Theme Quotes - Page 6

• The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

  George Orwell

  Book, Facts, Praise

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.265, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I went through puberty in a theme park. I'm grateful. That place was a landscape to me. I had adventures every day.

  Ryan Gosling

  Life, Grateful, Adventure

  "Welcome to Goslingland". Interview with Tom Chiarella, www.esquire.com. August 10, 2011.

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• Blackness is an ocean, a universe, a possibility that can never be exhausted. And so we have to constantly reaffirm the necessity of excavation, of archiving and curating, but also exploring, and understanding afresh and learning for the first time what it is that we need to know, and what the limits and boundaries are, and what the themes and preoccupations should be, and what the redemptive character of that erudition is. I find myself in the exciting position of doing all that, and at the same time having the obligation to explain to white people what the deal is.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Ocean, Character, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.

  William Styron

  Thinking, Evil, Fiction

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• And yet, we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in ... tiresome acrobatics. ... Flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step. ... When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Believe, Men, Ideas

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• I did a cover of the James Bond theme, and I felt like such a fraud, because the original is so good.

  Moby

  Fraud, Originals, Felt

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• Every film is a remake of a previous film, or a remake of a television series that everyone loved in the 1960s, or a remake of a television series that everyone hated in the 1960s. Or it's a theme park ride; it will soon come to breakfast cereal mascots.

  Alan Moore

  Cereal, Television, Breakfast

  "Alan Moore: why I turned my back on Hollywood". Interview with Tom Lamont, www.theguardian.com. December 15, 2012.

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• You never make all things for all people and can't always pander to the broadest denominator. I keep an eye toward doing the themes that interest me. Do they move me? Interest me? Make me think? When I run across something that is provocative in an unsettling way, it appeals to me.

  Edward Norton

  Running, Moving, Eye

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

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• They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.

  John O'Hara

  Men, Young Writers, Novel

  John O'Hara (1977). “"An artist is his own fault": John O'Hara on writers and writing”, Southern Illinois University

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• We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Character, Roots, Childhood

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• I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Men, Vision

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• A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

  Boris Pasternak

  Art, Moving, Reading

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• But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it. A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.

  Diane Johnson

  Jobs, Writing, Understanding

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• If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.

  Richard Yates

  Lying, Simple, Tragedy

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• Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Voice, Drones, Flew

  Leo Tolstoy (2016). “The Complete Novels of Leo Tolstoy in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich... (Including Biographies of the Author)”, p.2671, e-artnow

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• Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? A.Indeed I do think that I do. Q.Such as what? A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole.

  Tennessee Williams

  Thinking, Men, Duplicity

  Tennessee Williams, John S. Bak (2009). “New Selected Essays: Where I Live”, p.84, New Directions Publishing

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• If there is a God, he is within. You don't ask God to give you things, you depend on God for your inner theme.

  Bruce Lee

  Inspirational, If There Is A God, Giving

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• I’m beginning to sense a theme,” Mircea said, tossing his suit coat over a buckskin-covered chair. A moose head with huge, outspread antlers loomed over it, its bright glass eyes looking oddly lifelike in the low light. Mircea took in the room, his expression slightly repulsed yet fascinated. “I believe there is only one thing to say at this point.” What’s that?” Yee haw,” he said gravely, and took me down like a rodeo calf.

  Karen Chance

  Believe, Eye, Glasses

  Karen Chance (2011). “Cassie Palmer Novels 1-5”, p.1317, Penguin

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• That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

  Steven Millhauser

  Dream, Art, Book

  FaceBook post by Steven Millhauser from Aug 19, 2015

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• So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

  Nick Hornby

  Book, Reading, Cat

  Nick Hornby (2006). “The complete polysyllabic spree”

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• He was the boy that made mix tapes with themes and hand-colored covers until the day he hit my sister and stopped crying.

  Stephen Chbosky

  Boys, Hands, Tape

  Stephen Chbosky (2013). “The Perks of Being a Wallflower YA edition”, p.19, Simon and Schuster

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• I didn't want to tell the story of what makes two people come together, although that's a theme of great power and universality. I wanted to find out what it takes for two people to stay together for fifty years -- or more. I wanted to tell not the story of courtship, but the story of marriage.

  Diana Gabaldon

  Years, Two, People

  Diana Gabaldon (2015). “The Outlandish Companion (Revised and Updated): Companion to Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, and Drums of Autumn”, p.35, Delacorte Press

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• Look, then, into thine heart, and write! Yes, into Life's deep stream! All forms of sorrow and delight, All solemn Voices of the Night, That can soothe thee, or affright, - Be these henceforth thy theme. (excerpt from "Voices of the Night")

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Writing, Heart, Night

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Voices Of The Night: Prelude”

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• And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.

  Bill Bryson

  Sorry, Mean, Shopping

  Bill Bryson (1989). “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-town America”, p.232, VNR AG

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• Out, damned spot! Out, I say!

  William Shakespeare

  Memorable, Hands, Play

  'Macbeth' (1606) act 5, sc. 1, l. [38]

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