Arc Quotes

In a film you only get two hours to do this big arc and so you have to pick and choose your moments carefully, but with television you get to take your time and just take it episode by episode and discover new things. ~ Chris Zylka

I saw them with my bodily eyes as clearly as I see you. And when they departed, I used to weep and wish they would take me with them. ~ Joan Of Arc

Drama is a complete meal, vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates. It's a slow burn thing. It's got an arc. Comedy is more like coke. ~ Eddie Izzard

An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

I first heard the term "meta-novel" at a writer's conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The idea is that even though each book in a series stands alone, when read collectively they form one big ongoing novel about the main character. Each book represents its own arc: in book one of the series we meet the character and establish a meta-goal that will carry him through further books, in book two that meta-goal is tested, in book three - you get the picture. ~ Carolyn Wheat

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity which, by many experiments, he touches on every side until he learns its arc. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

The joy of 'Crash' was that it was all about the work. It was my first real part. Before that, it was a line here and there, maybe a scene. 'Crash' was five scenes, a beautiful arc, a little vignette of my own. It really meant something. ~ Michael Pena

Great rolls of toilet paper arc like ejaculate through the black sycamores. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

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

Anathema didn't only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rainforests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn't compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. ~ Terry Pratchett

Joan of Arc speaks of her "contemptible estate" as a shepherd's daughter, and afterward, denying her father, calls him "Decrepit miser! base, ignoble wretch!" (Henry VI., Part 1, Act 1, Sc. 2, and Act 5, Sc. 4.) It is hard to believe that Shakespeare would have so frequently allowed his characters to express their contempt for members of the lower orders of society if he had not had some sympathy with their opinions. ~ William Shakespeare

Writers know - especially new writers - [that] a lot of it [creative process] is the prewriting stage, the talking, brainstorming, the narrative arc and the character sketches. ~ Jenna Bush

What we see in these passages is God meeting people, tribes, and cultures right where they are and drawing and inviting and calling them forward, into greater and greater shalom and respect and rights and peace and dignity and equality. It's as if human history were progressing along a trajectory, an arc, a continuum; and sacred history is the capturing and recording of those moments when people became aware that they were being called and drawn and pulled forward by the divine force and power and energy that gives life to everything. ~ Rob Bell

I am committed now to one thing: lyric sequences. I want the intensity of lyric, but the scope and arc of narrative. so, I think I'll just write sequences for the foreseeable (the Beloved sequence doesn't have a 'plot' so I can just keep adding poems to it, it's like a giant bag I can just put beloved lyrics into - I think there are about 300 of them i've published by now). ~ Gregory Orr

Now that is a sword," Freddy said in awe as he went to look at an impressive saber hanging from the hat rack near the door.
"Stay away from it," she cautioned. "I'm sure it's sharper than yours."
As usual, Freddy ignored her. "Just think what I could do with this," he said as he lifted it off its hook.
"So far I haven't seen you do anything with a sword, my boy," Oliver remarked dryly. "Though I shudder to think what your cousin would attempt."
Maria glared at Oliver, which only made him laugh. Meanwhile, Freddy unsheathed the saber with a flourish.
"Curse it, Freddy, put it back," Maria ordered.
"What a fine piece of steel." Freddy swished it through the air. "Even the one Uncle Adam gave me isn't near so impressive."
Maria appealed to Oliver. "Do something, for pity's sake. Make him stop."
"And get myself skewered for the effort? No, thank you. Let the pup have his fun."
Freddy cast him a belligerent glance. "You wouldn't call me a pup if I came at you with this."
"No, I'd call you insane," Oliver drawled. "But you're welcome to try and see what happens."
Don't encourage him," Maria told Oliver.
The door opened suddenly, and Freddy whirled with the sword in hand, knocking a lamp off the desk. As the glass chimney shattered, spilling oil in a wide arc, the wick lit the lot, and fire sprang to life.
Maria jumped back with a cry of alarm while Oliver leaped out of his chair to stamp it out, first with his boots a ~ Sabrina Jeffries

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

I just did an arc with Warren Ellis - and no one else on the planet could get away with this, because I think this is like harassment? - But Warren felt like there was a depiction of Spider-Woman where it looked like her waist perhaps didn't contain any internal organs. And he suggested very quietly ... 'You should fix that, or else I will come to your house and nail your feet to the floor and set your house on fire.' ... And it totally got fixed! ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick

