Stage Directions Quotes

One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction. ~ Stanley Cavell

I usually write very few stage directions. I think a lot of that is a waste of time. The art of screenwriting is in its terseness, saying a lot with a little. I have no patience when I read a script where the writer describes this guy and what he's wearing and his glasses and his hair. ~ Scott Frank

If the novelist loses touch with this linguistic ground of prose style, if he is unable to attain the heights of a relativized, Galilean linguistic consciousness, if he is deaf to organic double-voicedness and to the internal dialogization of living and evolving discourse, then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre. He may, of course, crete an artistic work that compositionally and thematically will be similar to a novel, will be "made" exactly as a novel is made, but he will not thereby have created a novel. The style will always give him away. We will recognize the naively self-confident or obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced language (perhaps accompanied by a primitive, artificial, worked-up double-voicedness). We quickly sense that such an author finds it easy to purge his work of speech diversity: he simply does not listen to the fundamental heteroglossia inherent in actual language; he mistakes social overtones, which create the timbres of words, for irritating noises that it is his task to eliminate. The novel, when torn out of authentic linguistic speech diversity, emerges in most cases as a "closet drama," with detailed, fully developed and "artistically worked out" stage directions (it is, of course, bad drama). In such a novel, divested of its language diversity, authorial language inevitably ends up in the awkward and absurd position of the language of stage directions in plays [32 ~ Mikhail Bakhtin

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart ... even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining ... His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding
sometimes maddeningly so
for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley ~ Jennifer Lee Carrell

I just love language. I mean, I love it. I love stage directions. Any opportunity to write. I hadn't written in so long, I get very crazy and miserable. I - it's like not seeing my kids: I can't do it for very long. ~ Joss Whedon

You can skim those stage directions and go right to the dialogue. You can almost read the movie in the same amount of time it will take you to see the movie. ~ William H. Macy

Writers love to write those idiotic, long stage directions, and some of them worse than others. They have nothing to do with the movie. They're just jerking around. ~ William H. Macy

Cathedral terminology was like stage directions - totally counterintuitive. ~ Dan Brown

The last thing Farinoush did on several nights just before she went to bed was to rummage through her cardboard box of old things looking for him. And there he invariably remained, nestled forever between a copy of 'Jana Aranya' and 'The Hours'. She read about thirty pages of his still incomprehensible stage-directions before passing out from exhaustion and hoping that the morning would bring him back to her; yearning to be yanked out of bed by him, devoured by him again. But he never returned. ~ Kunal Sen

If you read Shakespeare's stage directions, all the gore and violence is right in there. ~ Teller

Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is - or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live. ~ Jostein Gaarder

A lot of actors choose parts by the scripts, but I don't trust reading the scripts that much. I try to get some friends together and read a script aloud. Sometimes I read scripts and record them and play them back to see if there's a movie. It's very evocative; it's like a first cut because you hear 'She walked to the door,' and you visualize all these things. 'She opens the door' ... because you read the stage directions, too. ~ Al Pacino

That seduction or initiation into evil can be understood by recognizing that most actors are not solitary figures improvising on the empty stage of life. Rather, they are often an ensemble of different players, on a stage with various props and changing costumes, scripts, and stage directions from producers and directors. ~ Philip G. Zimbardo

Generations of British writers would look up to Roget as a kindred soul who could offer both emotional as well as intellectual sustenance. In the stage directions to Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie includes an homage to Roget: The night nursery of the Darling family, which is the scene of our opening Act, is at the top of a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury. We might have a right to place it where we will, and the reason Bloomsbury is chosen is that Mr. Roget once lived there. So did we in the days when his Thesaurus was our only companion in London; and we whom he has helped to wend our way through life have always wanted to pay him a little compliment. For Barrie, Roget's masterpiece was synonymous with virtue itself. To describe the one saving grace of the play's villain, Captain Hook, Barrie adds, "The man is not wholly evil--he has a Thesaurus in his cabin. ~ Joshua Kendall

Politics has become so all-possessive of life, that by impertinence it thinks the only philosophy a person can hold is the right or the left. This question puts out all the lights of religion so they can call all the cats gray. It assumes that man lives on a purely horizontal plane, and can move only to the right or the left. Had we eyes less material, we would see that there are two other directions where a man with a soul may look: the vertical directions of "up" or "down. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

What's he doing?" I asked, leaning over the side of the boat, searching for him beneath the water. If the tow rope had gotten tangled, he might need help. And someone would need to go in the water with him, perhaps accidentally sliding against him down where no one else could see.
"Boo!" A handful of bryozoa rushed up at me from the lake.
I screamed (for once I didn't have to think about this girl-reaction) and fell backward into the boat. Sean hefted himself over the side with one arm, holding the bryozoan high in the other hand. It dripped green slime through his fingers. "Bwa-ha-ha!" He came after me.
I squealed again. It was so unbelievably fantastic that he was flirting with me, but bryozoa was involved. Was it worth it? No. I paused on the side of the boat, ready to jump back into the water myself. He might chase me around the lake with the bryozoa, but at least it would be diluted. On second thought, I didn't particularly want to jump into the very waters the bryozoa had come from.
Sean solved the problem for me. He slipped behind me and showed me he was holding the ties of my bikini in his free hand. If I jumped, Sean would take possession of my bikini top.
I had thought about double knotting my bikini. I'd hoped against hope that Stage Two: Bikini would work, and that Sean might try something like this. Of course, I didn't really want my top to come off in front of everyone. Nay, in front of anyone. But I'd checked the double knots in the mi ~ Jennifer Echols

But what if war isn't the exception? What if peace is the exception, the temporary reprieve from a struggle that began long before you or I came on the stage - and one that will continue long after we're gone, too? ~ Joanna Hathaway

