Outline Of Quotes

“The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.”

— Jacob Bronowski

“I shall now explain my plan. You may then speak, but only to amend the detail. The broad outline is not subject to negotiation. Are you ready? Good ... I propose to have sex with you. I believe it will be excellent sex. Your obedience on one particular issue of timing it will be required to make it unforgettable sex. I will explain that issue as we go. At the moment, I wish to hear your inevitable objection to the general sex part of this plan.”

— Nick Harkaway

“The fog turned a strange yellow, then orange, then black. The gilded winged statue Victory at Buckingham Palace retreated into mist. St. Paul's was a hazy outline, ghostlike in the gloom. La Traviata at the Sadler's Wells theatre was terminated midway because the audience could no longer see the singers on stage. Pedestrians noticed how everything below the waist disappeared. Knees, shoes, dogs became indistinguishable. The Great Smog was days and nights of people and things passing out of sight and existence. It seemed a fitting time for a mother to evaporate.”

— Kyo Maclear

“I was fuzzy on the details, but I knew the basic outline. I knew how I wanted to be, it was simply a question of being who I wanted to be.
I thought I had had it all figured out before. I'd had the plan perfectly clear in my head. I wasn't going to cross into thirty without the triple crown in hand: serious boyfriend, career, and great friends..
It was time to accept that maybe, just maybe, I didn't have to have it all figured out by the time I turned thirty. Maybe I could just work on me, and see what else fell into place.
I was pretty sure that was otherwise known as living.”

— Megan Crane

“At times of profound, fundamental change in the foundations of social development it is not only senseless but impossible to expect some sort of previously worked out "model" or a clear-cut outline of the transformations that will take place. This does not mean, however, the absence of a definite goal for the reforms, a distinct conception of their content and the main direction of their development.”

— Mikhail Gorbachev

“It's funny how strangers can pass in front of you every day and all you see is a flat shadow, a vague outline, not noticing any of the details. They move in a gray crowd, always looking the same and acting the same, simple caricatures of who they really are, but once you get to know them, you notice the specific, tiniest things, you pay attention to the intricacies of their personalities, their habits and particular ways of walking and talking, the subtle changes in their appearance and dress.”

— Gregory Galloway

“The Brown Coast"
"Not long after the affair had run its course, Bob and his wife were driving to town when Vicky looked up and saw the phantom outline of a woman's footprint on the windshield over the glove box. She slipped her sandal off, saw that the print did not match her own, and told Bob that he was no longer welcome in their home.”

— Wells Tower

“Years ago, when I was working on my master's thesis, I went to New York for a semester as an exchange student. What struck me most was the sky. On that side of the world, so far away from the North Pole, the sky is flat and gray, a one-dimensional universe. Here, the sky is arched, and there's almost no pollution. In spring and fall the sky is dark blue or violet, and sunsets last for hours. The sun turns into a dim orange ball that transforms clouds into silver-rimmed red and violet towers. In winter, twenty-four hours a day, uncountable stars outline the vaulted ceiling of the great cathedral we live in. Finnish skies are the reason I believe in God.”

— James Thompson

“She was a beautiful woman." Gavner sighed, tracing the outline of one of the elephants. "She just had very bad taste in underwear ... "
"And in boyfriends," I added impishly.
Mr. Crepsley burst into laughter at that”

— Darren Shan

“For a long time he had been white smoke. He did not realize that until he left the hospital, because white smoke had no consciousness of itself. It faded into the white world of their bed sheets and walls; it was sucked away by the words of doctors who tried to talk to the invisible scattered smoke ... They saw his outline but they did not realize it was hollow inside.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

“I love you," he said.
She looked up at him, her eyes shiny and black, then looked away. "I know," she said.
He pulled one of his arms out from under her and traced her outline against the couch. He could spend all day like this, running his hand down her ribs, into her waist, out to her hips and back again ... If he had all day, he would. If she weren't made of so many other miracles.
"You know?" he repeated. She smiled, so he kissed her. "You're not the Han Solo in this relationship, you know."
"I'm totally the Han Solo," she whispered. It was good to hear her. It was good to remember it was Eleanor under all this new flesh.
"Well, I'm not the Princess Leia," he said.
"Don't get so hung up on gender roles," Eleanor said.”