If we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable. ~ Tim Wu

But there was nothing. No village or town as far as her eyes could strain. Nowhere for her saviours to come from and take her to; just fields and trees and the weeping arc of the river Greave all the way to the horizon. Just like in the books, Greaveburn was all there was; building and building until streets were foundations, roofs were floors, constantly climbing away from itself. now that Abrasia saw it, her dream of escape crumbled completely like an ancient map in her fingers. The horizon was the world's edge and there was nothing beyond it but mist and falling.

Greaveburn stood alone on this little circle of earth, the river running around and into itself like a snake eating its tail. And Abrasia was doomed to watch the sun and stars trade places for all eternity. ~ Craig Hallam

If anyone uses the words 'marvelous imagery' or 'narrative arc,' slap them for me. ~ Liane Moriarty

Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. 'Virgin' meant not married, not belong to a man - a woman who was 'one-in-herself'. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virle. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chasity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past…, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus - they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant 'maiden' or 'young woman', with no connotations to sexual chasity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the 'Virgin Mary' as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched. When Joan of Arc, with her witch coven associations, was called La Pucelle - 'the Maiden,' 'the Virgin' - the word retained some of its original pagan sense of a strong and independent woman. The Moon Goddess was worshipped in orgiastic rites, being the divinity of matriarchal women free to take as many lovers as they choose. Women could 'surrender' themselves to the Goddess by making love to a stranger in her temple. ~ Monica Sjöö

I love the fact that there's an evolution in your understanding and the difference between the first time you play the role and last time you play the role - there's an incredible arc and that's wonderful. ~ Audrey Tautou

The truth is that all civic and social change is friction. Politics is friction. The only way you can bend the arc of history is to create that kind of friction, which is something that makes most people incredibly uncomfortable but which, for whatever reason, because of my upbringing or because of my genetics, is something that doesn't bug me. ~ Nick Hanauer

Faith is the belief that certain outcomes will happen, and hope is the belief that certain outcomes can happen. So when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," he is speaking from a place of faith. He is confident that justice is inevitable, even if it may come in another lifetime. Faith is often rooted in the belief of a higher power, in God. Hope on the other hand would mean reframing the statement to say, "The arc of the moral universe is long, and it will bend toward justice, if we bend it. Faith is rooted in certainty, hope is rooted in possibility, and they both require their own different kinds of work. ~ DeRay Mckesson

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

I love the needle poke, the red pop/
and when an arc of red drops,/
quivering and shaped like wings/
beg me to lick them off,/
quickly savoring your shoulder/
newly marked with a nearly invisible/
but indelible butterfly ~ Rachel Dacus

You can't plan your character arc - you have a vague idea, maybe, but I'm constantly surprised. Sometimes actors in films will play the ending of the movie, or even the middle, and you know where it's going - as an audience member you can read the actor. ~ Evan Peters

A TWIST OF LIGHT-prologue
Reissue date; 6-16-14

The new mother mover the sacking away from the tiny red face, marveling at the perfect mouth and the arc of dark eyebrows of the child she cradled. "Did you ever see anything so pretty?" She spoke to no one in particular, but addressed her question to the group of women huddled inside the hut. Fashioned from cardboard and corrugated iron, the hut wasn't much bigger than the flatbed of the truck that had brought her here.

"Nothing's quite as pretty as a healthy baby." the flat vowels marked the midwife's origins in Oklahoma as surely as her faded sunbonnet and her residence in the labor camp. Set up less than two months ago, it already bulged with over five hundred people who'd been blown out of their homes along with the rich topsoil.(less) ~ Joyce Mandeville

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments - which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. ~ Atul Gawande

And so began my final stage of my boyhood in Mohawk. Later, as an adult, I would return from time to time. As a visitor, though, never again as a true resident. But then I wouldn't be a true resident of any other place either, joining instead the great multitude of wandering Americans, so many of whom have a Mohawk in their past, the memory of which propels us we know not precisely where, so long as it's away. Return we do, but only to gain momentum for our next outward arc, each further than the last, until there is no elasticity left, nothing to draw us home. ~ Richard Russo

