Quotes & Sayings About Lines

Profan'd the God-given strength, and marr'd the lofty line. — Walter Scott

The defining lines of reality have always been a bit blurred for me. — Christy Hall

The Earth was formed whole and continuous in the Universe, without lines. — Donella H. Meadows

For commercial books in a genre, readers' and editors' expectations may be fairly rigid. Some romance lines, for instance, issue fairly detailed writers' guidelines explaining exactly what must happen in a book they publish (and what must not). — Nancy Kress

Shakespeare has way too many lines. My ideal theatre piece is about 40 minutes long with no interval. — Daniel Craig

Americans will buy anything, as long as it doesn't cross the thin line between cute and demonic. — Ian Shoales

I did smoke a joint and I did inhale. The bottom line is that's what it was in the '70s, that's what I did. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Whenever she came across lines she liked, she'd mark them in pencil and commit them to memory as if they were Holy Writ. — Haruki Murakami

Many injuries and deaths can be prevented through an understanding of the dangers of power lines, electrical appliances, extension cords, and lightning. — Richard Neal

"The Hallmark Sessions" is an extraordinary release. Breau plays beautiful chords (sounding a little like Johnny Smith in spots) and inventive single-note lines. It is remarkable that this music was not released until 2003, but a happy event that it was finally put out. This is a must for Breau fans and an important release for all jazz guitar lovers. — Scott Yanow

Sometimes you start a little further back from the starting line. And you're going to have to work a little bit harder, and push it faster to get to the finish. I'm willing to put in the work, to compensate for other things, to get ahead, to get to where I want to be. — Nick Newell

Embrace the fear, use it, but don't become a victim of it. — Brandy Nacole

Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by sounds; and what they see and what they hear are sights and sounds only. The intellectof man, on the contrary, energises as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights or sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not be seen or heard except in detail. It discerns in lines and colors, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea. — John Henry Newman

I remain as committed as ever to working across party lines with anyone who believes we must invest in the future of our economy by revitalizing our transportation infrastructure, ensuring every child is getting a world class education, and spurring research and development of new technologies. — Jim Himes

In the theater, you're so much more in charge as an actor. For better or for worse, you know what the audience is seeing. But you can be acting your socks off on film, and then you see the movie, and the camera is on the other actor, or they've cut out the lines you thought were significant, or they've adjusted the plot. So much of it is out of your control. — Susan Sarandon

And they're [Coen brothers] so smart, they're so witty, they have such an extraordinary way of communicating with an audience in a such a clean way - with just a few lines or just a gesture from a character, they say so much. — Angelina Jolie

It's easy to make something with a million style-lines. Simplicity is the most difficult thing to achieve, and that's how I approach design - very minimal, pare it down, perfect. — Keith Michael

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting. — Friedensreich Hundertwasser

In journalism, especially, we tend to deal with large, complex systems by finding especially interesting people and story lines to focus on. — Nicholas Lemann

The ubiquitous semi-sentient utility routine running in her macrocellular clusters responded immediately by unfolding a basic array of mental icons, slender lines of blue fairy light that superimposed themselves within her wobbly vision. She frowned. If she was reading their efficiency modes correctly, her biononics had — Peter F. Hamilton

This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded. — John Banville

There was silence on the other end. The static crackle from one hundred kilometres of telephone lines. Crows sitting on them, shivering, while people's conversations darted past under their feet. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

Prayer is picking a fight with the Enemy. It's spiritual warfare. Intercession transports us from the sidelines to the front lines without going anywhere. And that is where the battle is won or lost. Prayer is the difference between us fighting for God and God fighting for us. But we can't just hit our knees. We also have to take a step, take a stand. And when we do, we never know what God will do next. — Mark Batterson

But I have had to give up certain things in my life. One is shopping. Two is lunch with the girls. Three is cocktail parties, and four is studying my lines. — Joan Collins

If you took the world away and just left the elctricity, it would look like the most exquisite filigree ever made - a ball of twinkling silver lines with the occasional coruscating spike of a satellite beam. Even the dark areas would glow with radar and commercial radio waves. It could be the nervous system of a great beast. — Terry Pratchett

Every good laboratory consists of first rate men working in great harmony to insure the progress of science; but down at the end of the hall is an unsociable, wrong-headed fellow working on unprofitable lines, and in his hands lies the hope of discovery. — Ernest Rutherford

Everything funny in a not-funny-at-all kind of way. Sarcasm as something you practiced like karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines. — Jonathan Lethem