— Rainbow Rowell

“As soon as she could discern the outline of the house, it had all its old effect upon Tess's imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed to be; the slope of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of brick which topped the chimney, all had something in common with her personal character.”

— Thomas Hardy

“Jessica, falling in love can't always be a happily ever after or a once in a lifetime kind of story. Those happen in books, in movies. This is life and it's real. Life has no script, no outline. We broke the rules of love long ago. All I know for sure is that with you, the rules will never apply.”

— Kathryn Perez

“There was something so unreal about her, sitting there. I couldn't even see her face; couldn't discern the outline of her figure. Even then she fascinated me. That she could seem so calm, so still. She would sit in one place for hours at a time, unmoving, and I always wondered where she was in her mind, what she might be thinking, how she could possibly exist in that solitary world. More than anything else, I wanted to hear her speak.
I was desperate to hear her voice.”

— Tahereh Mafi

“He's also taller than I thought, maybe six feet, with a slim but athletic build. His pants hug his hips just enough to outline a bit of a visible bulge. Or maybe it's just the lighting in here. Or maybe I'm just a pervert.”

— Karina Halle

“Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“I'm a great planner, so before I ever write chapter 1, I work out what happens in every chapter and who the characters are. I usually spend a year on the outline.”

— Ken Follett

“The way I outline has changed quite a bit from when I first started writing.”

— George Stephen

“I am a writer who works from an outline. What I generally do when I build an outline is I find focal, important scenes, and I build them in my head and I don't write them yet, but I build towards them.”

— Brandon Sanderson

“I always work from an outline, so I know all the of the broad events and some of the finer details before I begin writing the book.”

— Mercedes Lackey

“To fill in the silence Tsukuru lowered the needle onto the record again, went back to the sofa, and settled in to listen to the music. This time he tried his best not to think of anything in particular. With his eyes closed and his mind a blank, he focused solely on the music. Finally, as if lured in by the melody, images flashed behind his eyelids, one after the next, appearing, then disappearing. A series of images without concrete form or meaning, rising up from the dark margins of consciousness, soundlessly crossing into the visible realm, only to be sucked back into the margins on the other side and vanish once again. Like the mysterious outline of microorganisms swimming across the circular field of vision of a microscope.”

— Haruki Murakami

“What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?”

— Thomas Wentworth Higginson

“It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.”

— Colley Cibber

“The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognised, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction.”

— Nassau William Senior

“I force myself to outline, but not too closely, so I guess I plot by the seat of my pants? My natural instinct is to dive right in, but I know I'll get stuck. I like to stick with the architect vs. gardener metaphor. I guess I'm a gardener who plants tomatoes. I have the sticks in the ground and let the vines grow along those parameters.”

— Victoria Aveyard

“I outline in some detail, but even after the outline is done I often get a new idea that is an improvement, so the outline is a living, breathing thing as well. I also re-outline when I'm two-thirds done, to be sure that there is an emotional payoff from all the plot lines and to be sure the story is as tight as it can be.”

— Jeff Abbott

“If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole times I remain with it? I look at it, I scrutinize it, as if I wanted to know more about the thing or the person it represents ... I want to outline the loved face by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation; I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth.”

— Roland Barthes

“The thing with making your art your business is: It's a business. You can't sit around waiting for the muse, especially when you run a show, and you're in production, and an outline is due, a script is due, and a reshoot is due. No. You look at the calendar, and you go, 'OK. I can write from 4 to 6.' So you write.”

— Noah Hawley

“The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can't do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious.”

— Per Petterson

“Okay. Now you have to move your arms and legs."
"I know how to make a snow angel."
"Then do it! Otherwise, you're more like a chalk outline at a police crime scene.”

— Richelle Mead

“The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.”

— Jeffery Deaver

“I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.”

