Trope Quotes

“Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“Standard protocol?"
"Yup."
"How many times have you done this?"
"Zero. But I'm familiar with the trope."
"The...what?" He blinked at her confused.”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis

“Our heroes have arrived, then," the stranger said, his voice a soft, bubbly murmur.

"Excuse me?" Poison queries.

The odd creature put down his rod in a little wooden cradle that rested next to him and got up from the edge of the jetty. He looked them over with his vast, yellowish eyes.

"Hmm," he said gloomily. "You don't seem a bad bunch." He jostled past them and began to shuffle back towards his house. "At least you're not the typical muscle-bound warrior, beautiful sorceress, and amusing thief sidekick. By the waters, did that become stale fast.”
― Chris Wooding, Poison

“[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.”
― Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context

“Dragons, for instance, have the right of safe conduct anywhere in Faërie. A reader may not like to read stories about dragons, she may be morally offended or aesthetically uninterested or simply sick of the subject; but at any rate she will not complain that the author has cheated by bringing in a dragon, because dragons belong in fantasy.”
― Tom Simon

“Do you mean to tell me, Superintendent, that this is one of those damned cases you get in detective stories where a man is killed in a locked room by some apparently supernatural agency.”
― Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot's Christmas

“There’s a subtlety to transphobia that we don’t see, because we’re not meant to see it. That subtly lies with making transphobic stereotypes so pervasive that they go unquestioned, unchallenged, undiscussed. So when trans and gender-nonconforming people call out these stereotypes, we should listen. Just because something is a common trope doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful, complicated and worthy of critique.”
― Zeba Blay