Block quotes
1.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside block — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I think creative blocks come from people's life journeys. If you don't know who you are or what you're about or what you believe in it's really pretty impossible to be creative."
"...Though we chisel away as best we can at the mysterious block from which our life is made, the black vein of destiny continually reappears."
"It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervadedand dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula."
"Somebody said once or wrote, once: 'We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks!"
"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic."
"Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I'm noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating."
"[Denzel Washington] was rustling with something and when he came back it was with a word about loving myself and the body that I'm in because I was still going on and on about the weight thing. I just liked that, because what people don't understand is that so much of what blocks us as actors is so personal."
"Obviously, ["Fences"] is a character-driven piece in every sense of the word, and Denzel [Washington] knows the actor. He gave us two weeks of rehearsal. He is a truth teller, and he is a truth seer. So he knows when something is not going in the right direction, and he will call you on it. But, he knows the word to use to unlock whatever is blocking you. So I think he's fabulous and he's a teacher."
"I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber."
"The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I."
"I've never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: 'Am I being joyful?' And if you've got a writer's block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you're writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject."
"Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped."
"Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider."
"Mostly, people watch their shows online and they watch them in a block. They don't have to tolerate the commercials, and they also don't have to wait another week. People binge watch. It's interesting."
"Sometimes Joyce is hilarious. I read Finnegans Wake after graduate school and I had the great good fortune of reading it without any help. I don't know if I read it right, but it was hilarious! I laughed constantly! I didn't know what was going on for whole blocks but it didn't matter because I wasn't going to be graded on it. I think the reason why everyone still has so much fun with Shakespeare is because he didn't have any literary critic. He was just doing it; and there were no reviews except for people throwing stuff on stage. He could just do it."
"We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture. We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it to gravel, we can shape it into glory. Examples from every other life are left for us to see, lifeworks finished and unfinished, guiding and warning. Near the end our sculpture is nearly finished, and we can smooth and polish what we started years before. We can make our progress then, but to do it we must see past the appearances of age."
"This condition [irony] has nothing to do with writer's block, a psychological syndrome, which is one of the few I have not diagnosed for myself!"
"Coaches want so many things from a back. It's hard to find someone like Edgerrin James or Marshall Faulk, someone you can trust to block, catch and be physical. But I can do all those things."
"Once you get the script, you then hope you can get the director that you want. Then you hope he can get the cast he wants. Again, you can go quickly or there can be a million stumbling blocks. There's just no way to know."
"There are, occasionally, writers who are able to combine both story and style. They are, of course, the best. You get a spectacular view and you also get to look at it from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In the field of fantasy, those writers able to combine story-as-narration with story-as-style are even rarer. But there are a few...the late Theodore Sturgeon, the early Ray Bradbury...and Richard Christian Matheson. A brilliant chip off the old block."
