Schematic Quotes & Sayings

A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them. — J.M. Coetzee

What will happen at very low temperatures is indicated in Fig. 1-4: the molecules lock into a new pattern which is ice. This particular schematic diagram of ice is wrong because it is in two dimensions, but it is right qualitatively. The interesting point is that the material has a definite place for every atom, and you can easily appreciate that if somehow or other we were to hold all the atoms at one end of the drop in a certain arrangement, each atom in a certain place, then because of the structure of interconnections, which is rigid, the other end miles away (at our magnified scale) will have a definite location. So — Richard Feynman

Every game, you will have a decided schematic advantage. — Charlie Weis

I wanted to speak with someone, but found no time; sought some fixed point, but found none. In the midst of the unrelenting forward thrust I felt the wish to stand still. The muchness and the motion were too much and too fast. Everyone withdrew from everyone. There was a running, as of something liquefied, a constant going forth, as of evaporation. Everything was schematic, ghostlike, even myself. — Robert Walser

I seem to wonder if we can reach some kind of new destination with cinema, or touch upon human existence in a different way to what cinema usually does in its very schematic and sometimes very controlled, plot-oriented ways of thinking. Sometimes I feel like I've found the holy grail, and next week I think it's a complete mistake and I need to try something completely different. It's an ongoing process. — Christoffer Boe

For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities. — Lance Armstrong

Don't be obstinate. It's not attractive in someone so young. I know you understand what I mean. Two hundred years ago, would anyone, even the most learned scientist, believe you if you told him one day men would walk on the moon and send information through the very air? I will supply my own response:no. But today these are unremarkable events. Perhaps the same is true of ritual-perhaps on the Day of Days the schematic of God's great machine will be as obvious to you as the code in your programs. — G. Willow Wilson

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things. — Peter Carey

Threatening others with physical harm allows the possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of a far more simple and schematic kind ("cross this line and I will shoot you," "one more word out of any of you and you're going to jail"). This is of course why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the stupid. — David Graeber

Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense. — Milan Kundera

A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form. — Anonymous

Since Aureliano at that time had very confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, his father in law gave him some schematic lessons. The Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would take power away from the supereme authority. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I said before that McDonald's serves a kind of comfort food, but after a few bites I'm more inclined to think they're selling something more schematic than that
something more like a signifier of comfort food. So you eat more and eat more quickly, hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger or French fry as it retreats over the horizon. And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full. — Michael Pollan

Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images. — James Merrill

[John C.] Calhoun was a minority spokesman in a democracy, a particularist in an age of nationalism, a slaveholder in an age of advancing liberties, and an agrarian in a furiously capitalistic country. His weakness was to be inhumanly schematic and logical, which is only to say that he thought as he lived. His mind, in a sense, was too masterful - it imposed itself upon realities. The great human, emotional, moral complexities of the world escaped him because he had no private training for them, had not even the talent for friendship, in which he might have been schooled. It was easier for him to imagine, for example, that the South had produced upon its slave base a better culture than the North because he had no culture himself, only a quick and muscular mode of thought. It may stand as a token of Calhoun's place in the South's history that when he did find culture there, at Charleston, he wished a plague upon it. — Richard Hofstadter

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that. — Adam Gopnik

That's the way life is: meaning is always there, but there is no clearly given way of decoding it. Conventional cinema obscures this with an easy reduction of meaning to plot and schematic characters. — Lenny Abrahamson

I mean, why do people fight over sports? Because of the framework, the schematic of sports, those particular people seize upon these opportunities to be violent. And the number one problem using the same framework would be religion. — Ian MacKaye

Put the penis schematic away, he told the coroner. — Paul Collins

Early in her career, Muse engaged her skills for technical purposes, such as document translation and schematic visualizations for government entities. She continued to write and paint poetically, in secret, using her pen name, Muse. An inner compass is evident in her work. Pieces reflect both past and present dilemmas; while showcasing her victories in overcoming these obstacles ~ all from her faith based perspective. Light touches of modernism play hand in hand with old world strokes, offering highly visceral readings. — Earl M. Coleman

He found and praised Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat. I said I found it too schematic and preferred The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. He nodded, but not in agreement, it seemed, more like a therapist who now understood my problem. — Ian McEwan

None of us knew what this power plant looked like. We had no schematic drawing. — William Scranton

Might you show me how to project a schematic of the entire inner solar system? I appear to be unable to zoom out from the immediate neighbourhood of Paladin." "Access that sub-menu, then select the logarithmic scale factor," Nissa said. "Thank you - I should have seen that." The — Alastair Reynolds

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticiously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functional social order, The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. — James C. Scott

In discussing the process with the actors, I made it clear to them that they could improvise but that the sum total of their improvisation needed to impart certain plot points, and schematic material. — Mike Figgis

Well, if there is a spectrum between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism, which is a rather schematic way of looking at it, all nationalism contains elements of both, but Scotland is very far on the civic end of the spectrum. That is partly because nobody has ever been stupid enough to say that Scotland is an ethnicity in a genetic sense. A kingdom of Scotland existed long before anybody talked of a Scottish people. So that is one thing we have been spared. — Neal Ascherson

[Artemis] returned to the aft bay for Mulch's version of a briefing.
The dwarf had drawn a crude diagram on a backlit wall panel. In fairness, there were more artistic chimpanzees. And less pungent ones. Mulch was using a carrot as a pointer, or more accurately, several carrots. Dwarfs liked carrots.
'This is Koboi Labs,' He mumbled around a mouthful of vegetable.
'That?' exclaimed Root.
'I realize, Julius, that it is not an accurate schematic.'
The Commander exploded from his chair. 'An accurate schematic? It's a rectangle for heaven's sake!'
Mulch was unperturbed. 'That's not important. This is the important bit.'
'That wobbly line?'
'It's a fissure,' pouted the dwarf. 'Anybody can see that.'
'Anybody in kindergarten maybe. So it's a fissure, so what?'
'This is the clever bit. Y'see that fissure is not usually there.'
Root began strangling the air again. Something he was doing more and more lately. — Eoin Colfer

I try to begin with a strong grasp of my characters. Even if it's schematic, I need it clear in my head who these people are. — Maria Semple

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

It was Supreme Chancellor Palpatine himself who had presented the schematic to the Strategic Advisory Cell at the second briefing. But in fact the battle station wasn't a product of Republic research and development; it had originated with the Separatists. The captive Geonosian leader, Poggle the Lesser, maintained that Count Dooku had provided Poggle's hive with the basic plans, and that the Geonosians had merely refined them. — James Luceno

I wrote 'Hereafter' quickly and without mapping it out too much or being too schematic. As an exercise, I think that was incredibly important. — Peter Morgan

I bet you could look at every single thing I've ever done and reduce it to that parenting schematic. — Vera Farmiga

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering. — Charles C. Mann

Quinn keyed up a three-dimensional holovid schematic of Vega Station and its neighbors. The jump routes were represented by sparkling jagged lines between hazy spheres of local space systems. — Lois McMaster Bujold

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished. — Jasper Johns

That cloud looks like a horse," Brayden said, lying on his back pointing out the fluffy, condensed precipitation in the bright blue sky. "That one looks like a bunny and there's a Buick. Over there is the electrical schematic of a B-2 Bomber and that one looks like a Category Five hurricane. — Jay Michael