Arc Of A Scythe Quotes

I vow to become the change that might have been ~ Neal Shusterman

We never know what choices will lead to defining moments in our lives. A glance to the left instead of right could define who we meet and who passes us by. Our life path can be determined by a single phone call we make, or neglect to make. ~ Neal Shusterman

I'll never have so compelling a figure within my embrace as Joan of Arc; there will never be a book whose last chapter is so very hard to get right. ~ Kathryn Harrison

Having a character change during the course of the screenplay is not a requirement if it doesn't fit your character. But transformation, change, seems to be an essential aspect of our humanity, especially at this time in our culture. I think we're all a little like Melvin (Jack Nicholson) in As Good as it Gets. Melvin may be complex and fastidious as a person, but his dramatic need is expressed toward the end of the film when he says, 'When I'm with you I want to be a better person.' I think we all want that. Change, transformation, is a constant of life, and if you can impel some kind of emotional change within your character, it creates an arc of behavior and adds another dimension to who he/she is. ~ Syd Field

You look at most artists, the arc of their career, there's a definite decline at the end. And that decline could set in at any time. In your 50s, or your 60s and 70s if you're lucky. Time goes by fast, and you've got to be busy all the time. ~ Seth

Lines written for a thirtieth wedding anniversary


Somewhere up in the eaves it began:
high in the roof – in a sort of vault
between the slates and the gutter – a small leak.
Through it, rain which came from the east,
in from the lights and foghorns of the coast –
water with a ghost of ocean salt in it –
spilled down on the path below.
Over and over and over
years stone began to alter,
its grain searched out, worn in:
granite rounding down, giving way
taking into its own inertia that
information water brought, of ships,
wings, fog and phosphor in the harbour.
It happened under our lives: the rain,
the stone. We hardly noticed. Now
this is the day to think of it, to wonder:
all those years, all those years together –
the stars in a frozen arc overhead,
the quick noise of a thaw in the air,
the blue stare of the hills – through it all
this constancy: what wears, what endures. ~ Eavan Boland

These days every morning begins like a joke
you think you have heard before,
but there is no one telling it
whom you can stop.
One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar,
then about a man with a big nose on his honeymoon,
then about a kangaroo who walks into a bar.
Each one takes up an entire day.
The sun looks like a prank Nathanael West
is pulling on the world; on the drive to work
cars are swinging comically from lane to lane.
The houses and lawns belong in cartoons.
The hours collapse into one another's arms.
The stories arc over noon and descend
like slow ferris wheels into the haze of evening.
You wish you could stop listening and get serious.
Trouble is you cannot remember the punch line
which never arrives till very late at night,
just as you are reaching for the bedside lamp,
just before you begin laughing in the dark. ~ Billy Collins

I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I've always wanted to do that. Now I'm thinking, 'Maybe there's a story in Joan of Arc's mother!' If I don't hurry up, her grandmother! ~ Ellen Burstyn

Home. It felt strange to use that word about a place she hadn't lived in since she was a child, but the castle felt more familiar than she had expected. She quickly became reacquainted with the layout, her bedroom, and all the other rooms, even visiting her old friend Joan in the portrait gallery. The truth was, home was anywhere Elsa was. ~ Jen Calonita

I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own. ~ H.G.Wells

Don't believe vegetarians who tell you that meat has no flavor, that it comes from the spices or the marinade. The flavor is already there: earth and metal, salt and fat, blood.
My favorite meat is chicken. I can eat a whole bird standing up in the kitchen, straight from the oven, burning my bare hands on its flesh. Anyone can roast a chicken, it is a good animal to cook. Lamb, on the other hand, is much harder to get right. You have to lock in the flavor, rubbing it with sea salt like you are exfoliating your own drying skin, tenderly basting it in its own juices, hour after hour. You have to make small slits across the surface of the leg, through which you can insert sprigs of rosemary, or cloves of garlic, or both. These incisions should run against the grain, in the opposite direction to which the muscle fibers lie. You can tell the direction better when the meat is still uncooked, when it is marbled and raw. It is worth running your finger along those fibers, all the way from one end to the other. This doesn't help with anything. It won't change how you cook it. But it is good to come to terms with things as they are.
Preparing meat is always an act of physical labor. Whacking rib eye with a rolling pin. Snapping apart an arc of pork crackling. And there is something inescapably candid about it, too. If you've ever spatchcocked a goose- if you've pressed your weight down on its breastbone, felt it flatten and give, its bones rearranging under your hands- you wi ~ Lara Williams

