Raw Materials Quotes - Page 2

• The raw materials of reality without the glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind.

  Ken Kesey

  Airplane, Reality, Wind

  Ken Kesey (2006). “Sometimes a Great Notion”, p.160, Penguin

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• Work with the raw material you have, namely you, and never let up.

  Helen Gurley Brown

  Materials

  Helen Gurley Brown (2012). “Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men”, p.22, Open Road Media

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• The raw material from which social institutions are fashioned is always more or less recalcitrant and any human society will tend to produce a caricature of itself.

  Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth

  Social, Institutions, Recalcitrant

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• Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

  Boris Pasternak

  Self, People, Principles

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• He [Thomas Edison] considered [money] as a raw material, like metal, to be used rather than amassed, and so he kept plowing his funds into new projects. Several times he was all but bankrupt. But he refused to let dollar signs govern his actions.

  Charles Edison

  Dollars, Plowing, Action

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• It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.

  William Ernest Henley

  Artist, Confusion, Select

  William Ernest Henley (1921). “The Works of William Ernest Henley: Views and reviews”

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• The trebling of the population in this small and impoverished country, flowing with milk and honey but not with sufficient water, rich in rocks and sand dunes but poor in natural resources and vital raw materials, has been no easy task: Indeed, practical men, with their eyes fixed upon things as they are, regarded it as an empty and insubstantial utopian dream.

  David Ben-Gurion

  Country, Dream, Eye

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• And the reward when good people die - her mother paused, swallowed, paused again - the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have - they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think.

  Dara Horn

  Mother, Thinking, People

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• One man's trash is another man's treasure is a third man's raw materials for their planet-buster earthquake machine.

  Mira Grant

  Men, Earthquakes, Machines

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• Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

  P. D. James

  Crafts, Increase, Materials

  "Ten rules for writing fiction" by P. D. James, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Writing, Dust, Order

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• The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Essence, Might

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.75, Modern Library

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• Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse. The differences in the product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the worlds cultures reflects a corresponding diversity. In the wilds that gave them birth.

  Aldo Leopold

  Men, Civilization, Differences

  Aldo Leopold (2013). “Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology: (Library of America #238)”, p.223, Library of America

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• We are considering various ways of making use of our oil and gas downstream industries. This is to be complemented with the import of oil and gas from other sources as raw materials.

  Hassanal Bolkiah

  Oil, Use, Way

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• The 'environmental crisis' has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of 'raw materials,' and that we may safely possess those materials by taking them.... And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as 'environmental' problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspiring, Simple, Years

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.178, Counterpoint Press

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• I put out a lot of different kinds of material, and maybe people read that as egotistical. Or maybe, since a lot of it does involve some aspect of me, they find it self-aggrandizing. But there’s a long tradition of artists using themselves. Look, I know I’m not perfect. And, who knows, maybe a part of it has to do with self-obsession. But it’s also about using this weird thing that is a public persona as raw material for creative projects.

  James Franco

  Artist, Self, Long

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• Time is the explicable raw material of everything.

  Arnold Bennett

  Time, Materials

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• Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it. Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by a thunderbolt and it'll just leave you stunned.

  Twyla Tharp

  Inspirational, Creativity, Effort

  Twyla Tharp, Mark Reiter (2003). “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life”, Simon and Schuster

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• Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Lying, Dupes, Dishonesty

  Thomas Carlyle, Chris Vanden Bossche (2002). “Historical Essays”, p.43, Univ of California Press

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• One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophical, Animal, Oxen

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• Software production is like any other production the preceded it, no raw materials are required, no time is required and no effort is required, you can make a million Copies of Software instantaneously for free and its very unique about that.

  John McAfee

  Unique, Effort, Software

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• With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

  Francine Prose

  Reading, Sight, Temptation

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• That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Men, Judging

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.84, HarperCollins UK

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• How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Memories, Daily Work, Clutch

  Lawrence Durrell (2012). “The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea”, p.129, Faber & Faber

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• History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

  Amy Waldman

  Japan, People, Novelists

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