Outline Of Quotes

“Earth, stars, and the vastness of space; yesterday, today and tomorrow; and the endlessly increasing knowledge of the relation of forces, present an illimitable universe of numberless phenomena. Only in general outline can the universe be understood. In its infinite variety of expression, it wholly transcends the human mind ... In the midst of this complexity man finds himself. As he progresses from childhood to manhood, and his slumbering faculties are awakened, he becomes more fully aware of the vastness of his universe and of the futility of hoping to understand it in detail. Nevertheless, conscious man cannot endure confusion. Out of the universal mystery he must draw at least the general, controlling laws that proclaim order in the apparent chaos; and especially is he driven, by his inborn and unalterable nature, to know if possible his own place in the system of existing things.”

— John Andreas Widtsoe

“In the world of your story, your outline is like the Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, your characters are all Atheists.”

— Jefferson Smith

“Is this one of those contracts like in that kinky book where we outline what we're willing to do or not do during sex? Like our hard limits and safe words?”

— Katie Ashley

“But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle- the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other's speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.”

— David Foster Wallace

“If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct ... make any better. It's frightening.”

— Milan Kundera

“You can outline the people you've lived with these past years in a few sentences ... yet could you give an account of their lives, their hopes, their dreams? You could try, perhaps, but they would be much the same as yours ... for you are all an inexplicable unity - this family group with its twisted tensions, unreasoning loves and solidarity and loyalty born and bred in blood. These people are the ones most basically responsible for what you are.”

— Sylvia Plath

“Man cannot relinquish himself or the place in the visible world that belongs to him; he cannot become the slave of things, the slave of economic systems, the slave of production, the slave of his own products. A civilization purely materialistic in outline condemns man to such slavery, even if at times, no doubt, this occurs contrary to the intentions and the very premise of its pioneers.”

— Pope John Paul II

“The true purpose of prayer is to get into God's presence so He can outline His agenda for us.”

— Mark Batterson

“Far to our left I could see a commercial airliner on final approach to Soekarno-Hatta. Far to our right I could see the outline of tall city buildings. The imagery was hard to ignore. In the midst was an impoverished world filled with dangerous radicals. Some believed it was God's will to crash airplanes into buildings. Some recruited children to self-detonate on buses and in coffee shops. It must be incredibly difficult to hold fast to hope when you live in such a world. It's also hard to keep faith with humanity when religious ideology is used as an impetus for war. But I also believe that for every war there is a hero ... and for me, Jakarta will always be Indira's city.”

— Tucker Elliot

“I used to be an obsessive outliner - figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.”

— Robin Wasserman

“Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.”

— Aimee Carter

“You ask me what I'm looking for, and I outline you.
you don't recognize the shape, offer other names.
you say my time will come, and I hope.”

— David Levithan

“I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I've written, but the next morning I see that it's crap. Then I start again - make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink the whole question.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“I finally get to the place where the book has matured in my mind and I can hardly wait to start writing it. Then I just sit down and I start. I hit the go button. I have an outline, which is 70 pages, but I don't look at it. I never have to look at it.”

— Stephen J. Cannell

“The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun.”

— Daphne Du Maurier

“Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.”

— Jacques Derrida

“She leans forward, revealing an ear: a freshly formed, soap-smooth, pretty ear, its delicate outline glistening with a tracery of fine hairs.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript.”

— Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

“In my stand-up, I generally improvise from an outline.”

— Jeff Garlin

“Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.”

— David Rabe

“I only have one story now.
The story was heroin. It was made out of sensation, not words; it was invisible and murderous and unstoppable. Sam disappeared from her slowly, like a snowman melting, until all Blanca had left of him was a pool of freezing-cold blue water, arctic cold, sorrow colored, evaporating with every year. She did her best to hold onto him, but it was impossible, like carrying ice into the desert or making time stand still. After the final fight when Sam moved out, Blanca saw him less and less often. He no longer had a presence; he was like the outline of a person, an absence rather than a full-fledged human being.”

— Alice Hoffman

“I tend to edit some as I go - partly because one of the reasons I don't outline much is that I don't know what the next scene will be until I've actually written the previous scene.”

— Ann Leckie

“I never do a full outline, and if I did, I would not feel bound to it, because the view from inside a scene can be different from the view outside it. But neither do I just start writing and see what happens; I am far more disciplined than that.”

— Piers Anthony

“A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. It's why you might find yourself crying, even if you aren't the crying kind.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.”

— Justin Cronin

“Make me an offer, " I said at last. "Write it up, and give me a point-by-point outline of why you're a good would-be suitor. "
He started to laugh, then saw my face. "Seriously? That's like homework. There's a reason I'm not in college. " I snapped my fingers. "Get to it, Ivashkov. I want to see you put in a good day's work. "
I expected a joke or a brush-off until later, but instead, he said, "Okay. "
"Okay?"
"Yep. I'm going to go back to my room right now to start drafting my assignment. "
I stared incredulously as he reached for his coat. I had never seen Adrian move that fast when any kind of labor was involved. Oh no. What had I gotten myself into?”

— Richelle Mead

“I write stuff down. I have a chalkboard in the kitchen where I will scrawl stuff down if I have a faint outline of an idea. And I'll go into my office or whatever. But that goes from format to format.”