I think I've always been fine on stage - though I get nervous beforehand. But once I'm on stage, all of that goes out of the window. ~ Rita Ora

But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908. ~ Jeff Bezos

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first. ~ Laura Linney

My persona on stage was always coming from a place of I know better than you and I'm going to be a little bit pretentious in your face with these sort of crass ideas. ~ Bo Burnham

They don't want to see rap music. They don't want to see the Beastie Boys. They don't care what we're doing. They want one thing and one thing only: that's to see Madonna come on stage. ~ Ad-Rock

I really love the process, with stage, of rehearsal, you get to create a character, and you have a beginning, a middle, and an end of story. And in television, you don't. ~ Sasha Alexander

We in the West regard the universe as a creation of God; like an invention or a product. After he created the universe, God set himself to oversee it and manage it. We see God as our boss. He created the universe, he is present in it, he manages every part of it, but he is still separate from it. It's like he installed video cameras all over the universe, so he can see everything that happens, and he can cause this or that to happen, but he is not a part of what happens. The Eastern view is very different. To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome." Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, a ~ Warren Sharpe

The actions that accompany the four truths describe the trajectory of dharma practice: understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path. These are not four separate activities but four phases within the process of awakening itself. Understanding matures into letting go; letting go culminates in realization; realization impels cultivation. This trajectory is no linear sequence of "stages" through which we "progress." We do not leave behind an earlier stage in order to advance to the next rung of some hierarchy. All four activities are part of a single continuum of action. Dharma practice cannot be reduced to any one of them; it is configured from them all. As soon as understanding is isolated from letting go, it degrades into mere intellectuality. As soon as letting go is isolated from understanding, it declines into spiritual posturing. The fabric of dharma practice is woven from the threads of these interrelated activities, each of which is defined through its relation to the others. ~ Stephen Batchelor

Paul Bearer was very influential in the early stages of my career. He constantly hounded me and I just think he realized the potential that was there. He convinced me that I was in the right place and doing the right thing. ~ John Cena

I go around with my books so much and I love to perform on stage, to remind everybody that the lights are off, the phones are off, and for this hour, it's going to be like your mother reading to you. We're going to remember why we love stories. I think that gets lost in over-intellectualizing. ~ T.C. Boyle

No person wakes up and finds themselves on the world stage. When that happens, it is in the movies. ~ Bidemi Mark-Mordi

In my career, I've had kind of a strange trajectory as an actor. I started out doing movies and theater and stuff, but then I had a terrible problem with stage fright as an actor on stage, and I quit stage acting for a long, long time. ~ Fred Melamed

I believe emotional suppression fueled by a shamed imagination lies at the root of society's ailments. It is the believing leaders of religion that keep the "denial circus" going decade after decade. We have, for too long, supported this tyranny of delusion. We have given the guru and the preacher the stage one too many times. It is time to wake up and replace the preacher with the human teacher - a human who is the intelligence of their whole organism. ~ Christopher Zzenn Loren

Since you must admit that there is nothing outside the universe, it can have no limit and is accordingly without end or measure. It makes no odds in which part of it you may take your stand; whatever spot anyone may occupy, the universe stretches away from him just the same in all directions without limit. ~ Lucretius

Be yourself on stage. Nobody else can be you and you have the law of supply and demand covered. ~ Bill Hicks

I like it when I'm on the stage, but honestly, I would be very happy if I could cut it off, just enjoy my life when I wasn't performing. ~ Beyonce Knowles

I was always used to being centre stage - something that had its good and bad points. ~ Gareth Gates

You have this impression from England that New Yorkers can be quite aggressive, but certainly the people that I've bumped into and the friends I've made here don't seem that way. Just walking down the street and asking for directions, people seem to be very helpful and happy to help. ~ Archie Panjabi

Attack in all directions! ~ Nathan Bedford Forrest

I became a councillor back in 1971, so if by this stage in politics I'm making lots of big mistakes, then I shouldn't be here. ~ Ken Livingstone

Markus definitely wasn't comfortable. He was sorry about having long legs; as regrets go, it certainly was a useless one.* Not to mention another fact that amped up his torture: there's nothing worse than being seated next to a woman you're dying with desire to look at. The show was to his left, where she was, not on stage. Not only that, but what was he seeing? It was so-so. The fact that it was a Swedish play wasn't exactly helping matters! Had she done it on purpose? As if that weren't enough, the playwright had studied in Uppsala. Might as well have dinner at his parents'. ~ David Foenkinos

It may be safe to walk,
but where do you go
when all directions wear
the same black ashen despair? ~ Stephanie Hemphill

I definitely loved going on stage, I loved the nervous feeling and the performance and the doing-ness of it. It always felt kind of natural and inevitable and logical. ~ Sean Astin

Time flies when you're being stupid. ~ David Henry Hwang

While you cannot deliver policies without principles, you cannot deliver principles without having power. You have quickly to move to a stage where, emphasising your principles, you build a programme, then call for popular support. ~ Gordon Brown

Imagine, if you will, a great reservoir, out of which lead innumerable small rivulets or channels. At its farther end each channel opens out into a small fountain. This fountain is not only being continually filled and replenished from the reservoir but is itself a radiating center whence it gives out in all directions that which it receives, so that all who come within its radius are refreshed and blessed. 41. This is our relation with God. Each one of us is a radiating center. Each one, no matter how small or ignorant, is the little fountain at the far end of a channel, the other end of which leads out from all there is in God. This fountain represents the individuality, as separate from the great reservoir--God--and yet as one with Him, and without Him we are nothing. ~ H. Emilie Cady

The stage is suspension of disbelief. Film is a literal medium. ~ Joseph Bologna