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void. ~ Siri Hustvedt

I ... was not too happy to suddenly take on this public role thrust upon me. They just assumed I was the Joan of Arc of the women's movement. And I wasn't at all. It put a lot of unnecessary pressure on me. ~ Bea Arthur

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

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

Joan of Arc should be played as a "pain in the ass" and how do I know she was a "pain in the ass"? ... because they burn her at the end. ~ Harold Clurman

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast. ~ Joan Of Arc

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

My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning. A man I don't remember mixed genes with a woman I can't recall, and I was called to the stage. I stumbled through the curtain, squinting into the blinding light of the birth canal, and after a brief and banal performance, I died.
This is the arc of the average life - unexamined, unremarked, unremarkable - and it should have ended there. In simpler times, life was a one-act play, and when it was over we took our bows and caught our roses and enjoyed any applause we earned, then the spotlight faded and we shuffled backstage to nibble crackers in the greenroom of eternity. ~ Isaac Marion

A man who took history in his hands and bent the arc of the moral universe toward justice ~ Barack Obama

Your life will consist of a series of times when you must reinvent yourself. We desperately cling to the idea that things should stay the same, but life and growth are about change. Don't mistake the end of a chapter for the end of the story. Lean into the plot changes, and follow your character arc. If you are in a dark part of your tale, know that this night will not last forever, but you must be brave enough to see it through. This is not the end, oh no my friend. Take courage. Better things await you. ~ John Mark Green

The arc of our history is toward more equality being expanded to more and more people. ~ George Takei

In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller. ~ Garth Stein

We are having the 100th anniversary of 2015 year of the first in the nation primary in New Hampshire. And these voters take their responsibility very seriously. They like to kick the tires. They get the most up close and personal look in the entire arc of the campaign at the candidates. And debates are time consuming. ~ Hillary Clinton

Our political solar system, in short, has been characterized not by two equally competing suns, but by a sun and a moon. It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period arc fought out; while the minority party shines in reflected radiance of the beat thus generated .... Each time one majority sun sets and a new sun arises, the drama of American politics is transformed. Figuratively and literally a new political era begins. For each new majority party brings its own orbit of conflict, its own peculiar rhythm of ethnic antagonisms, its own economic equilibrium, its own sectional balance. ~ Samuel Lubell

Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs
of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the
surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness
reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to
embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would
then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What
we would have is an undivided, interstitial field of anthropology. If ethnographic
theory is the hyperbola, anthropology is the ellipse. For ethnography, when it
turns, is no longer ethnography but the educational correspondences of real life.
And theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by
its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and
imagination - the one annexed to fact, the other to theory - has been the source
of much havoc in the history of consciousness. It needs to be repaired. It is surely
the task of anthropology, before all else, to repair it. In calling a halt to the proliferation
of ethnography, I am not asking for more theory. My plea is for a return
to anthropology. ~ Tim Ingold

A perfect balance is possible to imagine, but impossible to reach, so one is always trembling along an arc from too excited to too bored and back again. Everything we love most - be it sweetheart or flower - looks majestic because it seems to be trembling out of balance. While ~ Diane Ackerman

But this wasn't a movie. In life, we didn't get to have credits roll to tell us when we'd come to the end of our epiphany arc. To know when to applaud. In life, there were no credits, no sound tracks. In life, things often didn't work out. ~ Kim Culbertson

By habitus, I mean dispositions that inhere and mold the deepest, subtlest, intricate structures of personhood, are constituted and emergent in the most elusive folds and lineaments of consciousness, and are articulated in lastingly resilient, enduring textual tapestries of experience, orientations, desires. The range of habitus is deep and broad: habitus forms the long arc of evolutionary developments and arrangements of the body in action and at rest, posture, gait, stance, and gesture; it is the silent teacher of the phonemic alphabet, determining subtle distinctions of timbre and tone, accents and intonations in voice articulations; it is the subcutaneous, ingrained dynamic inhering in daily competencies, executed flawlessly and yet seemingly unconsciously, such as balancing huge loads the size of a person's body weight on the head as Kikuyu women often do, or walking fearlessly on narrow glacial paths through plunging cliffs as the Sherpas do, or weaving in and out of traffic while engaged in deep conversations on a cell phone as Californians do. Habitus describes the imbrication of structure and culture in desire. It is what defines subtle distinctions of taste, those almost ineffable differences of sweetness, succulence, spiciness, and bitterness in food and drink; the raging fetishes and unbidden cravings that shadow sexuality; the fickle difference between scents that intoxicate or trigger upheavals of wretching. Habitus, then, is "human nature" understood as the dee ~ Omedi Ochieng

