Antagonist Quotes

“Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation ... .Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities.”

— Helen DeWitt

“To fear is to have more faith in your antagonist than in Christ.”

— D.L. Moody

“Your life, sir, is propelled
By a dream of the fear of having nightmares; your love
Is the fear of being alone; your world's history
The fear of a possible leap by a possible antagonist
Out of a possible shadow, or a not-improbable
Skeleton out of your dead-certain cupboard.”

— Christopher Fry

“I have been to hell and back. It's a place where all antagonist meet and most often hug and ask:
why didn't we love ourselves enough?”

— PK Gyewu Akrofi

“Mais c'est renfantillage - this is childishness!' we heard de Grandin pant as we closed in and sought a chance to seize his skeleton-like antagonist. 'He who fights an imp of Satan as if he were human is a fool!'
("The Man In Crescent Terrace")”

— Seabury Quinn

“You don't really understand an antagonist until you understand why he's a protagonist in his own version of the world.”

— John Rogers

“It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.”

— Michelle Richmond

“To annoy or piss off are light offences. I'd say if you abuse the goodness of a novelist or a writer, the truth is, he or she can kill you multiple times or cannibalise you in many antagonist characters.”

— Angelica Hopes

“Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange.”

— Virginia Woolf

“And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.”

— Virginia Woolf

“Self-love is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.”

— Annie Besant

“Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.”

— Philip K. Dick

“The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement.”

— John Kessel

“Remember that when you meet your antagonist, to do everything in a mild agreeable manner. Let your courage be keen, but, at the same time, as polished as your sword.”

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

“In all our pictures, we had an antagonist who becomes the good guy, and the underdog fulfills his quest.”

— Arthur Rankin, Jr.

“People come up to me and say, 'You are such a great bad guy.' The fact is that the antagonist in a movie is usually the most fun to play. You can stretch the role and do so much with it.”

— Robert Z'Dar

“This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.”

— Barbara Deming

“Evil is relative - and what I mean by that is that our villains are as complex, as deep and as compelling as any of our heroes. Every antagonist in the DC Universe has a unique darkness, desire and drive. And the reason for being of 'Forever Evil' is to explore that darkness.”

— Geoff Johns

“Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who - thanks largely to the media - has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”

— Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

“Johnny Ringo to me was just the best antagonist that I've ever played, because I played him as a guy who has a death wish and had done everything that he wanted in life. As far as he was concerned, a gun fight was about as exciting as it was going to get.”

— Michael Biehn

“So often in TV, when you have an antagonist who's supposed to be the 'big baddie,' it's so easy for them to become cliched.”

— Michelle Forbes

“You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“LARRY
(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey) I'm afraid to live, am I?
and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself?”

— Eugene O'Neill

“... the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.
From Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets series, published in 3 volumes between 1779 and 1781, on Alexander Pope”

— Samuel Johnson

“If you have to be the antagonist, you often have a lot more creative powers. You have a lot more color to you.”

— William Atherton

“Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn't feel like I was staring into the sun. I'm rising to my wife's level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It's a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can't imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist.
We are one long frightening climax.”

— Gillian Flynn

“What then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a change in the form of life that looks like a stopping, and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; he is not the antagonist, not the opposite of life.”

— George MacDonald

“You could not fence with an antagonist who met rapier thrust with blow of battle axe.”

— L.M. Montgomery

“Yet as she tells the story, the change came about when that director stopped treating her like an antagonist and treated her like a person. He apologized for publicly calling her "baby-killer" and started spending time with her during her smoking breaks in the parking lot. Later, McCorvey accepted an invitation to church from a seven-year-old girl whose mother also worked at Operation Rescue. Pro-abortion forces had dismissed McCorvey-her dubious record of drug-dealing, alcohol, lesbianism, and rape made bad public relations-but Christian leaders took the time to counsel her in the faith, keeping her out of the public spotlight for half a year. "Ultimately, God is the one who changes hearts," says McCorvey now. "A Christian witness is the biggest tool in effecting change.”

— Philip Yancey

“He who has a slight disadvantage plays more attentively, inventively and more boldly than his antagonist who either takes it easy or aspires after too much. Thus a slight disadvantage is very frequently seen to convert into a good, solid advantage.”

— Emanuel Lasker

“Where you have a villain in the piece or the antagonist, whatever you want to call them, there has to be humanity at the core of it or it's faintly ridiculous. Nobody is just villain through and through. You have to feel something for them.”

— Scott Hicks

“On the aesthetic level, decolonized music presents itself as a direct antagonist to the traditional values promoted by the culture industry.”

— Bocafloja

“It is not like the white Republican, the conservative, who clears it up for you and says, "I don't like you", to your face and then you know immediately he is an antagonist. Racism operates in a lot of ways, and so I live it every day.”

— Bocafloja

“Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.”

— Doris Lessing

“I don't judge in my books. I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story.”

— Elmore Leonard

“Envy is the antagonist of the fortunate.”

— Epictetus

“It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.”

— Barbara Deming

“No wise combatant underestimates their antagonist.”

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“Ridicule has even been the most powerful enemy of enthusiasm, and properly the only antagonist that can be opposed to it with success.”

— Oliver Goldsmith

“Science ... in other words, knowledge-is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.”

— Franz Kafka

“Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light ... Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.”

— Thomas Paine

“Subtlety will sometimes give safety, no less than strength; and minuteness has sometimes escaped, where magnitude would have been crushed. The little animal that kills the boa is formidable chiefly from its insignificance, which is incompressible by the folds of its antagonist.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

“Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous.”

— Cheyenne Jackson

“I was tenaciously opposed by the governor and deputy-governor of the Bank, who had seats in parliament, and I had the City for an antagonist on almost every occasion.”

— William E. Gladstone

“We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers.”

— William Ellery Channing

“Because the character is a fiction, he's a composite of other contributors to the science that brought this enzyme therapy through the process. We had the opportunity to make him up out of those things that helped tell the story. We wanted to create both ally and antagonist for John [in the Extraordinary measures].”

— Harrison Ford

“I think, at the end of the day, the real antagonist is the brokenness of humanity.”

— LeCrae