Josiah became King of Judah at the age of eight. Joan of Arc led the French Army at nineteen. King Tut led all of Egypt at age nine. Age isn't everything you think it is. Your heart and your spirit speak more than a simple candle count on your birthday cake. ~Tony (Exposing ELE) ~ Rebecca Gober

When you're in sync with the director, on the type of movie you want to make, the arc of the characters, how the characters intertwine and interact, plotlines and story, and things like that, it really makes a difference. ~ Dwayne Johnson

As for me, I went inside, walked up to my bedroom, and fell on the floor. What…just happened? Staring at the ceiling, I tried to take it all in. My mind began to race, trying to figure out what it all meant. Do I need to learn how to whittle? Cook fried chicken? Ride a horse? Use a scythe? My face began to feel flushed. And children? Oh, Lord. That means we might have children! What will we name them? Travis and Dolly? Oh my gosh. I have children in my future. I could see it plainly in front of me. They'll be little redheaded children with green eyes just like mine, and they'll have lots of freckles, too. I'll have ten of them, maybe eleven. I'll have to squat in the garden and give birth while picking my okra. Every stereotype of domestic country life came rushing to the surface. A lot of them involved bearing children.
Then my whole body relaxed in a mushy, contended heap as I remembered all the times I'd walked back into that very room after being with Marlboro Man, my cowboy, my savior. I remembered all the times I'd fallen onto my bed in a fizzy state of euphoria, sighing and smelling my shirt to try to get one last whiff. All the times I'd picked up the phone early in the morning and heard his sexy voice on the other end. All the times I'd longed to see him again, two minutes after he'd dropped me off. This was right, this was oh, so right. If I couldn't go a day without seeing him, I certainly couldn't go a lifetime… ~ Ree Drummond

In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 'The Passion of Joan of Arc,' one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once. ~ Steve Erickson

Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about - the Saffron Shift.

If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor.

Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown - but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names.

As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world.

And the present moment is perfectly transparent.

It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . . ~ Vera Nazarian

Good writing takes advantage of a reader's expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc. ~ Steven Pinker

Adrienne Rich once wrote that Virginia Woolf's style - that detachment and banked rage, that light, calculated charm - revealed a woman who never forgot she was being overheard, and evaluated, by men. Reading the flood of public writing about #MeToo in recent years - the op-eds and testimonies - I'd occasionally experience a prickly feeling of recognition. Here again, I'd think, was writing that stemmed from outrage, and often shame, but remained impeccably well-mannered and sure of itself, almost legalistic in structure and presentation. Necessarily, perhaps - women must constantly perform credibility. "The whole long arc of justice now crashing down that we call #MeToo has been about whether women may be in possession of facts, and whether anyone will bother to hear out those facts or believe them or, having believed them, allow those facts to have consequences," Rebecca Solnit has written. These pieces often felt preoccupied with their imagined reception - straining to appease, convince, console - conscious of being overheard, in Rich's phrase, but this time by women as well as men.

Not these novels. They occupy the backwaters where the writer need not pander or persuade, and can instead seek to understand, or merely complicate, something for herself. They are stories about inconsistencies and incoherence, stories that thicken the mysteries of memory and volition. ~ Parul Sehgal

Through the music I hope to give it an arc that gives it a greater sense of a journey through the set rather than a bunch of songs. ~ Gotye

The governor had made up his mind to one thing: Joan was either a witch or a saint, and he meant to find out which it was. ~ Mark Twain

The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve - an arc of time-experience subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life. ~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Drizzt swung a long and heavy halberd, a polearm more than twice his height, in a slow arc. For all of Drizzt's attempts to keep the weapon under control, its momentum spun his tiny frame right to the ground. ~ R.A. Salvatore

