Character Quotes - Page 288

The character of our praying will determine the character of our preaching. Light praying makes light preaching.

I do not believe that a child can be reformed by lock and key and bars, or that fear can ever develop a child's character.

How many times can you play an action character, or a quirky romantic? Every actor has to find his own way to make each character unique.

As I get older, I'm more willing to take on more, I guess. I feel more comfortable kind of being different characters and kind of stretching it a little more. Like with The Visitation. At least for me, being an actor, I have to draw from human experiences, so it was kind of a stretch playing that role. Kind of supernatural... kind of like what I did in The Crow actually.

There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.

Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character ... A good deal like human beings.

None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.

I think the idea, first and foremost, is to understand that people may label these characters as villains, but at the end of the day I have to fall in love with the characters that I play. For me, they have to be real characters with real objectives, and driving forces. So they're all different.

He is, as you say, a remarkable horse, a prodigious horse, although as you very justly observe, a suspicious and untractable character.

In the tale proper--where there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident--mere construction is, of course, far more imperatively demanded than in the novel.

I've had people who see all my characters as Native, even if they aren't. It's kind of like assuming all a writer's characters are really female because the writer is a woman. I've learned to let that go.

Character is supreme in life, hence Jesus stood supreme in the supreme thing - so supreme that, when we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code but a character.

True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others.

Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.

I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because Im recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because Im concentrating on what the character is going through.

The Anarchists' uncompromising rejection of the State, the subject of Marxian sneers for its "absolutist" and "Utopian" character, makes much better sense in the present era than the Marxist relativist and historical approach. The pacifists also seem to be more realistic than the Marxist both in their understanding of modern war and also in their attempts to do something about it.

I know I have a first-rate mind, but that`s no source of pride to me. Intelligent people are a dime a dozen. But I am proud of having character.

I look for characters that are fun and that I'm going to have fun playing. By the way, that's whether it's drama, sci-fi, action, comedy, family movies or action-comedy. I just always want to have fun doing it. That's the bottom line.

To me, you couldn't write a character like J. Edgar Hoover and have it be believable. I mean, he was a crock pot of eccentricities. We couldn't even fit all his eccentricities into [ the same named] movie.

Star Trek characters never go shopping.

Vermont tradition is based on the idea that group life should leave each person as free as possible to arrange his own life. This freedom is the only climate in which (we feel) a human being may create his own happiness. ... Character itself lies deep and secret below the surface, unknown and unknowable by others. It is the mysterious core of life, which every man or woman has to cope with alone, to live with, to conquer and put in order, or to be defeated by.

Action choreographer is like talking. When you talk, you have a rhythm. When you act, you have a rhythm. When you're moving your body, you have a rhythm. So as an actor, as a choreographer, the objective is trying to blend everything in - into - ultimately back into that character.

The play is on top of me all the time, and I am constantly thinking about it. Even when I leave the theatre, I'll mumble the lines to myself or think about the way the character walks or holds himself.

Choosing a director is like choosing a therapist - you want somebody who is going to be a step or two ahead of you, who can interpret and articulate your intentions better than you can, with the benefit of objectivity. I look for a collaborator who is going to help bring to life, on stage, in three dimensions, what is on the page. I wouldn't want a director who imposes conceits or distrusts the text or who has prejudged the characters.

People often tell me, "You write such great women." I don't think about it, I just write characters as rigorously and as truthfully as I can and hope, no matter their gender, that their humanity comes through.