— John Darnielle

“Yet the misty spring rain softened the outline of the mountain across the river and made it even more beautiful. So gentle was the rain that they hardly knew they were getting wet as they strolled back toward the car, not even bothering to put up their umbrella. The slender threads of rain vanished into the river without a ripple. Cherry blossoms were intermingled with young green leaves, the colours of the budding trees all delicately subdued in the rain.”

— Yasunari Kawabata

“The car drives through, stops while the man closes and fastens the prickly gate behind it. The bell shuts off; the stillness is deafening by contrast. The car goes on until the outline of a house suddenly uptilts the searching headlight-beams, log-built, sprawling, resembling a hunting-lodge. But there's no friendliness to it. There is something ominous and forbidding about its look, so dark, so forgotten, so secretive-looking. The kind of a house that has a maw to swallow with - a one-way house, that you feel will never disgorge any living thing that enters it. Leprous in the moonlight festering on its roof. And the two round sworls of light played by the heads of the car against its side, intersecting, form a pear-shaped oval that resembles a gleaming skull. ("Jane Brown's Body")”

— Cornell Woolrich

“When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.”

— George Orwell

“Today, to him gazing south with a new-born need stirring in his heart, the clear sky over their long low outline seemed to pulsate with promise; today, the unseen was everything. the unknown the only real fact of life.”

— Kenneth Grahame

“The only way for us to make sense of life today is to appreciate where the future is going. Scripture outlines that future, not with detailed dates, but with a general outline of what is to come. That outline is designed not to have us prepare charts, but to prepare our hearts.”

— Darrell Bock

“The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information
these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning
to restructure the evidence so it made sense
and that is what I failed at.”

— Bret Easton Ellis

“Adaptation is always the same process for me, which is some version of throwing the book at the wall and seeing what pages fall out. It is trying to imagine, remember the story, read it, put it down, and then write sort of an outline without the book in front of you with some hope that what you like about it will be filtered and distilled out through your memory and then that will be similar to what other people like about it.”

— Akiva Goldsman

“It was a roller-coaster process. For a long time I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't writing with an outline. And, rare for me, I wrote scenes out of sequence ... I didn't understand the play when I wrote it. It was something I'd give in to. It happens to me periodically. I give over and write whatever comes to me and I don't know what it means and then I do. It's thrilling.”

— David Rabe

“He traced the line of her collarbone, and the side of her throat. "Did I hurt you, Daisy?" he whispered.
"Well, it was rather uncomfortable when you-" she stopped and blushed. "But I expected that. My friends told me it improves after the first time."
His fingertips wandered to the outline of her ear, and the blood-heated curve of her cheek. There was a smile in his voice as he said, "I'll do my best to see that it does.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“It's basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn't and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is that it will snowball. the best way to put it is that I have no particular method or technique per se, other than this: I plan nothing, I outline nothing, I start with an idea or an image or a line of dialogue and see where it leads me. Because I never know what the next page will contain, let alone the end of the book, I am perpetually surprised by the course that my characters take. The writing process is as full of surprises and twists for me as the reading experience is for my readers. I love the spontaneity of writing this way, the possibilities left open, the feeling that I am not constrained or committed to any given path. Every day, I am surprised by something. It may not be the most efficient way of writing, but it has served me well thus far.”

— Khaled Hosseini

“That's the thing about saying "sorry" or "excuse me" in this city. No one ever does. Or when we do apologize, we don't actually say it clearly. We just whisper the outline of excuse me or form the word sorry with our mouth, as if we expect people to lip-read.”

— Susane Colasanti

“Move out man! Life is fleeting by. Do something worthwhile, berfore you die. Leave Behind a work sublime, that will outline you and time.”

— Alfred Armand Montapert

“I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.”

— Michael Chabon

“An outline is crucial. It saves so much time. When you write suspense, you have to know where you're going because you have to drop little hints along the way. With the outline, I always know where the story is going. So before I ever write, I prepare an outline of 40 or 50 pages.”

— John Grisham

“How do we know, then, when a code's been cracked?when we are right?when do we know if we have even received a message? Why, naturally, when, upon one set of substitutions, sense emerges like the outline under a rubbing; when a single tentative construal leads to several; when all the sullen letters of the code cry TEAM! after YEA! has been, by several hands, uncovered.”

— William H. Gass

“Well, first you have to love writing. A lot of authors love having written. But I enjoy the actual writing. Beside that, I think the main reason I can be so prolific is the huge amount of planning I do before I start to write. I do a very complete, chapter-by-chapter outline of every book I write. When I sit down to write, I already know everything that's going to happen in the book. This means I've done all the important thinking, and I can relax and enjoy the writing. I could never write so many books if I didn't outline them first.”

— R.L. Stine

“The car, by bisecting the human outline, diminishes it, producing a race of half-people in a motion not of their own making”

— Marya Mannes

“Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.”

— Ishmael Reed

“When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.”

— Philip Kitcher

“The characters are born from repetition, from repeatedly thinking about them. I have their outline in my head. I become the character and as the character I visit the locations of the story many, many times. Only after that I start drawing the character, but again I do it many, many times, over and over. And I only finish just before the deadline.”

— Hayao Miyazaki

“The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.”

— Henry Adams

“A true poem is distinguished not so much by a felicitous expression, or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere which surrounds it. Most have beauty of outline merely, and are striking as the form and bearing of a stranger; but true verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very breath of all friendliness, and envelop us in their spirit and fragrance.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“I take the outline from a real person as inspiration, but the in-line is totally made up. Which is why I usually invent imaginary names.”

— Dana Spiotta