Dramatic Structure Quotes

The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage. ~ Pete Townshend

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know. ~ Don DeLillo

A film is a living thing. The screenplay is a guideline. You really need to have a good, sound script to know that you have a dramatic structure that's going to work thematically, and to know how one scene will got through another, and to get a sense of character. ~ Jose Padilha

The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories. ~ Tony Kushner

When I'm editing, I try to bring out some dramatic structure. I think it is about theater in some way; it is a little play. ~ Sheila Heti

Your machinery is beautiful. Your society people have apologized to me for the envious ridicule with which your newspapers have referred to me. Your newspapers are comic but never amusing. Your Water Tower is a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it. I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art and make a structure not like a water tower but like a tower of a medieval castle. It should be torn down. It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary. ~ Oscar Wilde

Lynching is an important aspect of racial history and racial inequality in America, because it was visible, it was so public, it was so dramatic, and it was so violent. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Theology is the mistress-science, without which the whole educational structure will necessarily lack its final synthesis. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The attitude of uncompromising heroism is attractive, and appeals especially to the dramatic instinct. But the purpose of the serious revolutionary is not personal heroism, nor martyrdom, but the creation of a happier world. Those who have the happiness of the world at heart will shrink from attitudes and the facile hysteria of "no parley with the enemy." They will not embark upon enterprises, however arduous and austere, which are likely to involve the martyrdom of their country and the discrediting of their ideals. It is by slower and less showy methods that the new world must be built [ ... ] To find fault with those who urge these considerations, or to accuse them of faint-heartedness, is mere sentimental self-indulgence, sacrificing the good we can do to the satisfaction of our own emotions. ~ Bertrand Russell

On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble - for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone - was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters: 'The dead travel fast. ~ Bram Stoker

My general sensibility is most certainly comedic. But when I signed with my manager, he said, 'I think you could do dramatic stuff as well.' So, rather than making the choice to do it, I sort of agreed and deferred. By no means does it feel close to home, but I was willing to explore it. ~ Benjamin Koldyke

My team and I used the actual footage to create a three-act story of the life of Ayrton Senna. There are no talking heads and no voiceover. Senna narrates his own epic, dramatic, thrilling journey. ~ Asif Kapadia

General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures. ~ Paul Davies

It is often asserted that, in view of the situation in quantum theory, object and subject can no longer be sharply separated. 1 To use Heitler's words, the 'separation of the world into an "objective outside reality", and "us", the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained. Object and subject become inseparable from each other'. 2 This, according to Bohr, is due to 'the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear'. 3 Heitler elaborates the point in some detail. 'One may ask', he writes, 'if it is sufficient to carry out a measurement by a self-registering apparatus or whether the presence of an observer is required.' And he arrives at the conclusion that the self-registering apparatus is insufficient, and that 'the observer appears, as a necessary part of the whole structure, and in his full capacity as a conscious being'. ~ Karl Popper

On a micro level, if we're not terribly lucky, this sort of thing can happen to us quite frequently - the political becoming the personal in dramatic and irreparable ways. I remember the first time I went out into the desert, passing by all these mine fields and getting the history on them from my guide and realizing all these murderous mechanisms were real, were just sitting out there waiting for a victim, and some of them had been for sixty, seventy, eighty years. ~ Ron Currie Jr.

I find myself more affected by music the more I do it. Particularly when you're touring, and you're in the bus, and you're listening to loads of music. Life becomes far more dramatic, I guess - you're never in the same place; you're constantly meeting new people. You almost become more sensitized to music. ~ Tom Odell

Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull. ~ C. Northcote Parkinson

In many spiritual cultures, it is believed that sacred fire burns low-frequency energies from the spirit and the lower levels of our consciousness. It consumes old, limiting perceptions of the belief that structure our thought patterns and thereby control our emotional responses to life's experiences, allowing us to move to new, and higher concepts of reality. ~ Lali A. Love

Now he was…dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time - and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, "assembled himself" from these scrambled fragments. He'd been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow - on their own terms - the pieces remained connected.

Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what's left? A cloud of random numbers.

But if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet, why shouldn't the pattern we think of as 'the universe' assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers, then what makes you think that you're not doing the very same thing? ~ Greg Egan

There is no master cabal organizing the three-hundred plus Food Not Bombs or mad genius organizing the dozens of Indymedia's across the globe. We can all be the Johnny and Jane Appleseeds of anarchist counter-structure. We do this by harvesting good ideas and strategies from across the globe and replacing them on the local level. And while our passions and ideas should be brash, we should also be inspired by our day-to-day victories. People need to feel encouraged to start small, realizing the infrastructure begets infrastructure. ~ Curious George Brigade

Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic. ~ John Irving

Precisely constructed models for linguistic structure can play an important role, both negative and positive, in the process of discovery itself. By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deep understanding of the linguistic data. More positively, a formalized theory may automatically provide solutions for many problems other than those for which it was explicitly designed. ~ Noam Chomsky

If I wanted so much to go
if everything I wanted in the whole world was on the other side of that door, why didn't I just go? ... What kept me frozen there in a despair composed equally of impotent rage and a strange reluctance to shatter some exquisite but invisible structure, neither the shape nor purpose of which was apparent to me? In a words, what the hell was going on? ~ Elaine Dundy