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. ~ Theodore Parker

Merit," Catcher said, sitting beside Mallory on the couch, an arm around her shoulders. "It's nice to see you clothed again."
"And now that she is," Gabriel said, standing, "we should get moving."
"Where are we going, exactly?" Catcher asked.
"To a land beyond space and time," Jeff said drawing an arc in the air. "Where the rules of mortals have no meaning."
Gabriel looked up at the ceiling as if he might find patience there. "We're going to the Brecks' backyard. Into the woods, right here in Illinois, where most of us are quite mortal."
"Illi-noise," Jeff said with cheeky enthusiasm. "Because the wolves will howl. ~ Chloe Neill

To have a man be able to touch her and bring her to the edge of release in a matter of seconds was a skill rarely found. "As rare as the Arc of the Covenant," Sophie mumbled to herself. ~ Donna Grant

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)

I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen. ~ Anne Lamott

The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable. ~ Christopher Hitchens

When I read a script or I see a character, I don't necessarily see the arc of her, that by the end she is this person, she's different from she was in the beginning. I guess it's more a subconscious understanding of that arc. ~ Shailene Woodley

I think every woman character, every female character, has her own arc. ~ Katheryn Winnick

The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long before the motor neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on its environment before it reacts to its environment. ~ Arthur Koestler

[Dewey's 'Reflex Arc' paper] is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing. ~ Louis Menand

The arc of Ken Griffey Jr.'s swing has gotten bigger than when he hit line drives. Juan Gonzalez is a terrific power hitter, too. ~ Tony La Russa

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

I don't believe in Gods and devils. I think it's man-made stories to try and help people understand where all this came from. They said 'Where did the world come from if there's no God', 'Where did life come from'. Just say 'I don't know'. Don't say some guy made a man and a woman. You have no business doing that, you know what I mean? And then He got mad and flooded the whole world; told Noah to build an arc. These are terrible stories. ~ Jacque Fresco

Enough Truthseeker! Do not utter another word about religion! We have debated it to death! If you so much as mention it again while I am present, I will resume my heart-carving. Not for the honour of Avanti, but to shut you up!"

~ Vexis Zaelwarsh to Brael Truthseeker
Deathsworn Arc 5: The Temple of the Mad God
Martyn Stanley ~ Martyn Stanley

On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh. ~ Aldo Leopold

Baltsaros's face was flushed, his lip curled into a slight sneer as he stared back at Jon. He felt a rush of adrenaline as he realized what the captain wanted from him.

"Hit him again," Jon said. "And don't hold back this time. ~ Bey Deckard

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes. ~ Craig Horner

Plot is certainly a part of constructing a story. It's a factor in outlining. But believe it or not, it's the least important factor. If you focus your efforts on the Three Legs - character arc, pacing, and theme - you can change the specifics of the plot a hundred different times, and you'll still have essentially the same story. ~ Libbie Hawker

Sense the blessings of the earth in the perfect arc of a ripe tangerine, the taste of warm, fresh bread, the circling flight of birds, the lavender color of the sky shining in a late afternoon rain puddle, the million times we pass other beings in our cars and shops and out among the trees without crashing, conflict, or harm. ~ Jack Kornfield

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. ~ G.K. Chesterton

He felt like a baked bean in a can, soaring through the air on a downward turn of a parabolic arc... ~ A. Ashley Straker

Far rather would I sit and sew beside my poor mother, for this thing is not of my condition. But I must go, and I must do this thing, because my Lord will have it so. Rather now than tomorrow, and tomorrow than the day after! ~ Joan Of Arc

We've never heard
About a marvel quite so great,
For all the heroes who have lived
In history can't measure up
In bravery against the Maid. ~ Christine De Pizan

