Quotes About Small Parts

“Not many years before the Happening, one of your country's largest religious bodies officially declared that their book was holier than their God, thus simultaneously and corporately breaking several commandments of their own religion, particularly the first one. Of course they liked the book better! It was full of magic and contradictions that they could quote to reinforce their bigoted and hateful opinions, as I well know, for I chose many parts of it from among the scrolls and epistles that were lying around in caves here and there. They're correct that a god picked out the material; they just have the wrong god doing it.
(The small god in Ch. 44)”

— Sheri S. Tepper

“Might one not say that in the chance combination of nature's production, since only those endowed with certain relations of suitability could survive, it is no cause for wonder that this suitability is found in all species that exist today? Chance, one might say, produced an innumerable multitude of individuals; a small number turned out to be constructed in such fashion that the parts of the animal could satisfy its needs; in another, infinitely greater number, there was neither suitability nor order: all of the later have perished; animals without a mouth could not live, others lacking organs for reproduction could not perpetuate themselves: the only ones to have remained are those in which were found order and suitability; and these species, which we see today, are only the smallest part of what blind fate produced.”

— Pierre-Louis Moreau De Maupertuis

“It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that we are not separated from life. We begin to understand that we are not small separate islands in a great ocean, but that life is one and that we all are small parts of the Whole. We begin to understand what is really important and meaningful in life. It is on the consciousness level of the heart that we begin to understand that life is about sharing, rather than hoarding. We begin to understand that life is about giving, rather than taking.”

— Swami Dhyan Giten

“A story is never about one person. It has a full cast of characters, connected by blood or love or jealousy. There's nothing small or inconsequential about our stories. There is, in fact, nothing bigger. And when we tell the truth about our lives-the broken parts, the secret parts, the beautiful parts-then the gospel comes to life, an actual story about redemption, instead of abstraction and theory”

— Shauna Niequist

“It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries
we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?
...
Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.”

— David Foster Wallace

“We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries-we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?”

— David Foster Wallace

“You know when you watch old movies, it's always the small parts you remember, the character actors who come in like a breath of fresh air.”

— Amy Sedaris

“You see tools and parts and my arm shoved inside a small spacecraft, and you really have to ask what I'm doing?”

— John Scalzi

“I never really acted at school. It was doing small parts on TV that really got me started.”

— Freddie Highmore

“'Arrested Development' is great; Mitch Hurwitz is great. Plus, it's the one show I've ever had where, on the small parts, he just let me cast people.”

— Allison Jones

“The whole of the life
even the hard
is made up of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole. These are new language lessons, and I live them out. There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments will add up.”

— Ann Voskamp

“I think I'll get a little more interesting small parts and see if I can really ... I guess you don't have to have the pressure on you compared to when you're a leading man in a film.”

— Robert Maillet

“I like the world, but I feel very, very Italian. I love the small parts of my country: Tuscany, Capri in the winter. I don't like big towns.”

— Luca Cordero Di Montezemolo

“It's interesting going between small parts and then bigger roles where you carry the film. If the writing is good, and if the people involved have integrity, then you'll do it, even if it's only five minutes on screen.”

— Brendan Gleeson

“It's nice when I get offered small parts. But I really think that 'SNL' is what my skill set is best designed for.”

— Seth Meyers

“I had just had small parts in other films, and I'd worked with a lot of directors in TV.”

— Sally Kellerman

“Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors.”

— Constantin Stanislavski

“I was dirt-poor. I could barely hold down a job. Eventually, though, I started getting small parts on shows like 'Smallville,' 'Supernatural' ... and lots of really bad sci-fi movies. I was running around the woods in wolf contacts, covered in fake blood made out of pancake syrup, roaring.”

— Cory Monteith

“My English teacher always gave me scripts for plays, but I was into sports. My friend said there were small parts I could go up for, but the director gave me the part of Mozart, which was kind of the lead role. From then on I just loved it.”

— Santiago Cabrera

“I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the square parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“There are no small parts; there are only small actors.”

— Melanie Griffith

“Yeah, I did some small parts in high school and the first year of college and then fairly soon thereafter I settled into the backstage scenery, and then at the University of Maryland I was doing posters for their productions.”