Marriage is a prisoner's dilemma in which you get to choose the person with whom you're in cahoots. This might seem like a small change, but it potentially has a big effect on the structure of the game you're playing. If you knew that, for some reason, your partner in crime would be miserable if you weren't around - the kind of misery even a million dollars couldn't cure - then you'd worry much less about them defecting and leaving you rot in jail. ~ Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

Nowadays, all students have access to and indeed most own computers and are comfortable with the software used to compose music. There are probably too many musical options for them now and the trick is to limit the number of musical ideas so as to develop structure and continuity in their work. ~ Jon Appleton

No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunning calculations will prevent this encounter. In fact, the more calculating, the more cautious you are, the greater is the likelihood of this rendezvous, the harder its impact. Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: "Hi, I'm Evil!" That, of course, indicates its secondary nature, but the comfort one may derive from this observation gets dulled by its frequency. ~ Joseph Brodsky

In Einstein's general relativity the structure of space can change but not its topology. Topology is the property of something that doesn't change when you bend it or stretch it as long as you don't break anything. ~ Edward Witten

Start watching out for any thoughts or feelings that are immature, angry, inaccurate, selfish, weak, scared, dramatic, or in any way based in fear. In those moments, start to practice consciously choosing love for yourself and others instead. ~ Kimberly Giles

An ex-girlfriend once got upset when I told her that music is the most important thing in my life. It's more important than anyone else could ever be. I don't want to be overly dramatic and say it's the only thing that gets me up and keeps me going. But people in your life come and go. As you go through your life, you make friendships, you break friendships, you have relationships. Music is the one thing I've always been able to rely on. ~ Ben Gibbard

No more self-defeating device could be discovered than the one society has developed in dealing with the criminal. It proclaims his career in such loud and dramatic forms that both he and the community accept the judgment as a fixed description. He becomes conscious of himself as a criminal, and the community expects him to live up to his reputation, and will not credit him if he does not live up to it. ~ Frank Tannenbaum

I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas. ~ Bill Ayers

Shortly after Christopher Columbus and his sailors returned from their voyage to the New World, a horrifying new disease began to make its way around the Old. The "pox," as it was often called, erupted with dramatic severity. ~ Peter Lewis Allen

The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system - and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny. ~ Ayn Rand

People liked religion but they didn't want to have to exercise any faith. Religion was comforting with all its structure and its rules. It made people feel safe. But faith wasn't safe. Faith was hard and uncomfortable and forced people to step out on a limb. ~ Amy Harmon

Top management as a function and as a structure was first developed by Georg Siemens (1839-1901) in Germany between 1870 and 1880, when he designed and built the Deutsche Bank and made it, within a very few years, into continental Europe's leading and most dynamic financial institution. ~ Peter Drucker

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. ~ David Mamet

Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure in short, is to learn how things are related. ~ Jerome Bruner

The workers of America have power enough to topple the structure of capitalism at home and to lift the whole world with them when they rise. ~ James P. Cannon

When I began a diet a week before my stroke, I never dreamed of such a dramatic result. ~ Jean-Dominique Bauby

Creativity permeates the cosmos. It is the driving force that sustains the particles, the stars and galaxiesit surges through the body with each beat of the heart. We all have access to creativity. At times, we summon it to use in our work and daily livesit can arrive in a dreamor it may result from a long struggleit can appear as a sudden, dramatic insightOne thing is certain - Creativity is ever present. It is a force to be enjoyed or endured but above all celebrated. Creativity is free, alive and spontaneous. ~ F. David Peat

I just saw the emotion in everything, so I got to feel everything that was going on and that I was viewing, but I couldn't think in terms of structure, which is the whole point of deep focus. ~ Gil Kane

It was one of those moments that would have had dramatic music if my life were a movie, but instead I got a radio jingle for some kind of submarine sandwich place blaring over the store's ambient stereo. The movie ofmy life must be really low-budget. ~ Jim Butcher

Buttressing this argument (that you can prevent children from learning to read or ride bicycles but you can't stop them from learning to talk), Chomsky had pointed to two other universals in human language: that its emergence in children follows a very precise timetable of development, no matter where they live or which particular language is the first they learn; and that language itself has an innate structure. Chomsky has recently reminded audiences that the origins of the structure of language - how semantics and syntax interact - remain as "arcane" as do its behavioral and neurologic roots. Chomsky himself finds nothing in classical Darwinism to account for human language.* And for that reason, says Plotkin, linguistics is left with a major theoretical dilemma. If human language is a heritable trait but one that represents a complete discontinuity from animal communicative behavior, where did it come from? ~ Frank R. Wilson

Even systems that do not use menus need to provide some structure: appropriate constraints and forcing functions, natural good mapping, and all the tools of feedforward and feedback. The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary. ~ Donald A. Norman

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. ~ George W. Bush

I asked the boy who wept what it felt like, crystal meth, the prettiest name for a drug besides heroin. Crystal methamphetamine. His head fell back. He closed his eyes, then opened them. 'Come on, you know . . . you're just high as fuck.' Then in a dramatic whisper: 'Everything goes silent like a midnight of the mind. ~ Hannah Lillith Assadi