Foreground Quotes - Page 2

• If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.

  Janet Burroway

  Character, Fiction, May

  Janet Burroway (1987). “Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft”, Little Brown

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• If there's loads of material going by you don't notice the individual things quite so much. Also it really foregrounds the sonic dimensions like electronic ambient music, it's pushes all of that colour to the foreground so you hear little every atom of sound.

  Max Richter

  Sound, Atoms, Littles

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us.

  Tillie Olsen

  Book, Men, Years

  Tillie Olsen (2014). “Silences”, p.38, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• Olive Schreiner is less a woman than a geographical fact. Just as one thinks of Egypt as a foreground for the Pyramids, so South Africa seems the setting of that warm, attractive, aggressive personality. Her work is far inferior to her.

  Rebecca West

  Thinking, Egypt, Pyramids

  Rebecca West (1982). “The young Rebecca: writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17”, Not Avail

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• I am glad you encouraged me with the 'Stoke' [his painting 'Stoke-by-Nayland', circa 1835] What say you to a summer morning? July or August, at eight or nine o'clock, after a slight shower during the night, to enhance the dews in the shadowed part of the picture, under 'Hedge row elms and hillocks green.' Then the plough, cart, horse, gate, cows, donkey, &c. are all good paintable material for the foreground, and the size of the canvas sufficient to try one's strength, and keep one at full collar.

  John Constable

  Summer, Morning, Horse

  "Constable". Book by Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Tate Gallery Publications, London, p. 380, Letter to William Purton (6 February 1836), 1993.

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• I shall not find a painting more beautiful because the artist has painted a hawthorn in the foreground, though I know of nothing more beautiful than the hawthorn, for I wish to remain sincere and because I know that the beauty of a painting does not depend on the things represented in it. I shall not collect images of hawthorn. I do not venerate hawthorn, I go to see and smell it.

  Marcel Proust

  Beautiful, Artist, Smell

  Marcel Proust's preface (1910) to John Ruskin "The Bible of Amiens" translated by Marcel Proust (1904); later quoted in "Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin" translated by Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (p. 57), 1987.

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• My distraction's my defense against this lack of inspiration Against this slow deflation Yeah the further the horizon The more it holds my gaze The foreground's out of focus but you know I kinda hope it's just a phase Just a phase.

  Ani DiFranco

  Inspiration, Focus, Defense

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• A background can be painted in the same range of values as the foreground by reversing the light effect. In the shadow plane, paint the lights cool and the shadows warm, and in the sunlight plane, paint the lights warm and shadows cool.

  Harvey Dunn

  Light, Shadow, Paint

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• Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.

  Daniel Levitin

  Art, Giving, Perspective

  Daniel J. Levitin (2011). “This Is Your Brain On Music: Understanding a Human Obsession”, p.18, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in afterlife the images first presented to it. The first thing continues forever with the child. The first joy, the first sorrow, the first success, the first failure, the first achievement, the first misadventure, paint the foreground of his life.

  Samuel Smiles

  Children, Mirrors, Afterlife

  Samuel Smiles (1872). “Character”, p.34

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• Any active sportsman has to be very focused; you've got to be in the right frame of mind. If your energy is diverted in various directions, you do not achieve the results. I need to know when to switch on and switch off: and the rest of the things happen around that. Cricket is in the foreground, the rest is in the background.

  Sachin Tendulkar

  Life, Success, Focus

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• The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically, she is the mind and they are the five senses.

  Joseph Campbell

  Brother, Ocean, Hero

  Joseph Campbell, M. J. Abadie (1981). “The Mythic Image”, p.7, Princeton University Press

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• Extreme sport has only ever been about goals and the ways to achieve these goals. Adrenaline plays a part, but it's never in the foreground.

  Felix Baumgartner

  Sports, Play, Goal

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• I get told I'm a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word "confessional". I don't like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don't want to put myself so directly in the foreground.

  Beth Orton

  Thinking, Ideas, Negative

  Interview with Hector de la Manzana, believermag.com. March 2003.

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• Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Disappointment, Silence, Personality

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.312, Courier Corporation

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• With humans you would say, "Don't stand over there." and that would probably work. With puppets, you can't stand over there because you would see the guy underneath. So it is a lot of foreground stuff.

  James Bobin

  Guy, Puppets, Stuff

  Source: collider.com

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• I never work with music. I hate background music, always did. I only like music in the foreground, meaning, deliberately listen to it, actually.

  David Hockney

  Hate, Backgrounds, Background Music

  Interview with John Tusa, www.americansuburbx.com. May 21, 2009.

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• It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes into the foreground.

  Friedrich Engels

  Movement, Facts, Free Love

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (2012). “On Religion”, p.206, Courier Corporation

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• At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Order, Years, Cities

  "'Lagos shows how a city can recover from a deep, deep pit': Rem Koolhaas talks to Kunlé Adeyemi". Interview with Chris Michael, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2016.

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• I wanted to see what it means to think about taking responsibility for one's own desires and choosing to foreground desire as an ethical principle. I also wanted to find ways of asking what the limits of agency are for subjectivities that are not unmarked or hegemonic.

  Richard Marshall

  Mean, Responsibility, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

  Edith Wharton

  Mind, Literature, Landscape

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• In England especially, poetry's woven into the background fabric of society. And in Ireland, it's in the foreground. The place of the poet in Irish society is enormous. If you say you're a poet in Ireland, you'd better know what you're doing, because the standard and the expectations are incredibly high.

  David Whyte

  Expectations, Fabric, England

  "Courageous Conversations: An Interview with David Whyte". Interview with Kim Rosen, spiritualityhealth.com. December 8, 2014.

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• One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate - obviously you couldn't be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it's not always there in the foreground. If you don't understand that, you're missing a lot.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Religious, Creativity, Issues

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• Investigations during the last few decades have brought hydrogen instead of carbon, and instead of CO2 water, the mother of all life, into the foreground.

  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

  Mother, Water, Lasts

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• When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

  Brian Eno

  Ideas, Records, Singers

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