Scene Quotes - Page 37

• If you don't like the scene you're in, if you're unhappy, if you're lonely, if you don't feel that things are happening, change your scene. Paint a new backdrop.

  Leo Buscaglia

  Lonely, Unhappy, Paint

  LEO BUSCAGLIA, PH.D. (1982). “LIVING, LOVING & LEARNING”

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• History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

  Winston Churchill

  Memories, Passion, Fate

  Winston Churchill, David Cannadine (1989). “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat: The Speeches of Winston Churchill”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them.

  Edith Wharton

  New York, People, Disease

  The Age of Innocence ch. 33 (1920)

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• I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Eye, Thinking, Ideas

  "The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought". Book by Marilynne Robinson, 1998.

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• Well, finally, the events I've been through have been tremendously complicated. All kinds of characters have come on the scene, and strange things have happened one after another, to the point where, if I try to think about them in order, I lose track.

  Haruki Murakami

  Character, Thinking, Order

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• Last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion. I am sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

  William Shakespeare

  Eye, Lasts, Taste

  'As You Like It' (1599) act 2, sc. 7, l. 139

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• Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy: This wide and universal theatre Presents more woeful pageants than the scene Wherein we play in.

  William Shakespeare

  Play, Unhappy, Theatre

  Cross, William Shakespeare (1989). “William Shakespeare: The Complete Works”, p.622, Barnes & Noble Publishing

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• We need more bodies, 'cause it's not looking enough like the last scene in Hamlet already. --Chopper Jim Chopin

  Dana Stabenow

  Needs, Body, Lasts

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• How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Regret, Skins, Saws

  Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.412, Faber & Faber

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• You know what this is?" Lula said. "This here's plane rage." Plane rage isn't allowed. It got taken off the allowed activities list along with eating. If you make a scene they'll hual you off in leg irons." Stephanie said. I'm tired of being stapped in here, too," Lula said. "This seat belt's too tight and it's giving me gas." Anything else?" There's no movie.

  Janet Evanovich

  Taken, Tired, Iron

  Janet Evanovich (2008). “To the Nines”, p.160, St. Martin's Press

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• Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.

  Anais Nin

  Memories, Men, Orange

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• Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter?

  Lauren Slater

  Doe, Fiction, Half

  Lauren Slater (2000). “Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir”, Random House Incorporated

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• If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.

  Joseph Goebbels

  Doors, History, Slam

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• It is hard for me to imagine that I felt good about behaving like that. I also remember that the smallest gesture of affection would bring a lump to my throat, whether it was directed at me or at someone else. Sometimes all it took was a scene in a movie. This juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity seemed suspicious even to me.

  Bernhard Schlink

  Gestures, Juxtaposition, Affection

  Bernhard Schlink (2001). “The Reader”, p.89, Vintage

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• Here is something that Peach, one of the Casserole Queens, says about men and women and love. You know that scene in Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo is standing on the ground looking longingly at Juliet on the balcony above him? One of the most romantic moments in all of literary history? Peach says there's no way that Romeo was standing down there to profess his undying devotion. The truth, Peach says, is that Romeo was just trying to look up Juliet's skirt.

  Deb Caletti

  Queens, Love You, Men

  Deb Caletti (2011). “Honey, Baby, Sweetheart”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

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• I put my fingers around the unmarked ring of the spyglass and twisted. The scene became clear. Oh no! A hairy brown spider clung to a vine! I couldn't go there! I'd go to the desert to find a dragon. I began to reset the spyglass, but then I stopped myself. A spider was worse than a dragon? No. My first monsters would be spiders, then.

  Gail Carson Levine

  Dragons, Monsters, Would Be

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• Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It's uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind.

  Aimee Mann

  Air, Return, Wreckage

  Song: True Believer, 2008

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• Ginny came in to visit while you were unconscious", he said, after a long pause, and Harry's imagination zoomed into overdrive, rapidly constructing a scene in which Ginny, weeking over his lifeless form, confessed her feelings of deep attraction to him while Ron gave them his blessing.

  J. K. Rowling

  Blessing, Imagination, Long

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• Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.

  Mark Helprin

  Beautiful, Art, Memories

  Mark Helprin (2017). “Ellis Island and Other Stories”, p.131, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• My boy, that was a TV show. I used a stunt double. I always use a stunt double. Except in love scenes. I insist on doing those myself.

  William Shatner

  Boys, Tv Shows, Use

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• The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.

  William Faulkner

  Night, Whiskey, Thousand

  William Faulkner (1972). “Light in August”, Vintage

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• Hey, what is it with you? Why are you so spaced out? You still haven't answered me." I probably still haven't completely adapted to the world," I said after giving it some thought. "I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me." Midori rested an elbow on the bar and looked at me. "There was something like that in a Jim Morrison song, I'm pretty sure." People are strange when you're a stranger.

  Haruki Murakami

  Song, Real, People

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• Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.

  Ayn Rand

  May, Way, Eras

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.57, Penguin

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• When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.

  Jostein Gaarder

  Stars, Memories, Past

  Jostein Gaarder (2010). “Maya”, p.158, Hachette UK

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• For at least twenty minutes she handed out the story. The youngest kids were soothed by her voice, and everyone else saw visions of the whistler running from the scene. Liesel did not. The book thief saw only the mechanics of the words--their bodies stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on. Somewhere, too, in the gaps between a period and the next capital letter, there was also Max. She remembered reading to him when he was sick. It he in the basement? she wondered. Or is he stealing a glimpse of the sky again?

  Markus Zusak

  Running, Book, Reading

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