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

Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom – now recovered and made safe by a woman, something that 5000 men could not have done – and the traitors [have been] exterminated. Before the event they would scarcely have believed this possible. ~ Christine De Pizan

Dragon watched the heavens turn. He saw his namesake, Draco, the dragon, arc across the sky. There were men who said the brightest star in Draco had once been the constant star by which men measured the way north. It was no longer, but the heavens changed in their own slow time, far beyond the brief ages of man, so perhaps it once had been so.
He drank more wine. A star streaked across the sky, burning brightly in its swift flight. Then it was gone, extinguished as though it had never been.
Life was too damn short. ~ Josie Litton

Urgent Story"

When the oracle said, 'If you keep pigeons
you will never lose home.' I kept pigeons.
They flicked their red eyes over me,
a deft trampling
of that humanly proud distance
by which remaining aloof
in it's own fullness. I administered
crumbs, broke sky with them like breaking

the lemon-light of the soul's amnesia
for what It wants but will neither take
nor truh let go. How it revived me,
to release them! And at that moment of flight
to disavow the imprint, to tear
their compass, out by the roots of
some green meadow they might fly over
on the way to an immaculate freedom, meadow

in which a woman has taken off
her blouse, then taken off the man's flannel shirt
in their sky-drenched arc
of one, then the other above
each other's eyelids is a branding of daylight,
the interior of its black ambush
in which two joys lame the earth a while
with heat and cloudwork under wing-beats.

Then she was quiet with him. And he
with her. The world hummed
with crickets, with bees nudging the lupins.
It is like that when the earth counts
its riches - noisy with desire
even when desire has strengthened our bodies
and moved us into the soak of harmony.

Her nipples in sunlight have crossed his palm
wind-sweet with savor and the rest
is so knelt before
that when they stand uprig ~ Tess Gallagher

The generalized theory of relativity has furnished still more remarkable results. This considers not only uniform but also accelerated motion. In particular, it is based on the impossibility of distinguishing an acceleration from the gravitation or other force which produces it. Three consequences of the theory may be mentioned of which two have been confirmed while the third is still on trial: (1) It gives a correct explanation of the residual motion of forty-three seconds of arc per century of the perihelion of Mercury. (2) It predicts the deviation which a ray of light from a star should experience on passing near a large gravitating body, the sun, namely, 1".7. On Newton's corpuscular theory this should be only half as great. As a result of the measurements of the photographs of the eclipse of 1921 the number found was much nearer to the prediction of Einstein, and was inversely proportional to the distance from the center of the sun, in further confirmation of the theory. (3) The theory predicts a displacement of the solar spectral lines, and it seems that this prediction is also verified. ~ Albert Abraham Michelson

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. ~ Theodore Parker

The last shot wasn't bad," he said, dropping the subject of the duel. "However, the target is the twig, not the leaves. The end of the twig," he added.
"You must have missed the twig yourself," she pointed out, lifting the gun and aiming it carefully, "since it's still there."
"True, but it's shorter than it was when I started."
Elizabeth momentarily forgot what she was doing as she stared at him in disbelief and amazement. "Do you mean you've been clipping the end off it?"
"A bit at a time," he said, concentrating on her next shot.
She hit another leaf on the twig and handed the gun back to him.
"You're not bad," he complimented.
She was an outstanding shot, and his smile said he knew it as he handed her a freshly loaded gun. Elizabeth shook her head. "I'd rather see you try it."
"You doubt my word?"
"Let's merely say I'm a little skeptical."
Taking the gun, Ian raised it in a swift arc, and without pausing to aim, he fired. Two inches of twig spun away and fell to the ground. Elizabeth was so impressed she laughed aloud. "Do you know," she exclaimed with an admiring smile, "I didn't entirely believe until this moment that you really meant to shoot the tassel off Robert's boot!"
He sent her an amused glance as he reloaded and handed her the gun. "At the time I was sorely tempted to aim for something more vulnerable. ~ Judith McNaught

Sometimes Duane imagined that he was the single crewman on a receding starship, already light-years from Earth, unable to turn around, doomed never to return, unable even to reach his destination in a human lifetime, but still connected by this expanding arc of electromagnetic radiation, rising now through the onionlike layers of old radio shows, traveling back in time as he traveled forward in space, listening to voices whose owners had long since died, moving back toward Marconi and then silence. ~ Dan Simmons

