Theme Quotes - Page 7

• I always loved the creative process, from 'Shakespeare in Love' to 'Finding Neverland' to 'Basquiat'; whether it's serious, or it's comedic, whether it's the 'inside look' at that, it seems to be a theme of what I do.

  Harvey Weinstein

  Creative, Looks, Serious

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• Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Political, Campaigns, Politics

  Woodrow Wilson (1966). “The Papers of Woodrow Wilson”

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• I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

  Dwight Yoakam

  Men, Musical, Pay

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• We live in a world where finding fault in others seems to be the favorite blood sport. It has long been the basis of political campaign strategy. It is the theme of much television programming across the world. It sells newspapers. Whenever we meet anyone, our first, almost unconscious reaction may be to look for imperfections.

  Henry B. Eyring

  Sports, Blood, Long

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• There is more to Indian cinema than just Bollywood. I think regional cinema, especially Tamil and Marathi cinema are exploring some really bold themes.

  Anurag Kashyap

  Thinking, Bollywood, Cinema

  "A Minute With: Anurag Kashyap". Interview with Shilpa Jamkhandikar, in.reuters.com. May 20, 2012.

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• At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Stars, Night, Blue

  Vincent van Gogh (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Vincent van Gogh (Illustrated)”, p.2897, Delphi Classics

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• To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

  William Shakespeare

  Inspirational, Life, Death

  'Macbeth' (1606) act 5, sc. 5, l. 16

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• The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, Memorable, Omission

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• All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

  Diane Setterfield

  Morning, Book, Reading

  Diane Setterfield (2007). “The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel”, p.289, Simon and Schuster

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• this is thy hour o soul, thy free flight into the wordless, away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, night, sleep, death and the stars.

  Walt Whitman

  Art, Stars, Book

  Walt Whitman, Harold Bloom (2003). “Selected Poems”, p.204, Library of America

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• It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Character, Trying, Events

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Slow Learner”, p.9, Penguin

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• You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --

  Charlotte Bronte

  Writing, Sleep, Giving

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• We take it for granted that Jesus was not interested in political life: his mission was purely religious. Indeed we have witnessed . . . the 'iconization' of the life of Jesus: 'This is a Jesus of hieratic, stereotyped gestures, all representing theological themes. In this way, the life of Jesus is no longer a human life, submerged in history, but a theological life -- an icon.

  Gustavo Gutiérrez

  Religious, Jesus, Icons

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• All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.

  J. G. Ballard

  Past, Egypt, Museums

  "The Atrocity Exhibition". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1970.

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• It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost—not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things.

  David Wroblewski

  Ink, Stories, Firsts

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• Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads. Had it gone my way, there might not be a story at all. Just a chapter, or a sentence in a book whose greater theme had yet to be determined. Maybe this chapter would've had the faintest whisper of love about it. But maybe not. Sometimes, a girl needs to lose.

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Girl, Book, Toss

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• There are patterns which emerge in one's life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme

  Jacqueline Carey

  Variation, Patterns, Endless

  Jacqueline Carey (2011). “Kushiel's Chosen”, p.35, Pan Macmillan

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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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• 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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