"This is the mark of a perfect character - to pass through each day as though it were the last, without agitation, without torpor, and without pretense."
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Character quotes
Character
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Character quotes (page 43 of 739)
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"The danger of having the Constitution twisted and misconstrued to support vested interests and prejudices must be guarded against if American democracy is to maintain a progressive character."
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"I am definitely not scared of Mike Tyson. I am at the top of the food chain and he is looking to knock me off. Mike's an arrogant imbecile. He sounds like a cartoon character."
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"You see we adults have learned how to disguise our terrible characters but a child... well, it's like a grotesque drawing of us. They should be neither seen nor heard. And no one must make another one."
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"Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments."
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"I always find stuff in my characters to relate to."
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"and in that recurring dream, I found myself trapped in some sort of gigantic game of which I was unfamiliar with the rules; lost in a labyrinthine town of dark and damp, criss-crossing streets, ambiguous characters of uncertain authority having no idea of why I was there nor what I had to do, and where the first sign of the beginning of understanding was the wish to die."
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"Our differences with [Joseph] Stalin are entirely of a strategical character."
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"If you're gonna let the character be the story, you better set a tone that allows the actors to do the best work they can do."
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"Marty [Scorsese] knows that when an improvised moment comes out of a real situation, it's gonna have more life and more going on than anything you can imagine and that's how the character can become the story"
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"I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world."
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"How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of character?"
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"The thing I do at the beginning is a "voice journal," a free form doc that is the character speaking to me. I just work on it until I start to hear different from my own, or the other characters."
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"Many writers struggle with exposition in their novels. Often they heap it on in large chunks of straight narrative. Back story – what happens before the novel opens – is especially troublesome. How can we give the essentials and avoid a mere information drop? Use dialogue. First, create a tension-filled scene, usually between two characters. Get them arguing, confronting each other. Then you can have the information appear in the natural course of things."
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"Shy and proud men are more liable than any others to fall into the hands of parasites and creatures of low character. For in the intimacies which are formed by shy men, they do not choose, but are chosen."
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"What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do."
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"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast."
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"I can only show what I have received from the characters. That's what's scary because you're never going to be everyone's taste and you don't want to let people down. But, I can only do what I can do."
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"This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought."
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"By constant self-discipline and self-control you can develop greatness of character. Grenville Kleiser Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment."
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