There's a scientific phenomenon to describe something that happens when an object is in motion. You think you know exactly what path it will take and where it will end up. Then suddenly, for no reason you can see . . . the arc changes. It goes somewhere you would never have expected. ~ Cassandra Clare

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

It's a long arc and a long storyline, and I think it leaves us in a great place to see how we interact again, whether that be for The Defenders, Jessica Jones Season 2, or whatever. We'll see. I don't know. ~ Mike Colter

Phury ... I was going to come find you before I left."
With a towel under his chin, Z looked at his reflection in the mirror, seeing his new yellow eyes. He thought of the arc of his life and knew most of it was for shit. But there had been two things that hadn't been. One female. And one male.
"I love you," he said in a rough voice, realizing it was the first time he'd ever said the words to his twin. "Just wanted to get that out."
Phury stepped in behind him.
Z coiled in horror at his twin's reflection. No hair. Scar down his face. Eyes flat and lifeless.
"Oh, sweet Virgin," Z breathed. "What the fuck did you do to yourself ... ?"
"I love you, too, my brother." Phury raised his arm. In his hand was a hypodermic syringe, one of the two that had been left for Bella. "And you need to live. ~ J.R. Ward

Well, in Twilight, I started out dying my hair blonde. And then, as the movie progressed, I wore wigs. The wigs went through a transformation. In Breaking Dawn, it's a little longer. That's my arc. ~ Peter Facinelli

I find historical figures in general very tricky because you feel at times that you're serving two masters. Not only the arc and wonderful writing that comes with the show, but also the history of a person's life. ~ Vincent Piazza

You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows ... not ideograms but a straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-nonsense surety. ... The fire burned it's steady, slow flame, and phantoms danced in its incandescent core. ~ Stephen King

By following its own legal traditions, the arc of the Western moral universe never bends towards Indigenous justice. At best, it ignores it. At worst, it annihilates it. ~ Nick Estes

When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement. ~ John Green

[Elisabeth Woodville] doesn't take up arms to get her own way. But she is just as resolute as either Joan [of Arc] or Magaret [D'Anjou] about getting what she wants. What does she use instead? She uses sexuality.
You may ask, what is wrong with that? Women have been using their sexuality to get what they want from time immemorial (...). And if there is no other way to exert power, then to use your will to procure your will is probably a good idea.

However, if what you are implicitly promising (...) is not actually what you want to do, and in order to deliver you must separate yourself from yourself, then it does have its shortcomings as a negotiating tool. You pay a price; you separate yourself from your body. I say this from a woman's point of view. (...) And, as some of my young feminist friends have pointed out, you cannot change a corrupt system by using its own tools ~ Tina Packer

'Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons' is a kind of novel in verse about the arc of an urban lesbian love affair - and I suppose there is a certain amount of voyeurism in the consumption of fiction! The 'Sancerre' poems here are more contemplative and about the relationship of the individual to local and wider histories. ~ Marilyn Hacker

High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl's patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. ~ William Gibson

To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions? ~ Criss Jami

As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there. ~ Michael Nesmith

When you guest-star, you're usually at the center of the dramatic arc, so that's fun. ~ Bellamy Young

The conversation went on for another half hour, before this man's girlfriend, who had not said much of anything until then, remarked, Being a woman, you can't just say you don't want a child. You have to have some big plan or idea of what you're going to do instead. And it better be something great. And you had better be able to tell it convincingly - before it even happens - what the arc of your life will be. ~ Sheila Heti

Evidently, rigging cables is therapy for the Swiss: or part of their theology. What was it that he used to say? A balanced arc between mountain rows / as servant to his master shows / the power of besieged belief / in something something something, something something something-something to do with ducks, or rainbows. ~ Mark Helprin

I feel 'The Night Circus' has a complete story arc in one book. I like it as a single volume. It feels complete to me, and I wouldn't want to stretch it out into something it's not. ~ Erin Morgenstern

You Englishman, who have no right in this Kingdom of France, the King of Heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Maid, that you quit your fortresses and return into your own country, or if not, I shall make such mayhem that the memory of it will be perpetual. - Joan of Arc ~ Susan Banfield