Outline Of Quotes

“Approach him across open ground with a steady unfaltering movement. Let your shape grow in size but do not alter its outline. Never hide yourself unless concealment is complete. Be alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to fear. To share fear is the greatest bond of all. The hunter must become the thing he hunts.”

— J.A. Baker

“What matters is to live in the present, live now, for every moment is now. It is your thoughts and acts of the moment that create your future. The outline of your future path already exists, for you created its pattern by your past.”

— Sai Baba

“And somehow, somewhere along the track, I went numb. I couldn't say what it was & didn't dare try. How do you explain the sense of being made to feel improper ? I withdrew into a watchful rectitude, anxious to please, risking nothing. I followed the outline of my life, carefully rehearsing form without conviction, like a bishop who can't see that his faith has become an act.”

— Tim Winton

“There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”

— Milan Kundera

“I was eleven when my father left, so neither of us really knew our fathers. I'd met mine of course, but then I only knew my dad as a child knows a parent, as a sort of crude outline filled in with one or two colors. I'd never seen my father scared or cry. I'd never heard him admit to any wrongdoing. I have no idea what he dreamed of. And once I'd seen a smile pinned to one cheek and darkness to the other when my mum had yelled at him. Now he was gone, and I was left with just an impression-one of male warmth, big arms, and loud laughter.”

— Lloyd Jones

“For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn't get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution.”

— Claude Lévi-Strauss

“Do not the bewitching power of all studies lie in that they continually open up to us new, unsuspected horizons, not yet understood, which entice us to proceed further and further in the penetration of what appears at first sight only in vague outline?”

— Pyotr Kropotkin

“British prime minister William Gladstone summed up the West's opinion of "the Turk": Let me endeavor very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline, what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mahometanism simply, but of Mahometanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild Mahometans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them; and, as far as their dominion reached, civilisation disappeared from view.”

— Eric Bogosian

“She felt like a fictional character who'd escaped the book in which her creator had carefully and kindly trapped her, taken a pair of scissors to her outline and leaped, free ...”

— Kate Morton

“If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the various species, or - in this place at least - to much of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder. (moby dick chap 32 p131)”

— Herman Melville

“The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Bronte. Remarkable faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them.”

— Virginia Woolf

“But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in skeleton outline, bare of flesh?”

— Virginia Woolf

“I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.”

— Jayne Anne Phillips

“My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline.”

— Edward Carpenter

“I write on big yellow legal pads - ideas in outline form when I'm doing stand-up and stuff. It's vivid that way. I can't type it into an iPad - I think that would put a filter into the process.”

— Robin Williams

“Thoughts of You
There were times when I was with him and it was too much. Does that make sense? When someone stirs a world of emotion in you and it's so intense you can barely stand to be with him.
During those moments, I wanted so desperately to leave - to go home, walk into my bedroom, and shut the door behind me. Crawl into bed and lay there in the dark, tracing the outline of my lips with my fingers - replaying everything he said, everything we did. I wanted to be left alone - with nothing other than my thought of him.”

— Lang Leav

“I went to this tattoo parlor in the East Village and I got an outline of a violin on my lower back. They call them tramp stamps now.”

— Katherine Moennig

“I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.”

— Richard Greenberg

“The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.”

— George Eliot

“I use the chopsticks to outline the biggest heart possible. Then I use the Sweet'N Low packets to fill it in. I borrow some from two other tables when I run out.
When I'm done, I point to the heart on the table.
"This," I say, "is only about one ninety-millionth of how I feel about you."
She laughs.
"I'll try not to take it personally," she says.
"Take what personally?" I say. "You should take it very personally."
"The fact that you used artificial sweetener?"
I take a Sweet'N Low and fling it at her.
"Not everything is a symbol!" I shout.”

— David Levithan

“I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.”

— Barry Schwartz

“Grossman, perhaps tiring slightly of journalism, seems to have longed to convey his thoughts and feelings about the war in fictional form. At this stage, when the Soviet Union was fighting for its life, his ideas were very close to that of the Party line. It was only at Stalingrad, a year later, that his view of the Stalinist regime began to change. This outline, may well have formed part of the idea for The People Immortal, his novel written and published the following year ...”

— Vasily Grossman

“Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.”

— Hallie Ephron

“I've never written a book with an outline or a predetermined theme. It's only in retrospect that themes or subjects become identifiable. That's the fun of it: discovering what's next. I'm often surprised by plot developments I would not have dreamed of starting out, but that, in the course of the writing, come to seem inevitable.”

— Susan Choi

“When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.”

