Tropes Quotes - Page 2

• It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nerves, Degenerates, Language

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.144, Simon and Schuster

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• One of the tropes of our videos is that they were very rhythmic with clipped edits.

  Stephen Mallinder

  Video, Edits

  Source: www.artdesigncafe.com

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• Audiences are hungry for something different. With binge-watching, they're hungry for interesting content they haven't seen before, and they want to be entertained. A lot of shows are grim, murky and dark. We wanted to spin away from the obvious, the tropes, the cliches and what people are doing right now, and do something different.

  Miles Millar

  Dark, People, Interesting

  Source: collider.com

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• Hence, when some members of the Iranian diaspora, especially women at the moment, use different tropes including the trope of the veil and the issue of gender to construct an image of oppression or to describe the 'silenced' Iranian woman, western intellectuals, policymakers, and publishing houses are all quick to introduce them as presenters of the authentic Iranian experience.

  Mohammad Marandi

  Issues, Publishing House, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Oh, the foghorns... even the foghorns, they're all brass. It's something by Ingrid Marshal called Fog Tropes. It's not a sound effect. It's an actual piece of music. If you listen to what's going on after he has a flashback about his wife you'll hear... it sounds like the humpback whales in a way. But it's all music. And we use it again later, too.

  Martin Scorsese

  Fog, Whales, Wife

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes--articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. Like all the director's work after 'Jackie Brown,' the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness--it's too shallow to be called nihilism--undermines even the best scenes.

  David Denby

  War, Eerie, Evil

  David Denby (2013). “Do the Movies Have a Future?”, p.252, Simon and Schuster

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• The TV Tropes QC page is every single idiotic comment from my forums distilled into one HTML document.

  Jeph Jacques

  Html, Pages, Tvs

  Call Out Boy‏ @jephjacques, twitter.com. September 4, 2009.

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• The only way to real mature love is to get past the tropes of what we consider 'romance.'

  Joss Whedon

  Real, Past, Love Is

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• A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

  Jaron Lanier

  Thinking, Yield, Circles

  Jaron Lanier (2010). “You Are Not a Gadget”, p.49, Vintage

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• Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.

  Edward Abbey

  Sacrifice, Laughing, Nuance

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.31, RosettaBooks

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• After the horrific massacre Wednesday at the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, perhaps the West will finally put away its legion of useless tropes trying to deny the relationship between violence and radical Islam.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Charlie Hebdo, Islam, Trying

  "How to Answer the Paris Terror Attack". Article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, www.metafilter.com. January 7, 2015.

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• My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

  Will Self

  Character, Ideas, Two

  "In the beginning" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2007.

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• It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.

  Anne Waldman

  Ideas, Language, Rich

  "Interview with Anne Waldman: On All Kinds of Roads". Interview with Kurt Jacobsen, logosjournal.com. 2011.

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• To call ourselves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for first wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existence, which comprehend the creatures not onely of world, but of the Universe.

  Thomas Browne

  Running, Live Life, Animal

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• Some facts in life are immutable. One is, trust no-one who uses the word 'trope'.

  Mark Gatiss

  Trust No One, Use, Facts

  Twitter post from Sep 16, 2014

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• We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.

  Anne Waldman

  Thinking, Mind, Narrative

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• In movies and TV, we tend to fall into tropes about how characters might get out of problems. But when you look at real life, you realize that there is a lot of drama of not being able to get out of the problems.

  Matthew Weiner

  Real, Drama, Fall

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• The Collector [John Fowles book] does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that's become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children.

  Emma Donoghue

  Jobs, Children, Book

  "Emma Donoghue Chats About 'Room'". The New Yorker Chat, www.newyorker.com. January 21, 2011.

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• An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Reading, Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1993). “Self-reliance, and Other Essays”, p.78, Courier Corporation

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• The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Long, Use, Shells

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.457, Library of America

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• For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to.

  Anne Waldman

  People, Life Experience, Embedded

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy. But, I wanted to put a somewhat different spin on it. The whole trope of absolute good versus absolute evil, which was wonderful in the hands of J.R. Tolkien, became cliche and rote in the hands of the many Tolkien imitators that followed.

  George R. R. Martin

  Reading, Hands, Evil

  Source: collider.com

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• I've read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn't, since hers was simply a companion to my own.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Tears, Poetic, Companion

  Elizabeth Kostova (2008). “The Historian”, Little, Brown

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