Digressions Quotes

Never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care what those themes are- they're yours to uncover and stand behind-so long as, at the very least, there is courage. ~ Marisha Pessl

Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health ... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in making my prose even more clear and direct, and in avoiding complicated digressions. ~ Serge Schmemann

The real secret, though, is that nobody belongs, whether they are natives or not. After expulsion from paradise all humans are in exile. You can be a Colonel Sanders chicken, born, raised and fried in one quarter of a square foot and you'll still be an outsider. The thing we call reality is a holding tank for people who must worry about belonging -- it's a worrier prison. Don't worry people! You'll soon be fried and eaten. A few of us are writers, hence double-alienated, but happier (because we are busy)
If it's true that many of us go through life feeling like we don't belong, could digression (geographical and otherwise) be our way of trying to forget, or to escape, that feeling?

Bad news: there are no digressions. Everything is connected in the whole darn ball of yarn: start pulling at any end and you'll get to the same place. On the other hand, most normal people dislike digression because they have to lose themselves to follow you. The surest way to drive your dear ones crazy is to digress. In private, it's an offense. In public it's "art," "performance. ~ Andrei Codrescu

I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren't going to stop me. ~ Richard Dawkins

A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the althernative scenerios explored in a detective novel. ~ Rebecca Solnit

By my rambling digressions I perceive myself to be growing old. ~ Benjamin Franklin

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions. ~ John Irving

Sometimes people say, 'You're the best at digressions.' And that's actually a real compliment to me. ~ Mike Birbiglia

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. ~ George Eliot

For the carpenter's and the geometer's inquiries about the right angle are different also; the carpenter restricts himself to what helps his work, but the geometer inquires into what, or what sort of things, the right angle is, since he studies the truth. We must do the same, then in other areas too, [seeking the proper degree of exactness], so that digressions do not overwhelm our main task. ~ Aristotle.

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. ~ Marisha Pessl

Digressions are part of harmony, deviations too. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Many contemporaries of Proust's insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, although when Du côté de chez Swann appeared in print, they were startled by what they saw as the severity of the page. Where were the pauses, the inflections? There were not enough empty spaces, not enough punctuation marks. To them, the sentences seemed longer when read on the page than they did when they were spoken, in his extraordinary hoarse voice: his voice punctuated them. One friend, though surely exaggerating, reported that Proust would arrive late in the evening, wake him up, begin talking, and deliver one long sentence that did not come to an end until the middle of the night. The sentence would be full of asides, parentheses, illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations, digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions, and marginal notes. ~ Christopher Prendergast

Most writers cannot afford focus groups or A/B testing, but they can ask a roommate or colleague or family member to read what they wrote and comment on it. Your reviewers needn't even be a representative sample of your intended audience. Often it's enough that they are not you. This does not mean you should implement every last suggestion they offer. Each commentator has a curse of knowledge of his own, together with hobbyhorses, blind spots, and axes to grind, and the writer cannot pander to all of them. Many academic articles contain bewildering non sequiturs and digressions that the authors stuck in at the insistence of an anonymous reviewer who had the power to reject it from the journal if they didn't comply. Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself. ~ Steven Pinker

Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading. ~ Laurence Sterne

In some ways, a novel isn't as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel, you can more deeply illuminate a character's interior and get away with digressions. ~ Howard Gordon

I'm prone to tangential digressions, but I've never regretted being remarkably inconsistent:it's led me to fascinating people and interesting stories. ~ Natalie MacLean

The clock is Shandy's first symbol: under its influence, he is conceived and his misfortunes begin, which are the same thing according to this sign of time. Death is hidden in clocks, as Belli said, along with the unhappiness of individual life, of this fragment, of this thing that is divided, disintegrated, deprived of wholeness - death, which is time, the time of individuation, of separation, the abstract time that rolls toward its end. Tristram Shandy doesn't want to be born because he doesn't want to die. Any means, any weapon, can be used to save oneself from death and time. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fatal, inescapable points, then digressions lengthen that line - and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, and so rapid as to obscure their own tracks, then perhaps death won't find us again, perhaps time will lose its way, perhaps we'll be able to remain concealed in our ever-changing hiding places. These ~ Italo Calvino

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics. ~ William Vickrey

[Beowolf] is considered an epic because of its long speeches, its digressions, its repetition, and its being required. ~ Richard Armour

...when there's no plot line there are no digressions. ~ Ronald Sukenick