Action Fiction Quotes

Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what. ~ Barry Eisler

There will be no holding off, there will be no remorse and there will be no hesitation. They will die and they will die a horrible death. This is my pledge and vow, so bank on it and don't try to stop me. ~ Mark A. McCormick

Placing his suitcase on the seat next to him, he unbuttoned his suit jacket, loosened up his necktie and removed his fedora. He kept his custom eye wear on and made himself comfortable, looking more like a Wall Street accountant than the cold killer he'd become ... ~ Peprah Boasiako

Touch not the fighting-dog without a glove.
Give me a fighting-dog and I come alive.
Fighting-dogs always meant more to Tom Mitchell than people. ~ John Duncan

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald. ~ James Rollins

She didn't watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning. ~ Ray Bradbury

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,
but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility. ~ Katherine Paterson

The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice ~ C. G. Jung

The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action. ~ Herbert Schiller

Well, for one, you walk around like you're so much better than everyone else. We're all a bunch of soulless animals or somethin' in your eyes, I guess. You're the high and mighty one and I ain't fit to drink your piss. ~ Michael Monroe

NEVER be surprised by your own success! ~ Steve Maraboli

A persons outer action reflects their inner mind. ~ Tsem Tulku

Goodness is funny because it draws you to it while curiously possessing you with the untrammelled desire to turn it into something bad. ~ Sophie Villalobos

A dream written down with a date becomes a goal. A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan. A plan backed by action makes your dreams come true. ~ Greg Reid

There's no match for the sweetness independence brings. ~ Ami McKay

The tendency to predict that your actions will have negative outcomes is incredibly central to anxiety problems. If you can catch yourself when you're making a negative prediction and entertain alternatives, you'll likely ease a great deal of your anxiety. While there is a lot of information in this book, mastering this one simple principle will take you a very long way toward solving your anxiety issues. Pay close attention to this concept.
Whenever you're feeling anxious, use this feeling as your cue to practice articulating your negative prediction and an alternative. Try prompting yourself to think of the best possible outcome, instead of just the worst. You don't need to completely eliminate your fear; you just need to consider the different possibilities side by side, in an evenhanded way.
Experiment: For an action you'd like to take, try articulating both your feared negative outcome and an alternative possible outcome, just like the painting-the-walls example. If you practice this skill a lot, it will start to become a habit.

Feared outcome = __________________.
Alternative outcome = _______________. ~ Alice Boyes

Big oaks grow from small acorns, and activity is a precursor to accomplishment. You don't think yourself into success. ~ Mark Sanborn

WHAT THE HELL WAS I DOING?! Oh, right.$1500."
From "Clown Porn" in "Broken Headbone ~ Ginny McMath

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.
From the Introduction ~ Orson Scott Card

That's all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different. ~ Ray Bradbury

I believe having a vision in mind, a goal let's say, is a good thing. Unfortunately, so many of us are blinded by the greatness of our vision that paralysis and inaction sets in. What I try to do is focus on the individual steps, the moments if you will, and let them lead one to the next. The vision that eventually appears may not be exactly what you had in mind, but it will be the right one for you, because you did the work and you took the necessary action. ~ Charles F. Glassman

Thinking, understanding, reasoning, willing, call not these Soul They are its actions, but they are not its essence. ~ Akhenaton

Characters I've played, they used to impact my paintings, like 80 percent of the time, and especially when I was doing an action film. ~ Sylvester Stallone

Bob Torricelli, Democrat member of the Senate, was basically about to be thrown out of office on corruption charges, and he went to the floor of the Senate to deny everything. And we juxtaposed his denials with an attorney from someone in an action against Torricelli who was listing all of the gifts and all the bribes that Torricelli had been given and offered in exchange for policy considerations on the Senate floor. So he's on the Senate floor denying it. ~ Rush Limbaugh

Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience. ~ David Foster Wallace

When you see the world outside your home town, outside the walls of what you were brought up to see, then you discover that you almost never know if you're dong the right thing. One action, brave and true, leads to war and destruction. Another, craven and greedy, leads to peace and prosperity.
pg 197 ~ Sebastien De Castell

Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use ordinary situations. ~ Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

In comedy, beware the split focus. The audience should focus on the face of the actor. The audience must see the setup. If there is action elsewhere on the stage, the comic line can be lost. ~ James Carver

From the moment he took office in January of 1961, Kennedy had been eager to settle the Cuban problem without overt military action by the United States. ~ Robert Dallek

I love magic and playing with magic systems. But to me, good fantasy like all fiction comes down to good character and plotting. ~ David B. Coe

That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action. ~ Twyla Tharp

Talk is cheap. Learn to listen with your eyes. Actions do speak louder than words. Watch what a person does more than what he says. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

How quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his non-existence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Celibacy doesn't make you enlightened, otherwise every nun or priest in Buddhism or Christianity would be enlightened. People who don't date and can't get any action would be enlightened. ~ Frederick Lenz