His hair was shorter than I remembered, tawny in this half-light, the tousled edges casually framing the clean, commanding lines of his face. His mouth, normally so stern was relaxed now and as I stared a slight sweet smile touched his lips, its curve softening the straight strong lines of his nose and brow. Finally, inevitably, I met his eyes and felt a connection that seared straight through me, down through my soles and away. Those eyes, darker than mine, the darkest blue, dark and as impenetrable as glaciers. Tonight he was real, so very real that my heart thumped, my blood sang, my legs shook. — Hannah Blatchford

He was a collection of hard lines and tailored edges — Leigh Bardugo

What a beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lines, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins. — Herman Melville

One of the reasons for learning about type is to recognize that we are constantly motivated, simply by the way we've established our neural networks, to shape reality along particular functional lines. Another is to recognize the possibilities for growth and change that exist within - and apart from - the framework we have created for ourselves. Even small changes in our usual way of doing things can make big differences in the way our brain is operating. We develop the ability to think in new ways, and this stimulates creative change in all areas of our lives. — Lenore Thomson

Breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert. — Hunter S. Thompson

I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically. — Alexander McCall Smith

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: ... But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?
MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
(Act I., lines 132-140) — Oscar Wilde

I'd love to get into one of Tyler Perry's movies - play a little role, have a little character. I don't care. But more than two lines! More than two words! — Sharon Jones

I'm so busy these days. I forget everything but my lines. — Christopher Meloni

Jason's heart lifted when he saw Nico di Angelo on the front lines with the Greeks, slashing his way through a crowd of two-headed men. — Rick Riordan

I was delighted to have lines when they came - learning lines for film isn't a problem, but television is a little different, because we shot those shows the whole way through. — David Selby

What's exciting about being an artist, still, and what I'm really finding is awesome is that you can do it until you drop. I don't care how many lines I have on my face - I'll keep doing it! — Nikki Sixx

When you cross the line, it is such a wonderful feeling it's hard to describe. — Kelly Holmes

Once I began taking calls for cable, I quickly realized that when Americans cannot watch television, all of their repressed marital rage floods the telephone lines. — Anonymous

I'm happy that I'm finally getting some lines in my face. I always looked too young for the kind of roles I wanted. It was constraining. My face didn't fit my innards until I reached 40. — Sam Rockwell

People recite lines to me all the time, anywhere I get recognized. — Steven Bauer

I do miss the days of living in our boardinghouse when I could practice my lines while experiencing the freedom of trousers without anyone thinking a thing about it." "The only time I saw you wearing trousers was when you were impersonating a coachman," Bram said slowly. "Have you seen her when her hair looks like a rat's nest because she's braided it at least a thousand times while she's distracted with her lines or . . . investments?" Millie asked. To Lucetta's surprise, instead of seeming taken aback by the idea she wasn't always very concerned about her appearance, Bram was watching her now with what looked like clear delight in his eyes. "I'll see what I can do to find you and Millie some trousers, if you really think that will help you mend fences with Geoffrey. — Jen Turano

I don't divide my reading into demographic categories, any more than I'd divide my friends into groups along ethnic or sexual lines. The thing I look for most is a sense of literary rawness - bareback fiction, if you will. — Christopher Fowler

Man has drawn artificial lines on the chest of the Mother Earth, which have no significance, except for the sake of war and clashes between countries. The soil seems to be the same, the trees the same, the grass the same, and the fragrance of the air, the smell of the earth the same. — Girdhar Joshi

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up. — Grace Paley

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

It had been written with one foot in the grave and a finger in heaven. These lines, falling one by one onto the paper, were what could be called soul drops. Who could these pages come from? Who could have written them? Cosette did not hesitate for a second. There was only one man it could have come from. Him! — Victor Hugo

I'm from the suburbs and where I'm from didn't necessarily have people like you see in 'Suburgatory,' but along those lines and I think people will laugh at themselves. And it's lighthearted. — Jane Levy

He had not been in El Paso for years, and they had developed it considerably since then, he'd heard, along the lines of sin and salvation. They had churches and a Republican or two and a smart of banks and a symphony orchestra and five railroads and a lumberyard and the makings of a library. So much for sin. On the side of salvation they had ninety-some saloons, just shy of one for every hundred citizens, although municipal goodyism had moved the gambling rooms out back or upstairs. — Glendon Swarthout

I will never be able to pound words into lines
To match the velocity of your presence — Henry Rollins

I'd been auditioning for parts for years. I never got any better at it. I'm crap at auditions. I know there are people who can walk into those rooms and make those lines sing on the page and get the job immediately. I wasn't one of them. I'm still not one of them. — Jamie Dornan

It is a pleasure to be able to quote lines to fit any occasion ... — Abraham Lincoln

