#traits

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #traits




For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A commercial. You know the awful singsong of blase: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality really can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared scripted. It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls. It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else. I would have done anything to feel real again.


Gillian Flynn


#derivative #human #personality-traits #real #secondhand-experience

Oh, you ask me, what is the greatest torture of a person who does portraits for a living? I could fill several volumes with nice nasty stories. I don't know.


Imogen Cunningham


#could #does #fill #greatest #i

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.


Imogen Cunningham


#money #portraits #professionally #you

I collect old portraits. They're all just interesting pictures of people, and you just kind of wonder who they were and what they were. There's a guy - I don't know who he is, but he's wearing a suit. He's got his arms folded, and he looks like he sold insurance or something. I'm just wondering why someone painted him.


Ellen DeGeneres


#collect #folded #got #guy #him

The three traits speculators must learn to manage within themselves are confidence, fear, and aggressiveness.


Larry Williams


#confidence #fear #learn #manage #must

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.


G. Stanley Hall


#adolescence #birth #born #completely #higher

I suppose I'm intrigued with the bad traits of society, because I'm a part of society, and the bad traits pose the dangerous questions for our future.


Jude Law


#because #dangerous #future #i #intrigued

Havin' fun while freedom fightin' must be one of those lunatic Texas traits we get from the water - which is known to have lithium in it - because it goes all the way back to Sam Houston, surely the most lovable, the most human, and the funniest of all the great men this country has ever produced.


Molly Ivins


#because #country #ever #freedom #fun

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.


Thomas Jefferson


#favor #forms #his #imagination #moment

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.


Erica Jong


#forebears #grandfather #living #mother #painted