Either you pursue or push, O Sisyphus, the stone destined to keep rolling.
[Lat., Aut petis aut urgues ruiturum, Sisyphe, saxum.] ~ Ovid

WHITE AMERICANS HAVE A VERY UNUSUAL SENSE OF HISTORY. They make it up as they go along, constantly revising to suit their tastes in a manner that would make Stalin blush. Very few of them saw any irony in the fact that during a recent nasty Balkans conflict, when Uncle Sam intervened to stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosnians, the military action was performed using Apache helicopter gunships. Helicopters named after a people that had been ethnically cleansed
in the United States less than one hundred years previously. Sixteen lane highways across the sacred burial grounds. Yee-hah. ~ Craig Ferguson

Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you're expecting a reward. Most people do the exact opposite: They only take action when they expect a reward, and they don't enjoy the action. And that's the reason why they don't do their best. ~ Miguel Angel Ruiz

The idea of doing a period movie, some people say, "Isn't it odd that you're doing a period movie? That's a change of pace for you." And, I'm like, "Not really." When you're doing a science fiction movie, it's almost exactly the same. ~ Paul W. S. Anderson

Elsa's mother no longer spoke to her of men and love, but of duty and fate and accepting one's burden. As far as Elsa could tell, if love really was the inherited female domain, then women were saddled with the biggest burden of all. It was pressing down upon them, the way the sea pressed down upon the creatures of the deep. ~ Kathy-Diane Leveille

I think strong rhetoric and strong action are two separate things. Anyone can use tough words. Anyone can go over the top and say things that sound strong. But sounding strong is not enough. You have to know exactly how you're going to do it. And if you look at some of the policies he's talked about, they would not make America stronger. ~ Marco Rubio

How much longer will you sit back and wait for your dream to spontaneously come true? Too many days, weeks, months, and years have passed! Do not be unresponsive to your own dreams. Now, set a course of action that will lead to bringing your dream into reality. ~ Steve Maraboli

Jack coughed slightly and offered his hand. "Hi, uh. I'm Jack."
Kim took it. "Jack what?"
"Huh?"
"Your last name, silly."
"Jackson."
She blinked at him. "Your name is Jack Jackson?"
He blushed. "No, uh, my first name's Rhett, but I hate it, so…"
He gestured to the chair and she sat. Her dress rode up several inches, exposing pleasing long lines of creamy skin. "Well, Jack, what's your field of study?"
"Biological Engineering, Genetics, and Microbiology. Post-doc. I'm working on a research project at the institute."
"Really? Oh, uh, my apple martini's getting a little low."
"I've got that, one second." He scurried to the bar and bought her a fresh one. She sipped and managed to make it look not only seductive but graceful as well.
"What do you want to do after you're done with the project?" Kim continued.
"Depends on what I find."
She sent him a simmering smile. "What are you looking for?"
Immediately, Jack's eyes lit up and his posture straightened. "I started the project with the intention of learning how to increase the reproduction of certain endangered species. I had interest in the idea of cloning, but it proved too difficult based on the research I compiled, so I went into animal genetics and cellular biology. It turns out the animals with the best potential to combine genes were reptiles because their ability to lay eggs was a smoother transition into combining the cells to create a new species, o ~ Kyoko M.

Regardless of my age, such a trivial thing isn't important, it was upon that decision which my life hung. ~ Ross Turner

I hope you discover that love is both a feeling and an action, like light is both a particle and a wave. ~ Iain S. Thomas

I was always fascinated by science-fiction shows, shows like 'Star Trek' and 'Lost in Space.' ~ Michael P. Anderson

We eventually learn that emotional closure is our own action. We can be responsible for it. In any moment, we can choose to open or to close. ~ David Deida

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy. ~ Jennifer Haigh

The Love factor makes anything hallowed, and an action is no exception. Doing things with love makes the work sacred. ~ Banani Ray

The young lady then placed her hands on Kode's shoulder, letting her cheek rest on top of the pile. The smile on her face was more than a victory smile. It was a happy sign of contentment. Eena wondered.

"When do you suppose those two will get married?" She whispered the question to Kira who still had a firm grip on her arm.

"Kode get married?" The incredulity on Kira's face matched her brother's strong outburst.

"Who the hell says I'm gettin' hitched?"

Niki pushed herself away from her boyfriend's shoulder; her upper lip curled into a resentful scowl at the negative way he had voiced his query.

Eena had never meant for them to overhear. She stumbled over a justification for the question. "It's just that you've been together for a while, you know, like a couple. Close. I mean, you're always together so…I just figured…" she let the notion trail off.

Kode looked queasy. "We're always together 'cause she bloody follows me around everywhere I go like I'm some freakin' tour guide!"

"Fine!" Niki exclaimed, holding her palms like a defensive wall in front of her. "I'll leave if that's what you want. I don't need you! There's plenty of other guys who'd love to get their lips on me!" With that outburst, the pretty Mishmorat twirled her body around, setting off on foot with both fists seared into her hips. Kode let her take about four steps before he darted over and dragged her back. She didn't put up much o ~ Richelle E. Goodrich