You see, the thing is, if you don't do anything to your face, and you get old, and you can stand up, and you can remember your lines, the work is there. — Judy Parfitt

There is a celebrated aphorism insisting that the best way to live is to 'work like you don't need the money, dance like nobody is watching, and love like you've never been hurt.' ... After years of hearing and reading these lines I have decided to tell the truth: the original version is wrong. There is a grave error in the wording of this adage. The correct version should go as follows:
Love like you don't need the money,
Work like nobody is watching,
Dance like you've never been hurt.
See? Doesn't that make more sense? — Gina Barreca

I have a certain temperament, a disposition that I think lends itself to not playing outside the lines that much. But I do test the boundaries, certainly, and break one or two of my own. Some people are mystified by it, but not me. — David Sanborn

Don't accept less than what it is that you know that you want. Don't allow someone to be a jerk. Don't allow someone to disrespect you. Listen to the bigger voice in your head telling you that you deserve the best, whatever that is whatever that is you decide you like for yourself. It may differ from what I like or what is ideal for me. But the bottom line is to never accept less than what you know you deserve. — Kimora Lee Simmons

I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know. It was something I always did. — Carrie Fisher

It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light. — Kat Rosenfield

One of the first exercises we did in acting class my freshman year was to stand in two rows, two lines facing each other as a class, and just make sounds and move in some completely nonsensical way out into the center of the room. Sort of make an idiot out of yourself, essentially, but to be okay with that. — Chris Parnell

One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines. — Roger Ebert

The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing. — Derrick Jensen

This leads to the idea of a race between education and technology: if the supply of skills does not increase at the same pace as the needs of technology, then groups whose training is not sufficiently advanced will earn less and be relegated to devalued lines of work, and inequality with respect to labor will increase. In order to avoid this, the educational system must increase its supply of new types of training and its output of new skills at a sufficiently rapid pace. If equality is to decrease, moreover, the supply of new skills must increase even more rapidly, especially for the least well educated. — Thomas Piketty

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it. — Jeremy Bentham

From high Meonia's rocky shores I came, Of poor decsent, Acoetes is my name, My sire was measly born: no oxen ploughed, His fruitful fields, nor in his pastures lowed, His whole estate within the waters lay' With lines and hooks he caught the finny prey; His art was all his livelehood, which he Thus with his dying lips bequeathed to me: In streams, my boy, and rivers take thy chance; There swims', said he, Thy whole inheritance. — Ovid

When you're hard and unyielding your words score me with lines - I hate lines - I want curves - curves are happy like a snowman ... — John Geddes

Our culture is intent on taking the lines out of people's faces - surgically, with costly creams, and with fear and trembling - when, in fact, the opposite should be the case. As artists know, if there is anything behind a face, that face improves with age. — Karen DeCrow

And they dare to rule the world! They have made it so ugly. Square houses! Their obsession with straight lines and right angles has ruined the earth! They consider all curves, all subtleties, all softness, all indefinites, female, and they shun them. They have poisoned and denatured everything they touch, and expect us to be grateful. — Lucy Ellmann

Beau never stays within the lines. He's not just my roommate, he moves through Portland as if it's his city, as though all the people at this party are his best friends, as if he invented beer pong, even. He's that drop of water that runs and seeps into the paper, smearing the other watercolors until they've run wild as well. — Rebecca Paula

Every other band should be wiping my ass. The line forms over there to the left. — Gene Simmons

went in. The doctor's questions had started him thinking along several lines. Losing to a superior opponent was always a possibility, but one he acknowledged only in an academic sense. — Robert Daniels

Happy the bard, (if that fair name belong
To him that blends no fable with his song)
Whose lines uniting, by an honest art,
The faithful monitors and poets part,
Seek to delight, that they may mend mankind,
And while they captivate, inform the mind.
Still happier, if he till a thankful soil,
And fruit reward his honorable toil:
But happier far who comfort those that wait
To hear plain truth at Judah's hallow'd gate — William Cowper

You really have to take your time; you have to know your character and your scene. The line you are about to say comes from the moment right before. It's not what's said, it's what is in between the spaces, it's what's in between the lines; that is the most important to play. — Sarah Shahi

When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax. — Natasha Trethewey

In his ... 'Geometrical peculiarities of the Pyramids', Ballard shows the relationship between the equal area theory and the golden number. After checking Herodotus' statement via dimensions Ballard concludes: 'I have therefore the authority of Herodotus to support the theory which I shall subsequently set forth, that this pyramid was the exponent of lines divided in mean and extreme ratio. — Roger Herz-Fischler

The customer is the most important part of the production line. — W. Edwards Deming

The clarity of gender makes possible the human dialectic. Let the lines of balanced tension go slack and the structure dissolves into the ooze of androgyny and narcissism. — Bill Vaughan

