MindProbe > MindProbe's Quotes

“Shakespeare is complex, like living, not technically and crackably difficult, like crosswords or changing the time on the cooker”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“Do you not want to rule the world, Nicator Seleucus? Do you not want your name whispered from Athens to the banks of the Indus? Hear the bards singing your fame for posterity and the cities minting your coins? The armies carrying your banners and the warriors piercing the clouds with your name? Do you not want all of that, Seleucus?”
― Moris Farhi, Doctor Who: Farewell, Great Macedon

“I'd been going back and forth on a three-month visa, which occasionally I was allowed to renew for a six-month, but it was working out very expensive so I thought I'd apply for my three-year visa. And they turned me down because they said I was a drugs trafficker. Total load of bollocks; it wasn't trafficking, it was possession.”
― Jacqueline Pearce, Call Me Jacks-Jacqueline Pearce In Conversation

“But it's still possible to find depths in Shuster's drawing. I can't help but see in these handmade fantasies the poignant products of young minds dreaming better tomorrows. The depth of engaged meditation, the focus that goes into writing and drawing even the crudest of the comics, emerges through the least-assured line. The pages are the result of human hours, and the glory and confusion of what it means to be here now—on a coffee and pills jag at four in the morning with a story to hand in by lunchtime—shines from between the lines of the lowliest eight-pager.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“In Superman, some of the loftiest aspirations of our species came hurtling down from imagination's bright heaven to collide with the lowest form of entertainment, and from their union something powerful and resonant was born, albeit in its underwear.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“You may recall – perhaps you’ve experienced this in the theatre – the bewilderingly oblique way Shakespeare tends to begin his plays, via marginal characters whom we struggle to place as they recount or anticipate some major narrative event in a conversation that begins in the middle, leaving us flailing (beginning Shakespeare’s plays at their beginning is not always the easiest place to start). Not so in Richard III. The opening stage direction in the first printed edition is ‘Enter Richard, Duke of Gloucester, solus’ – meaning alone – making it absolutely clear that not only does he open the play, he does so, uniquely, in soliloquy. He begins, that’s to say, by addressing the audience. From the outset, we are his creatures.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“Even though – perhaps because – we are in no doubt about his ruthless self-interest, Richard establishes an immediate alliance from the outset. This intimacy with the audience will be carefully managed through a stream of asides and sardonic remarks, where only we know his true meaning, keeping us from forming any real attachment to any other character. The very title of the play seems to have succumbed to his charms and to endorse his ambitions. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, doesn’t actually become King Richard III until Act 4, but his play has no doubt he will get there: from the opening he is the king-in-waiting.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“The Comedy of Errors has been consistently under-appreciated, I’d argue, in part because we don’t know how to appreciate plot. Contemporary culture, the study and performance of Shakespeare, and our own intrinsic narcissism tend to encourage the view that character is destiny. Errors challenges this humanistic view of the world by emphasizing, in ways that anticipate the experience of modernity, the alienation of a mechanical universe. Think Charlie Chaplin on the accelerating assembly line in Modern Times (1936), and you have something of the comic terror captured in The Comedy of Errors.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“I would like also to recommend Random Harvest to those who can stay interested in Ronald Colman's amnesia for two hours and who could with pleasure eat a bowl of Yardley's shaving soap for breakfast, and Life Begins at 8:30 to those who can still be tickled by Monty Wooley's beard and Nunnally Johnson's lines (both good things in moderation), at the end of what seems hours. I also urge that Ravaged Earth, which is made up of Japanese atrocities, be withdrawn until, if ever, careful enough minds, if any, shall have determined whether or not there is any morally responsible means of turning it loose on the public.”
― James Agee, Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies

“The English version of this term, putting the cart before the horse, suggests haste – and there is indeed a kind of premature quality to this play that is so shaped by youthful impatience and hurry, with its adolescent protagonists rushing towards their destiny, heedless of Friar Lawrence’s caution: ‘Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow’ (2.5.15).
Lots of elements of this play are about coming too soon, and the sexual pun is somehow unavoidable: Romeo and Juliet is shaped as the structural equivalent of premature ejaculation. If, as many theorists have conjectured, the pleasure we take in narrative is somehow paced like sexual pleasure – enjoying anticipation, foreplay and climax – then this play needs to learn to take its time.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“They hurled him inside... into the song of a thousand sweetly singing flowers... and though he tried -- desperately -- to shut out those siren notes, they seeped into his mind... into his soul -- and that fine intelligence succumbed to a killing beauty...”
― Dennis O'Neil, Superman (1939-2011) #236

“Surely even the most malignant ghost is a lonely thing, left out in the dark, desperate to be heard.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“The rhetoric of this sequence converges to the third couplet, where the parallel structures and the use of the same word – ‘me’ – as the rhyme enact the same collapse of difference that the play develops elsewhere. Linguistic and rhetorical doubling, through parallel syntax and through the heavy use of rhyme, show us the way that Shakespeare’s language is a microcosm of his wider dramatic art: what happens at the level of a sentence or speech often miniaturizes a wider theme or debate.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare

“But Don John merely represents a more general mistrust in the play – he is not its sole source. After all, his is a tiny part (no sniggering at the back): he has only 4 per cent of the play’s lines. He does, however, symbolize something larger than himself. And perhaps this is why he is given the identity of bastard. His own malevolent illegitimacy might be thought a kind of proof that women can – and some do – sleep with men not their husbands. Don John the bastard is himself the very certification to stabilize the play’s paranoia about women’s faithlessness. His status as a bastard thus confirms the play’s worst fears.”
― emma smith, This Is Shakespeare

“The eyes behind the deep blue cowl snap wide, horror swirling madly in their shadowed depths -- and even as the Batman launches himself toward this bloody tableau like the predator he is -- his thoughts brand another scene, another time across the inside of his eyes!”
― Steve Englehart

“Great cities are the fulcrums of history in the twentieth century. In their boardrooms and byways, decisions of life and death are made with the regularity of falling leaves of the calendar... Such a fulcrum is the Wayne Foundation building in the city of Gotham... where one Jeremy Wormwood -- financier, socialite, and freelance assassin -- has been summoned...”
― Elliot S. Maggin, Detective Comics (1937-2011) #450

“So now, I look at these stories, and almost like a photograph snapped at a party, I find all manner of signs and indications of who I was. Was? Yes, was. I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore. Writing an introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Weaveworld last year I remarked on much of the same thing: the man who'd written that book was no longer around. He'd died in me, was buried in me. We are our own graveyards; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we're neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“If you find yourself writing a lengthy denouement, rethink your structure. The story's finished, dammit. Your reader may enjoy a bit of additional information, or a final visit with your characters, but if you've done your work well, there's really very little left to interest them.”
― Dennis O'Neil, The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics

“To occupy the time I talked with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott’s novels on all his wanderings. He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.
We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of his own case – six months at the public charge for want of three pounds’ worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.
Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather than given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.
‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too pleasant you’d have all the scum of the country flocking into them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. You don’t want to go encouraging of them. They’re scum.’
I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:
‘You don’t want to have any pity on these tramps – scum, they are. You don’t want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They’re scum, just scum.’
It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow tramps. He has been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether of the middle classes.”
― George Orwell, Essays

“To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Silence is the perfectest herald of joy. I were
but little happy if I could say how much.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.”
― George Orwell, A Collection of Essays

“The epilogue is a distinctly Shakespearean genre: a concluding moment when the play is both brought together and dissolved, a paradox of completion and dispersal.”
― Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare