White Space Quotes

What does a victorious or defeated black woman's body in a historically white space look like? Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston's "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." This appropriated line, stenciled on canvas by Glenn Ligon, who used plastic letter stencils, smudging oil sticks, and graphite to transform the words into abstractions, seemed to be ad copy for some aspect of life for all black bodies. ~ Claudia Rankine

She cannot remember her mother's face ... This is the woman who brought her into the world ... This is the woman her father loved. Yet every time she turns her mind's eye in her mother's direction she sees only the men she is talking to, the children she is playing with, the maids to whom she is giving orders ... She begins to realise how alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white space between the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning. ~ Mark Haddon

Oddly enough, white is a dead tone in a small room. Choosing something with a more medium tone will make the space feel larger. ~ Emily Henderson

As he reads, his eyes graze each poem's lines like a needle over an LP's grooves, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he is looking for is key: a gap in the book's mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings- reading sideways, reading upside down, reading white space instead of text- but the words always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions. ~ Martin Seay

Effective life management isn't about finding more time to fill; it's about recognizing you don't have to do anything you do not choose to do. Hiding a choice behind a "have to" is irresponsible. Everything filling the white space in your life is there because you chose to put it there. We always have the power to say, "No." We just need to be ready to live with the consequences. ~ Joe Jordan

There are still some pieces that aren't being used, like the white-space bands between TV channels. With digital broadcasting, those buffers aren't needed anymore. The wireless telcos want to lease them, while the TV industry wants to maintain the status quo. Either decision would be a mistake. ~ Ram Shriram

I know what I want is impossible. If I can make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story while walking out of this story. I could - it all could - just disappear. ~ Maggie Nelson

There's relief in white space for the reader. ~ Leni Zumas

It was a mind-blowing experience, it really was-absolutely an awesome thing ... As I got to the top I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was amazing ... Looking out that window, seeing the white clouds in the LA Basin, it looked like snow on the ground. ~ Mike Melvill

Almost all the great American graphic designers have used white space as the significant silence to better hear their message loud and clear. ~ Massimo Vignelli

I'm a compulsive enjamber. I'm drawn to half-meanings created by the line, so that's definitely an element of craft that's always on my mind. And I'm a big devotee of the short line, of couplets and tercets, and of irregular stanzas with lots of white space. I've got to give the dense language room to breathe! ~ Anna Journey

Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society's map. What others don't know about it is what makes it yours. ~ Stephen King

There must be an open space in the paintings - an entry space for the viewer, or even for me. Just white space where you can get into it. ~ Norbert Bisky

Plenty of white space and generous line spacing,and don't make the type size too miserly. Then you will be assured of a product fit for a king. ~ Giambattista Bodoni

I'm kind of in a middle space, being marketed as a biracial actor. Roles are written either stereotypically black, or they're written 'normal,' which is just code for white. ~ Jesse Williams

Survival requires a dose of madness - what cynics call "hoping against hope" - just like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. "Survivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us," observed one Holocaust expert. "Their will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst. ~ Mark Matousek

My prose can be dense. I love to pile on detail. I love to describe. I'm much more reluctant to give the reader entrance into a character's feeling than describe what's around him or her and have the reader intuit the internal life of a character. I know that's demanding, so this was a gesture of friendliness, maybe. It's like I'm saying to the reader, I know this is going to be more lyrical than maybe 70 percent of American readers want to see, but here's a bunch of white space for you to recover from that lyricism. ~ Anthony Doerr

I am sure in some years from now you will see new posters with just white space and four lines in Garamond. ~ Adrian Frutiger

It may seem from a cursory look at the news that the streets are a battleground, a deadly arena of fists, guns and knives. In fact armed attacks are not at all common, though they are serious enough to merit attention when they do happen. Lesser levels of violent assault are more frequent, but even these are not as likely as many people think.
The perception of constant street violence derives mainly from the fact that it gets reported while its absence does not. Headlines like 'nobody got stabbed today' would not sell a lot of newspapers, so we are told about incidents that do happen and never hear about the millions of people who go about their business unharmed. To illustrate that, look at this page. The words stand out but there is a lot more white space between and around them. You do not notice it because it is not brought to your attention. So it is with violence - a lot more people do not encounter violence than do. ~ Martin J. Dougherty

By the time I got to high school, I had learned to be more cautious about revealing my dreams. I was reading - and therefore writing - adventure stories. This was before I'd read Isak Dinesen and Mikhail Bulgakov, before Ernest Hemingway and T. Coraghessan Boyle, before I'd read something and really felt it, when writing was still just a compulsion, and my teen-age brain was only bordering on sentience. I filled pages of white space with swashbuckling, rapier-wielding, sidekick-sacrificing, dragon-baiting romance.
(from 'High-School Confidential' in the The New Yorker.) ~ Tea Obreht

If you want to make true love to me, take this paper and fill up the white space in-between the blue lines. ~ Delano Johnson

Witness Donald Trump's current presidential campaign. So first people need to find the white spaces, the unexploited or underexploited niches where there is less competition and more opportunity. ~ Jeffrey Pfeffer

Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said. ~ Lauren Groff

Illumination

Always there is something more to know

what lingers at the edge of thought

awaiting illumination as in

this second-hand book full

of annotations daring the margins in pencil

a light stroke as if

the writer of these small replies

meant not to leave them forever

meant to erase

evidence of this private interaction

Here a passage underlined there

a single star on the page

as in a night sky cloud-swept and hazy

where only the brightest appears

a tiny spark I follow

its coded message try to read in it

the direction of the solitary mind

that thought to pencil in

a jagged arrow It

is a bolt of lightning

where it strikes

I read the line over and over

as if I might discern

the little fires set

the flames of an idea licking the page

how knowledge burns Beyond

the exclamation point

its thin agreement angle of surprise

there are questions the word why

So much is left
untold Between

the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl

between what is said and not

white space framing the story

the way the past unwritten

eludes us So much

is implication the ~ Natasha Trethewey

White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background. ~ Jan Tschichold

I also learned to tell a story. I think I learned from poetry how to time a story. Poetry's timing, beats and pauses. That white space on the page is as important as the black. The bottom of the page is blackout. It's performance. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space. ~ Richard Corliss

my friend, we cannot view work as a burden. Work must not be about survival. Work is the place in which we alter the white space before us for good. We must reclaim our place as pioneers of new outcomes, inventors of new solutions, designers of new products, dreamers of new possibilities, and architects of a better tomorrow. We must re-infuse our work with challenge, reward, zest, zeal, fun, laughter, creativity, and unapologetic hope. ~ Aaron McHugh

The moon's a dead rock, but I still like the word,
so black in its white space.
[ ... ]
what can we say to the
moon except You again?
You again. ~ Franz Wright

You are the silence between the notes. The white space between the letters. The missing that makes everything else a something. ~ Pleasefindthis

If you are representing a white body let it be surrounded by ample space, because as white has no colour of its own, it is tinged and altered in some degree by the colour of the objects surrounding it ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen. ~ Pattiann Rogers

He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice. ~ Don DeLillo

Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and
Short.
Paragraphs.
Light was everything. ~ Matt Haig

Women clearly felt things more deeply: they read sub-text where men saw only white space. ~ Elin Hilderbrand

White Fang received the nursing. Judge Scott's suggestion of a trained nurse was indignantly clamoured down by the girls, who themselves undertook the task. And White Fang won out on the one chance in ten thousand denied him by the surgeon. The latter was not to be censured for his misjudgement. All his life he had tended and operated on the soft humans of civilization, who live sheltered lives and had descended out of many sheltered generations. Compared with White Fang, they were frail and flabby, and clutched life without any strength in their grip. White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none. In neither his father nor his mother was there any weakness, nor in the generations before them. A constitution of iron and vitality of the Wild were White Fang's inheritance, and he clung to life, the whole of him and every part of him, in spirit and in flesh, with the tenacity that of old belonged to all creatures. ~ Jack London

You couldn't turn on the TV without hearing about the missing teenage girl. Sixteen years old. White. Middle class. Very pretty. No one ever seemed quite as outraged when an ugly woman went missing. ~ Karin Slaughter

By the mid-1770s, the system of bond labor had been thoroughly transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The degraded status of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery in America was born. ~ Michelle Alexander

It's a good thing we're pretty to look at," I said as Lend sat down on the orange plastic seats next to me. "Because we don't have much else going for us as bowlers. ~ Kiersten White

Imama looked at the black sweater and the white collar peeking out of it. She put her arms around his neck and rested her head on his chest. She inhaled the soft cologne he was using. Salar was absolutely still as if he could not believe what was happening. Then, gently, he embraced her. "I am honoured," she heard him say. ~ Umera Ahmed- Peer-e-Kamil

In the current [Carter] administration, who can use the White House swimming pool and tennis courts is decided at the very highest level. President Ford did not bother himself with such minor details. He let me swim in the pool. He only got upset when I tried to walk across the water. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Everything looks so much brighter today. The sky is a magnificent cobalt blue, the clouds look like puffy white marshmallows, and I'm happy. not the fake, suck-it-up-and-put-a-smile-on-your-face-happy. Really happy. For the first time in a long time. ~ Beth Michele

She stopped as soon as she'd come through and the two of them stand there for fully five minutes, for forever, just looking. Staring at each other, right in the eyes, across the space between then, both knowing they have an eternity in which to touch. ~ Janina Matthewson

The Dark Lord has Nine. But we have One, mightier than they: the White Rider. He has passed through the fire and the abyss, and they shall fear him. We will go where he leads. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Researchers use alloxan in lab rats to induce diabetes. That's right - it's used to produce diabetes. This is bad news if you eat anything white or enriched. ~ Timothy Ferriss

A somewhat casual observer from outer space might well deduce that the course of evolution in this planet had produced a species of large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains; peculiar animals which rested when they sent their brains away from them but performed in rather predictable manner when their brains were recalled. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

Morality is a easy horse to ride when all the horses are just black and white. ~ Jury Nel

She had never been afraid to be Black in a White world, and she had sure taken a lot of abuse because of it. ~ Sandra Kitt

* The vermine is a small black-and-white relative of the lemming, found in the cold Hublandish regions. Its skin is rare and highly valued, especially by the vermine itself; the selfish little bastard will do anything rather than let go of it. ~ Terry Pratchett

Have you seen the careful manner in which deer drink from a lake at sunrise? That is the way she moves. Have you ever heard the sound a shooting star makes as it crosses a cloudy sky? That is the way she breathes. ~ S.M. White

Then she leans over, brushes her lips against his forehead, and turns off the lamp. ~ Kiersten White

It sure if terrific to be in the back seat of a car full of all the people in your affinity group, and as you zip down the center of the road the radio is going boodeley-boodeley-boo in some bluegrass heart song to open space, and, whoopee, you're hugging all the committed girls who love you just as the boys love you but even more so, maybe, because Bug never forgot that a Swiss army knife, for instance, does everything well and nothing excellently; and to do something excellently a good navy surplus kelp-slitting blade is far superior to a thousand sawtoothed frogman's specials; and a gun is worth a thousand knives; and a good friend is worth a thousand guns; and ten minutes' bored talk about the weather with any girl is worth a thousand friends at your back on the Great Trek of 1836, at least at that time in his life, perhaps because until he joined the affinity group none of his friends had ever been girls; but now everyone was his friend, especially the girls (but he only thought that; he didn't say it, didn't want anyone to claim that he was a sexist). ~ William T. Vollmann

His bedroom was a reflection of Bryant's mind, its untidy shelves filled with games and puzzles stacked in ancient boxes, statues and mementoes competing for space with books on every subject imaginable, from Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology to Illustrated British Ballads and A History of Indian Philosophy.
"What are you reading at the moment?' asked May.
"Batman," said Bryant. "The drawings are terribly good. ~ Christopher Fowler

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference - between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either - that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect. ~ Haruki Murakami

Politics is not worrying this country one-tenth as much as where to find a parking space. ~ Will Rogers

Shepherd further argues while conjuring the spirit of Alice Walker, "We need to reexamine the things we have been taught, the things we've been told are biblical, the terminologies we've had defined for us as sexual beings. We need to 'peel the old white man from our eyeballs before we can see clearly, see ourselves and G ~ d. ~ Candi Dugas