You learn your lines as well as you can and you go in there and go with whatever is thrown at you. Sometimes you don't know whether or not they're going to break the scene up, so you don't have to do it all at one time. — Courtney B. Vance

He promised all those things men promise when they are far away and can feel the phone lines stretching too tight, the wires and cables rapidly unraveling from their braids, snapping, recoiling, collapsing the poles along the way. — Salvador Plascencia

They murdered him. — Robert Cormier

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. — Franz Kafka

At work she became instant best friends with the Clinique girl, Susan, a Waynesboro muscle-car aficionado. She was fond of dispensinf wisdom along the lines or: "The bullshit stops when the green light pops!" I'd go to the mall to pick up Renee. take them both a couple of coffees, and hang out while they chattered in their hot white coats. Susan would take Renee to hot-rod shows and run-what-ya-brung drag races. She brought out sides of Renee I'd never gotten to see before, and it was a sight to behold. After a night out with Susan, Renee would always come back saying things like, "If it's got tits or tires, it's going to cost you money. — Rob Sheffield

The painter doesn't try to reproduce the scene before him ... he simplifies and eliminates until he knows exactly what stirred him, sets this down in color and line as simply and as powerfully as possible and so translates his impression into an aesthetic emotion. — David Milne

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon. — William Golding

The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything. — Gertrude Stein

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. — Oscar Wilde

The real problem devolves around class lines once again: it's the street hormones that folks without insurance, or folks who are too young for prescriptions without parental okay, use. Sometimes those hormones can be pretty rough. — Kate Bornstein

Politics is like a stage. Each politician plays his part according to the lines that are given to him. But backstage, the hero and the villain enjoy their drink together. Everybody — Ashwin Sanghi

I know I love sexy surf guitars, I know I love loud snare. I love really simple repeating bass lines, and I love weird mad scientist keyboard sounds. — Kathleen Hanna

When people listen to my music, I hope that they will notice that if you take a piece by a composer like Schubert, the major and the minor triad is an extermely important thing not merely as harmony, but in creating melodic lines. Schubert is always walking up and down with arpeggios on C, E, G and so forth. I am not doing anything different really, except using a different system of harmony. — Elliott Carter

The faces of the others looked like aggregates of interchangeable features, every face oozing to blend into the anonymity of resembling all, and all looking as if they were melting. Rearden's face, with the sharp planes, the pale blue eyes, the ash-blond hair, had the firmness of ice; the uncompromising clarity of its lines made it look, among the others, as if he were moving through a fog, hit by a ray of light. — Ayn Rand

I do like when you find a true personal relationship with any of the characters, you like to make that honest connection. And every once in a while, there's that glimmer where you got that line in where something happens, where you get to really talk. — Jonathan Banks

To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place.So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form. — Billy Collins

You fight them, his father had said.
You don't trust them. His father had been right. And his father had been ready. Rabatians were cowards and deceivers, they should have scattered when their duplicitous attack met the full force of the Akielon army. But for some reason they hadn't fallen at the first sign of a real fight, they had stood firm, and shown metal, and, for hour upon hour, they had fought, until the Akielon lines had begun to slip and falter.
And their general wasn't the king, it was the twenty-five year old prince, holding the field.
Father, I can take him, he'd said.
Then go, his father had said, and bring
us back victory. — C.S. Pacat

My best advice is to not start in PowerPoint. Presentation tools force you to think through information linearly, and you really need to start by thinking of the whole instead of the individual lines. — Nancy Duarte

While American football is very structured and linear and static - where everyone lines up, and there's a burst, and it happens - soccer is like the cosmos. It's like constellations. It's bodies moving in space. It's a very spherical game. — Gabriel Luna

The world of shapes, lines, curves, and solids is as varied as the world of numbers, and it is only our long-satisfied possession of Euclidean geometry that offers us the impression, or the illusion, that it has, that world, already been encompassed in a manageable intellectual structure. The lineaments of that structure are well known: as in the rest of life, something is given and something is gotten; but the logic behind those lineaments is apt to pass unnoticed, and it is the logic that controls the system. — David Berlinski

A house is very much like a portrait. I cannot disconnect houses from people. The thought of arrangement, the curves and straight lines. It gives an indication of the character at the heart of it. — Christian Louboutin

Once, after a long night of sex and alcohol consecutively and concurrently, he told me somewhat drunkenly that he measured my rages by how long he perceived it would be between the time he made me angry and the time I would sleep with him again; this had made me so furious with him that I'd managed to withhold sex for nearly a full ten minutes.
(Tristan in White Lines) — Shukyou