The second is that some things become true simply by being spoken. When she said to the little girl "I'm here for you", the architecture of her mind, her definition of herself, shifted and reconfigured around that statement. She became committed, or maybe just acknowledged a commitment. It has nothing to do with guilt for earlier crimes (although she has a pretty fair understanding of what she deserves), or any hope of redemption. It's just the outermost point on an arc. She's risen as far as she can, and now she's falling again, no longer in control (if she ever was to start with) of her own movements. ~ M.R. Carey

Whenever a woman describes herself as a 'post-feminist' I picture women lashed to posts. Joan of Arc was an early post-feminist. ~ Kate Clinton

A lot of the television industry is so cookie-cutter. In general, there are so many shows that are easy and bland to watch. You can tune in at any time and know exactly where you are in the story arc because it's pretty much the same every week. ~ Adam Baldwin

Don't you know how much I hero-worshiped you when I was a kid? You
were Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc to
me when I was ten. And when i told you that, you said my cultural
references were the sign of a colonized mind. ~ Kamila Shamsie

At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention. ~ Julia Bacha

Tonight, the moon came out, it was nearly full.
Way down here on earth, I could feel it's pull.
The weight of gravity or just the lure of life,
Made me want to leave my only home tonight.
I'm just wondering how we know where we belong
Is it in the arc of the moon, leaving shadows on the lawn
In the path of fireflies and a single bird at dawn
Singing in between here and gone ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter

Used to be you could see the orange glow of the hi-intensity arc-sodiums from North Conway, but no more. Now there's just the White Mountains, looking like dark triangles of crepe paper cut out by a child, and the pointless ~ Stephen King

There is a storytelling element in there. The tango form is a little like the blues in that you have a kind of structure. It's not as rigid as twelve bar, but it's very much a storytelling medium -- and there's an element of call-and-response, and a particular arc in the musical form, that suggest a story. It's about being in the moment, with the music; and responding to your partner, and the particular feeling and momentum in her body in any one moment. It's a very concentrated thing; you can't think about anything else while you are doing it. If you try to hold a conversation, it just kind of falls apart. The music was what really drew me into tango. Everyone knows a few of the more popular tango classics, but once you get into it, there's such a rich field. It's astonishing, this kind of miraculous musical form that developed in a very small locality: two cities on either side of the River Plate, in Argentina and Urugauy. It started in the 1880s or '90s, and there are all kinds of mysteries, myths and stories, about how tango started and developed. It was first of all considered really low-life, almost reptilian. Something to be avoided and not talked about. And then it became this word wide phenomena. . .and I could go on talking about tango forever. . . . but its also to do with movement. I try to get that into my pictures: a sense of movement, something flowing through. A while ago, I realised how much I'd been drawing dancing figures in the corners of my sketchbooks fo ~ Alan Lee (artist)

He could feel the end of the battle approaching, and so could the blur of the Sith he faced in the Force, the shadow had become a pulsar of fear.

Easily, almost effortlessly, he turned the shadow's fear into a weapon: he angled the battle to bring them both out onto the window ledge.

Out in the wind. Out with the lightning. Out on a rain-slicked ledge above a half kilometer drop.

Out where the shadow's fear's fear made it hesitate.

Out where the shadow's fear turned some of it's Force-powered speed into a Force-powered grip on the slippery permacrete.

Out where Mace could flick his blade in one precise arc and slash the shadow's lightsaber in half.

One piece flipped back in through the cut open window. The other tumbled from opening fingers, bounced on the ledge, and fell through the rain towards the distant alleys below.

Now the shadow was only Palpatine: old and shrunken, thinning hair bleached white by time and care, face lined with exhaustion.

'For all your power, my lord,you are no Jedi. All you are, my lord,' Mace said evenly, staring past his blade, 'is under arrest. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories. ~ Mark Slouka

You look beautiful and tragic, just the way a heroine should on the eve of battle. Like Joan of Arc in her silver armor. ~ Melissa De La Cruz

It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to become a beggar on the open road. And when, in the general emancipation of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn't play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons with patient benevolence: "Defer, therefore, the operation you contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your head and the Lord be with you." Among ~ G.K. Chesterton