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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #characterization
Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart. ↗
I do not know the man I should avoid So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much, He is a great observer, and he looks Quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays As thou dost, Anthony; he heard no music; Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort As if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit That could be moved to smile at anything. Such men as he be never at heart's ease Whiles they behold a greater than themselves, And therefore are they very dangerous. ↗
#love
When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance. ↗
Off the bike she was like a smoker without cigarettes, never sure what to do with her hands. As soon as she got off the bike, her heart was expected to perform all these baffling secondary functions like loving someone and feeling something and belonging somewhere - when all she'd ever trained it to do was pump blood. ↗
Maugham's success, in fact, lies a good deal less in what he positively does than in what he discreetly leaves undone. He gets the colors of life into his Charles Strickland, not by playing a powerful beam of light upon him, but by leaving him a bit out of focus--by constantly insisting, in the midst of every discussion of him, upon his pervasive mystery--in brief, by craftily making him appear, not as a commonplace, simple and completely understandable man, but as the half comprehended enigma that every genuine man of genius seems to all of us when we meet him in real life. ↗
Most of these stories are on the tragic side. But the reader must not suppose that the incidents I have narrated were of common occurrence. The vast majority of these people, government servants, planters, and traders, who spent their working lives in Malaya were ordinary people ordinarily satisfied with their station in life. They did the jobs they were paid to do more or less competently,. They were as happy with their wives as are most married couples. They led humdrum lives and did very much the same things every day. Sometimes by way of a change they got a little shooting; but at a rule, after they had done their day's work, they played tennis if there were people to play with, went to the club at sundown if there was a club in the vicinity, drank in moderation, and played bridge. They had their little tiffs, their little jealousies, their little flirtations, their little celebrations. They were good, decent, normal people. I respect, and even admire, such people, but they are not the sort of people I can write stories about. I write stories about people who have some singularity of character which suggests to me that they may be capable of behaving in such a way as to give me an idea that I can make use of, or about people who by some accident or another, accident of temperament, accident of environment, have been involved in unusual contingencies. But, I repeat, they are the exception. ↗