— Colleen Hoover

“And more even than the painter, the writer, in order to achieve volume and substance, in order to attain to generality and, so far as literature can, to reality, needs to have seen many churches in order to paint one church and for the portrayal of a single sentiment requires many individuals. For if art is long and life is short, we may on the other hand say that, if inspiration is short, the sentiments which it has to portray are not of much longer duration. It is our passions which draw the outline of our books, the ensuing intervals of repose which write them.”

— Marcel Proust

“At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon the violin part, delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony-he knew not which-that had just been played, and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils.”

— Marcel Proust

“What Jessica said-hair much shorter, wearing a darker mouth of different outline, harder lipstick, her typewriter banking in a phalanx of letters between them-was: "We're going to be married. We're trying very hard to have a baby."
All at once there is nothing but his asshole between Gravity and Roger. "I don't care. Have his baby. I'll love you both-just come with me Jess, please ... I need you ... "
She flips a red lever on her intercom. Far away a buzzer goes off. "Security." Her voice is perfectly hard, the word still clap-echoing in the air as in through the screen door of the Quonset office wth a smell of tide flats come the coppers, looking grim. Security. Her magic word, her spell against demons.”

— Thomas Pynchon

“In 'The Purity Myth,' I not only discuss what the purity myth is and reveal its consequences for women, but also outline a new way for us to think about young women as moral actors, one that doesn't include their bodies.”

— Jessica Valenti

“SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.”

— Jerry B. Jenkins

“I know you adore Father, but he isn't the white knight you imagine him to be. He never was. True, he's charming and loving in his way. But he's selfish. He's a limited man determined to bring about his own end-"
"But-"
Tom grabs both my hands in his and gives them a small squeeze. "Gemma, you can't save him. Why can't you accept that?"
I see my reflection on the surface of the Thames. My face is a watery outline, all blurred edges with nothing settled.
"Because if I let go of that" - I swallow hard, once, twice - "then I have to accept that I am alone."
The ship's horn howls again as it slips out toward sea. Tom's reflection appears beside mine, just as uncertain.
"We're every one of us alone in this world, Gemma." He doesn't say it bitterly. "But you have company, if you want.”

— Libba Bray

“Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.”

— George Orwell

“If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.”

— Elmore Leonard

“That was, in writing the 'Twilight' script I had about five weeks to write that. I'd taken about a month to write the outline and then it was slam into a script and write it down fast because the writer's strike was looming.”

— Melissa Rosenberg

“Killing people was easier when the only face I ever saw was Mother's back then, anyone else was the enemy and shooting at an outline in a scope wasn't any different than taking down a deer, just in a different shape.”

— Mindy McGinnis

“THE ART OF DRAWING YOU
In a bed by the Gulf of Corinth, a woman contemplates by firelight the profile of her sleeping lover.
On the wall, his shadow flickers.
The lover, who lies by her side, will leave. At dawn he will leave to war, to death. And his shadow, his traveling companion, will leave with him and with him will die.
It is still dark. The woman takes coal out of the embers and draws on the wall the outline of his shadow.
Those lines will not leave.
They will not embrace her, and she knows it. But they will not leave.”

— Eduardo Galeano

“Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."”

— Andre Dubus

“If ever I were to have a symbol attributed to me, it would be a heart, the outline!”

— Rudolph Valentino

“The Bible has a human history as well as a divine inspiration. It is a history full of interest, and it is one which all those who value their Bible should know, at least in outline, if only that they may be able to meet the criticisms of sceptics and the ignorant.”

— Frederic G. Kenyon

“A mother's example sketches the outline of her child's character.”

— Tim Howard

“To understand my feelings - and my conception of the role of Secretary General - the nature of my religious and cultural background must first be understood. I should therefore like to outline not only my beliefs but also my conception of human institutions and of the human situation itself.”

— U Thant

“I've written so many things over the years that I don't want to go back to being just a scriptwriter. I'm in what I consider to be the enviable position of all I have to do is come up with the idea and write an outline that makes it seem like it's a viable idea that will interest people, and then other people write the scripts
and I become the executive producer or the producer, depending on how much involvement I have, and I get a creative credit and then move on to the next project.”

— Stan Lee

“I'm lucky. I don't have to produce the whole movie. What I've been doing is just coming up with ideas for movies. I write a concept, a treatment, an outline, and if I sell that to a studio, then someone else does the actual production and I go on to another project, although I keep the title executive producer.”

— Stan Lee

“The best way to look at countries on a map is like a chalk outline drawn by the police when someone dies what you are seeing with the borders are just outlines of historical crimes past warlords empires its nothing to be loyal to. Have loyalty to reason, to evidence, to ideals not to lines drawn up mostly by criminals.”

— Stefan Molyneux

“I never outline. I don't work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don't know how it's going to end.”

— Tom Robbins

“In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean "the foolish face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved, by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, with the most disagreeable sensation.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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

“Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.”

— Henry David Thoreau