— Khaled Hosseini

“She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn.”

— John Green

“It's not like I had some utterly poignant, well-lit memory of a healthy father pushing a healthy child and the child saying higher higher higher or some other metaphorically resonant moment. The swing set was just sitting there, abandoned, the two little swings hanging still and sad from a grayed plank of wood, the outline of the seats like a kid's drawing of a smile.”

— John Green

“I reject the word 'script' entirely-at any rate in the usual sense. I prefer the old usage-usually scenario-which it had in the Commedia dell'Arte, meaning an outline or scheme: it implies a dynamism, a number of ideas and principles from which one can set out to find the best possible approach to filming.”

— Jacques Rivette

“I'm so sorry I have this. I can't stand the thought of how much worse this is going to get. I can't stand the thought of looking at you someday, and this face I love, and not knowing who you are."
She traced the outline of his jaw and chin and the creases of his sorely out of practice laugh lines with her hands. She wiped the sweat from his forehead and the tears from his eyes.
"I can barely breathe when I think about it. But we have to think about it. I don't know how much longer I have to know you. We need to talk about what's going to happen."
He tipped his glass back, swallowed until there was nothing left, and then sucked a little more from the ice. Then he looked at her with a scared and profound sorrow in his eyes that she'd never seen there before.
"I don't know if I can.”

— Lisa Genova

“I don't know why the publishers in New York don't take a tip from Hollywood and just publish the outlines of novels rather than the completed books. Let the audience use their imaginations, as my Maw always says about radio. I would much prefer to read an outline of War and Peace than slog through eight hundred thousand words. Why do I need Tolstoy to describe snow? I can imagine snow, whether Russian snow or just regular snow. But book publishers seem to think that the authors should do all the work, and the readers should be waited on hand-and-foot like a buncha goddamn prima donnas.”

— Gary Reilly

“Ignorance of God's prophetic outline, failure to know God's program for the Church, the nations, and Israel, is the cause of the overwhelming amount of error and misunderstanding of the events of the future.”

— M. R. DeHaan

“To all that he touched he gave a new meaning, a new color, a new outline, a new loveliness, and a new poignancy.”

— Frederick Delius

“Therefore, to teach them [women] at least an outline of economics and law is the first requirement after giving them a general education. Figuratively speaking, it will be like providing the women of civilized society with a pocket dagger for self-protection.”

— Fukuzawa Yukichi

“I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc ... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin.”

— Said Sayrafiezadeh

“The first task is to get to know the players really well-watching them as individuals in training and in match play-to see what is good in their natural game. Then, and only then, can we begin to outline the general tactics.”

— Helenio Herrera

“I've always thought that Boathouse Row looked best at night, when hundreds of electric lights outline the shape of each building, truning them into fantastic postcard themes. I knew, however, from many visits to Boathouse Row, that at the same time, armies of rats were holding maneuvers in the basements.”

— Brad Alan Lewis

“Without the definiteness of sculpture and painting, music is, for that very reason, far more suggestive. Like Milton's Eve, an outline, an impulse, is furnished, and the imagination does the rest.”

— Henry Theodore Tuckerman

“I don't think I'm anything like the improviser. I'm not. I do better with at least an outline.”

— Kathleen Turner

“I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel For words, like nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain A use measured language lie's The sad mechanic exercise Like dull narcotic's, numbing pain In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er Like coarsest clothes against the cold But large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more.”

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

“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

“In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.”

— Aristotle

“Conceive a jelly-fish such as sails in our summer seas, bell-shaped and of enormous size - far larger, I should judge, than the dome of St. Paul's. It was of a light pink colour veined with a delicate green, but the whole huge fabric so tenuous that it was but a fairy outline against the dark blue sky. It pulsated with a delicate and regular rhythm. From it there depended two long drooping, green tentacles, which swayed slowly backwards and forwards. This gorgeous vision passed gently with noiseless dignity over my head, as light and fragile as a soap-bubble, and drifted upon its stately way.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle

“There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.”

— Carson McCullers