Blank Quotes - Page 24

• The cool thing about writing is that there is really never a typical day. Sometimes I get a rhythm going and head off to work every morning and come home at night. Sometimes I'll write for two days straight and then be utterly blank for the next two.

  Patricia Briggs

  Morning, Home, Writing

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• ... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

  Irving Stone

  Painting, Canvas, Reason

  Irving Stone (1937). “Lust for Life: The Novel of Vincent Van Gogh”

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• Mr.Blank's reputation as a card shark had preceded him. No one accused him of being dishonest, but on the other hand no one accused him of being honest.

  Groucho Marx

  Funny, Humorous, Gambling

  Groucho Marx (2008). “Memoirs Of A Mangy Lover”, p.132, Da Capo Press

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• Mexican homes as a rule are closed off to the world by high blank walls of yellowish masonry, topped with broken glass to discourage escaladores, or climbing burglars. The gardens and fountains and other delights are hidden, as in an Arab city.

  Charles Portis

  Wall, Home, Garden

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• Don't act so callous to blank out good friends who failed on their way to success, just because something unusual hindered them, but you meandered out by a stroke of luck.

  Michael Bassey

  Good Friend, Luck, Way

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• It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone--journalist, student, academic--who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths.

  David Edelstein

  Glasses, Media, Brain

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• Most people have a blank slate and can start from nothing. But for me, I had to break a bad habit that I've been doing all of my life, which is freestyle hip-hop.

  Roshon Fegan

  People, Hip Hop, Hips

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• Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Insecurity, Canvas, Certain

  Vincent van Gogh, Vincent Willem Gogh (1927). “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to His Brother, 1872-1886: With a Memoir by His Sister-in-law, J. Van Gogh-Bonger ...”

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• Anger clearly has its proper place at work, which is neither wholly absent nor ever present. The manager who is an emotional blank is just as hard to work for as the volcanic boss, and both can do great harm by setting an unhelpful example for what kind of emotional expression is expected and accepted.

  Julian Baggini

  Emotional, Expression, Boss

  "Calm? Why should I be calm?" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. March 02, 2009.

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• When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,--when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,--oh, then diet yourself well on biography,--the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Grief, Heart, Men

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• That's the horrible thing starting out, you get distracted a lot because anything is easier than writing. It's just the same enemy - blank paper.

  Jimmy Breslin

  Writing, Enemy, Paper

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• Being a journalist is good if you want to write books: it teaches you to get beyond the blank screen. My books have been described as froth but there's scope to be witty and ironic about everything in life.

  Sophie Kinsella

  Witty, Book, Writing

  "Big ideas". Interview with Alice Wignall, www.theguardian.com. July 19, 2004.

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• Da Vinci was as great a mechanic and inventor as were Newton and his friends. Yet a glance at his notebooks shows us that what fascinated him about nature was its variety, its infinite adaptability, the fitness and the individuality of all its parts. By contrast what made astronomy a pleasure to Newton was its unity, its singleness, its model of a nature in which the diversified parts were mere disguises for the same blank atoms.

  Jacob Bronowski

  Notebook, Nature, Science

  Jacob Bronowski (2011). “The Common Sense of Science”, p.16, Faber & Faber

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• Omission to do what is necessary Seals a commission to a blank of danger; And danger, like an ague, subtly taints Even then when we sit idly in the sun.

  William Shakespeare

  Omission, Sun, Danger

  William Shakespeare, Bowdler (1823). “The family Shakspeare”, p.179

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• Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity.

  William Wordsworth

  Son, Cities, Confusion

  William Wordsworth (1994). “The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.698, Wordsworth Editions

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• I'm lucky enough that there is never a blank canvas in front of me... I have hundreds of projects that I want to do but I am running out of time.

  George Lucas

  Running, Lucky, Want

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• Well, for that matter, I was also a good friend of Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Francis Bacon, Albert Einstein, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo." He pauses, seeing the blank look on my face and groaning when he says, "Christ, Ever, the Beatles!" He shakes his head and laughs. "God, you make me feel old.

  Alyson Noel

  Good Friend, Laughing, Looks

  Alyson Noel (2013). “The Immortals Bundle 1-3: The Immortals: Evermore, The Immortals: Blue Moon and The Immortals: Shadowland”, p.132, Pan Macmillan

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• Writer's block.. when one curses the blinking cursor on the blank page.

  Regina Brett

  Block, Pages, Curse

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• I am the blank page between the Old and the New Testament.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Pages, New Testament, Blank Pages

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• Imagination in a poet is a faculty so wild and lawless that, like a high ranging spaniel, it must have clogs tied to it, lest it outrun the judgment. The great easiness of blank verse renders the poet too luxuriant. He is tempted to say many things which might better be omitted, or, at least shut up in fewer words.

  John Dryden

  Imagination, Might, Shut Up

  John Dryden (1808). “The works of John Dryden now first collected ...”, p.121

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• Somebody finally has to get out an ad, often after hours. Somebody has to stare at a blank piece of paper. Probably nothing was ever more bleak. This is probably the very height of lonesomeness. He is one person and he is alone

  Fairfax M. Cone

  Business, After Hours, Pieces

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• There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Dream, Memories, Typewriters

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• Meditation is not a matter of trying to stop thinking or make your mind go blank but rather to realize when your attention is wandering and to simply let go of the thoughts and begin again. It is a way of changing our relationship to our thoughts, so we're not so consumed by them, with no sense of space. Having a newly spacious relationship to our thoughts brings both peace and freedom.

  Sharon Salzberg

  Letting Go, Thinking, Space

  FaceBook post by Sharon Salzberg from Mar 28, 2017

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• If you look at all the pictures of women in magazines, everybody's got a forehead that looks like a billboard. Completely blank.

  Amy Heckerling

  Looks, Magazines, Billboards

  Interview with Noel Murray, www.avclub.com. March 20, 2008.

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• You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Important, Paper

  Ernest Hemingway, Carlos Baker (2003). “Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961”, p.837, Simon and Schuster

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