.40, Delphi Classics

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• I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.

  J. K. Rowling

  Writing, Plot, Outlining

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• I have a number of writers I work with regularly. I write an outline for a book. The outlines are very specific about what each scene is supposed to accomplish.

  James Patterson

  Book, Writing, Numbers

  "The Great Gatsby : But First, a Word From Viagra" by Marie Woolf, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 5, 2013.

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• If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest.

  Jeff Koons

  Drawing, Tree, Missing

  "Jeff Koons on drawing as a means of articulating an idea". Interview with Dale Berning, www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2009.

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• The girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Girl, Shadow, Records

  Chuck Palahniuk (2001). “Choke: A Novel”, Anchor Books

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• Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

  Carl Sandburg

  Dream, Dust, Blood

  Carl Sandburg (1928). “Smoke and steel: Slabs of the sunburnt West. Good morning, America”, Harcourt, Brace and World

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• Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.

  E. O. Wilson

  Motivation, Inspiration, Animal

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• I am fooling only myself when I say that my mother exists now only in the photographs on my bulletin board or in the outline of my hand or in the armful of memories I still hold tight. She lives on beneath everything I do. Her presence influenced who I was and her absence influences who I am. Our lives are shaped as much by those who leave us as they are by those who stay. Loss is our legacy. Insight is our gift. Memory is our guide.

  Hope Edelman

  Family, Mom, Photography

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• My hope that the Church will emerge as a strong leader in society is just that a hope. What I described in The Catholic Moment is not a prophecy but the outline of a possibility. There are no guarantees that my hopes expressed in The Catholic Moment will ever be realised.

  Richard John Neuhaus

  Strong, Guarantees That, Leader

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• Shadow is the obstruction of light. Shadows appear to me to be of supreme importance in perspective, because, without them opaque and solid bodies will be ill defined; that which is contained within their outlines and their boundaries themselves will be ill-understood unless they are shown against a background of a different tone from themselves.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Light, Perspective, Shadow

  Leonardo Da Vinci “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci”, Lulu.com

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• About a billion years ago, long before the continents had separated to define the ancient oceans, or their own outlines had been determined, a small protuberance jutted out from the northwest corner of what would later become North America.

  James A. Michener

  Ocean, Years, America

  James A. Michener (1993). “Two complete novels”, Outlet

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• Ignorance of God's prophetic outline, failure to know God's program for the Church, the nations, and Israel, is the cause of the overwhelming amount of error and misunderstanding of the events of the future.

  M. R. DeHaan

  Ignorance, Errors, Israel

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