Outlines Quotes - Page 6

• Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Book, Would Be, Speech

  "The Philosophy of Paine" by Thomas A. Edison, June 7, 1925.

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• This is kind of hard to articulate, but in broad outline, the United States is going to do what the United States has to do.

  Wesley Clark

  United States, Kind, Broads

  Source: www.sbs.com.au

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• And I think it was the outline of that church tower at Belaugh against the sky which gave me a passion for churches so that every church I've past since I've wanted to stop and look in.

  John Betjeman

  Passion, Past, Thinking

  John Betjeman (1997). “John Betjeman: coming home : an anthology of his prose 1920-1977”, Vintage

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• Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There's no joy of discovery in what you're doing if that's your strategy.

  Bob Shacochis

  Writing, Discovery, Joy

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• Thinking through quotes, which to say scouring a range of texts for insight, is one way to outline the process of thinking/feeling through a subject.

  Masha Tupitsyn

  Thinking, Feelings, Way

  "True Lovers are as Rare as True Rebels". Interview with Jacob Wren, logger.believermag.com. October 24, 2013.

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• I'm a pantser. I try to plot. I always try to plot. I end up with a few paragraphs that basically outline the gist of the story.But I never get much beyond that. I get too impatient to write.

  Pamela Clare

  Writing, Trying, Stories

  Source: happyeverafter.usatoday.com

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• I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Stories, Rubbish

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• I don't write with an outline. I don't often know what I'm going to do as I'm writing. And I do everything by feel and by instinct.

  James Frey

  Writing, Instinct, Feels

  Interview with Toby Litt, tobylitt.wordpress.com. August 1, 2008.

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• I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.

  Michael Chabon

  Book, Writing, Character

  Interview with Elizabeth Benefiel, www.avclub.com. July 5, 2007.

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• I'm not somebody who comes in with a whole outline, and says, "Here's the movie we're going to make." That's not what a documentary is for me. I think a documentary is about capturing events as they unfold in real time.

  Morgan Spurlock

  Real, Thinking, Documentaries

  Interview with Scott Tobias, film.avclub.com. April 16, 2008.

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• The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Taken, Mean, Ideas

  "Bend Sinister" by Vladimir Nabokov, (p. 6), 1963.

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• When you start, it's very cold, an impossible task. But then maybe the characters start to take on a little bit of life, or the story takes a turn that you don't expect ... With me that happens a lot because I don't outline, I just have a vague notion. So it's always felt like less of a made thing and more of a found thing. That's exciting. That's a thrill.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Character, Tasks

  "Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of Fiction, and More". Interview with James Parker, www.theatlantic.com. April 12, 2011.

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• Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.

  Louis L'Amour

  Teacher, Children, Book

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• She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.

  Ann Brashares

  Broken Heart, Past, Empty

  Ann Brashares (2011). “Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants): A Novel”, p.84, Random House

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• Mattia was right: the days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each removing a very thin layer of pigment from her tattoo, and from both of their memories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colors had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning.

  Paolo Giordano

  Tattoo, Memories, Color

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• you ask me what I'm looking for, and I outline you. you don't recognize the shape, offer other names. you say my time will come, and I hope.

  David Levithan

  Names, Shapes, Ask Me

  David Levithan (2008). “The Realm of Possibility”, p.56, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight.

  George MacDonald

  Wise, Eye, Men

  George MacDonald (1883). “The Imagination, and Other Essays”

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• I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.

  John Grisham

  Book, Writing, Numbers

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• All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.

  Tom Stoppard

  Eye, Nudge, Existentialism

  'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' (1967) act 1

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• You want this?" His voice was hoarse. "Yes," she said. "Do you?" His finger traced the outline of her mouth. "For this I would have been damned forever. For this I would have given up everything." She felt the burn behind her eyes, the pressure of tears, and blinked wet eyelashes. "Will ..." "Dw i'n dy garu di am byth," he said. "I love you. Always." And he moved to cover her body with his own.

  Cassandra Clare

  Love You, Eye, Voice

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• Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have -- that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.

  Claire Messud

  Who I Am, People, Giving

  Claire Messud (2013). “The Woman Upstairs”, p.24, Vintage

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• It was dark in the alcove, so dark that Jace was only an outline of shadows and gold. His body pinned Clary's to the wall. His hands slid down along her body and reached the end of her dress, drawing it up along her legs. "What are you doing?" She whispered. "Jace?" He looked at her. The peculiar light in the club turned his eyes an array of fractured colors. His smile was wicked. "You can tell me to stop whenever you want," he said. "But you won't.

  Cassandra Clare

  Wall, Eye, Dark

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “City of Lost Souls”, p.318, Simon and Schuster

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• To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions.

  Jacob Burckhardt

  Ocean, Eye, Hands

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• So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.

  Mark Twain

  Humor, Thinking, Years

  Mark Twain, Gary Scharnhorst (2009). “Mainly the truth: interviews with Mark Twain”, University Alabama Press

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• To make us one nation as to foreign concerns, and keep us distinct in Domestic ones gives the outline of the proper division of powers between the general [national] and particular [state] governments.

  Thomas Jefferson

  4th Of July, Government, Giving

  Thomas Jefferson, Andrew M. Allison (1983). “The Real Thomas Jefferson”, Natl Center for Constitutional

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