— Jim Henson

“As any actor will tell you, the hardest thing to do is small parts, because you focus all your attention and concentration on that small part. When you're playing the lead part, you don't have time to think about the whole of it, so you just have to steam on and get on with it.”

— Colin Baker

“Any goal can be achieved if you break it down into enough small parts.”

— Brian Tracy

“April. Henry passed the word into sounds so small their sense disappeared, as if he'd wandered into the wide spaces that separate the solid parts of the molecule.”

— Chad Harbach

“There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.”

— Alain De Botton

“I like doing small parts, because I don't feel I'm that practised in acting. It's like making baby steps towards a bigger goal.”

— Heidi Klum

“I would rather do three or four small parts every year as opposed to some of the lower-hanging fruit that might get my name above the title.”

— Jason Bateman

“I always wanted to have a family - that was one of my big wishes. And in school, I'd taken drama, and I'd always wanted to act. I did go to drama school in New York, Los Angeles and London, and I did small parts here and there, but I never really had the time. Modeling was always paying more.”

— Jerry Hall

“I just finished my 62nd or my 63rd movie here, and you know, I do good ones, I do bad ones, I do big parts, I do small parts, I do cameos - but I've allowed myself a pat on the back, because I realized that I've been working in Hollywood now since 1973.”

— Robert Englund

“Sophie couldn't stop smiling. It had to be true that nature was built up of small parts that never changed. At the same time Heraclitus was obviously right in thinking that all forms in nature 'flow'. Because everybody dies, animals die, even a mountain range slowly disintegrates. The point was that the mountain range is made up of tiny indivisible parts that never break up.”

— Jostein Gaarder

“There aren't any small parts, only small paychecks.”

— Joe Pantoliano

“After making my stage debut aged nine as Macduff's small son in 'Macbeth,' I had played a number of parts, from 'Twelfth Night's Viola to 'The Merchant Of Venice's Portia'.”

— Felicity Kendal

“Sometimes I've done small parts, like with Spike Lee, but it doesn't matter because you want to work with the director.”

— Monica Bellucci

“To be honest, I don't see myself acting forever. I just can't imagine myself being a 70-year-old man fighting for roles. I would love to do small parts in my friends' movies or things that I'm directing myself. I do envision myself behind the camera as I get a little bit older.”

— Dave Franco

“So break me to small parts, let go in small doses, but spare some for spare parts.”

— Regina Spektor

“Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity.”

— Alec Guinness

“I had a really regular progression
and this is really pleasant, I think
because I had small parts in TV movies, then bigger parts in TV movies, and then small parts in films. And I think this allows you to get ... experience of the set and to get familiar with [the process]. And as I had a really slow progression, I think it really helped me to stay lucid and not get carried away.”

— Gaspard Ulliel

“A thought no less than a thing, an idea equally with an empire, is resolved into a complex of infinitely extensive relations between infinitesimally small parts.”

— Sangharakshita

“God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

“I've had small parts in big pictures and big parts in small pictures.”

— Candy Darling

“For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.”

— Adam Smith

“The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.”

— Alfred North Whitehead

“Past, n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy ... Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one-the knowledge and the dream.”

— Ambrose Bierce

“PIGMY, n. One of a tribe of very small men found by ancient travelers in many parts of the world, but by modern in Central Africa only. The Pigmies are so called to distinguish them from the bulkier Caucasians - who are Hogmies.”

— Ambrose Bierce

“I'm not ambitious when it comes to my acting career. I'm not breaking down my agency's doors or sending out headshots. Even when I'm offered work, I always want small parts. When it comes to things that other people have written, I just don't know what I'm doing. I'm terrible at memorizing a script and reading lines. I get confused and I don't understand and it just looks fake to me. It's more difficult for me to be creative that way.”

— Amy Sedaris

“I'd like to be a working actor.It sounds really trite, but there really are no small parts, only small actors. And so as long as I'm a working actor, I can improve.”

— Anne Hathaway

“Still on it creeps, Each little moment at another's heels, Till hours, days, years, and ages are made up Of such small parts as these, and men look back Worn and bewilder'd, wondering how it is.”

— Joanna Baillie

“I like to have memories of a place. It brings something extra. I'm not even sure what it is. I mean, it's the same part of it as I like using friends in small parts or people I know or my doorman.”

— Noah Baumbach

“Time is the very lens through which ye see
small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope
something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality.”

— C.S. Lewis