I don't particularly like equities, but I think equities are a better space to be in than bonds. ~ Marc Faber

The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context. ~ Tom Turner

High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery
of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue
wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles
had been transformed into great false noses, drooping toward the point.
The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the
intervals of the wind there was a dull sound dripping about the
precincts of the church. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little? (asked Yali) ~ Jared Diamond

If we ever start communicating with living creatures from other planets, the number one priority is, how are you going to communicate information? Even between different cultures here on Earth, you get into communication problems. ~ Story Musgrave

we all are equal; I'm not black and you aren't white ~ Fany Renjana

Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House. ~ John F. Kennedy

How much more mysterious and inviting is the street of an old town with its altering realms of darkness and light than are the brightly and evenly lit streets of today! The imagination and daydreaming are stimulated by dim light and shadow. In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision, has to be suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocused gaze. Homogeneous bright light paralyses the imagination in the same way that homogenization of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place. The human eye is most perfectly turned for twilight rather than bright daylight. ~ Juhani Pallasmaa

Jonathan Green had a firm handshake, clear eyes, and a jawline not dissimilar to Dudley Do-Right's. He was in his early sixties, with graying hair, a beach-club tan, and a voice that was rich and comforting. A minister's voice. He wasn't a handsome man, but there was a sincerity in his eyes that put you at ease. Jonathan Green was reputed to be one of the top five criminal defense attorneys in America, with a success rate in high-profile criminal defense cases of one hundred percent. Like Elliot Truly, Jonathan Green was wearing an impeccably tailored blue Armani suit. So were the lesser attorneys. Maybe they got a bulk discount. I was wearing impeccably tailored black Gap jeans, a linen aloha shirt, and white Reebok sneakers. Green said, Did Elliot explain why we wanted to see you? ~ Robert Crais

Fter the O.J. Simpson trial there was talk about how the country was splitting in two - one part black, one part white. It was ludicrous: typical gringo arrogance. It's as though whites and blacks can imagine America only in terms of each other. It's mostly white arrogance, in that it places whites always at the center of the racial equation. ~ Richard Rodriguez

The one and only thing required is to free oneself from the bondage of mind and body alike, putting the Buddha's own seal upon yourself. If you do this as you sit in ecstatic meditation, the whole universe itself scattered through the infinity of space turns into enlightenment. This is what I mean by the Buddha's seal. ~ Dogen

His face was crystal, his mouth a ruby, even at that hour.
Sheathed in chain mail, he sat on his white horse like a golden tower. ~ Shota Rustaveli

In this life, your so-called ordinary life, you must be rooted; and in your inner space, in the spiritual life, you must be weightless and flying and flowing, floating. ~ Rajneesh

Free white workers were better off than slaves or servants, but they still resented unfair treatment by the wealthier classes. ~ Howard Zinn

If you are reading this, and feel discouraged by an inability to communicate to others your own feelings about the importance of an active space development effort, comfort yourself with this thought. If you want to be on the leading edge of anything, you have by definition to be a couple of standard deviations away from most people. That makes you an odd-ball. The trick is to learn to accept it, then to like it-and keep on making lots of noise for what you believe in. ~ Charles Sheffield

Oh dear white children, casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words. ~ W. H. Auden

After he left the house, she dried her hair and dressed in a pair of old, comfortable jeans and a white hoodie. Ordinarily, she'd take the time to put on makeup, but today she didn't feel the need to hide anything. She was who she was: a woman who'd survived a war of the heart and had the wrinkles to prove it. (Night Road, page 382) ~ Kristin Hannah

He had to get out, get some space between him and the world, just to breathe. ~ Allison Brennan

In a 1972 story titled "The Big Space Fuck," Kurt Vonnegut names his spaceship with "eight hundred pounds of freeze-dried jizzum in its nose" the Arthur C. Clarke, "in honor of a famous space pioneer." Its mission is to impregnate the Andromeda Galaxy. ~ Michael Benson

No two individuals, it would seem, could be further apart politically than [Eldridge] Cleaver and [George] Wallace. Cleaver, on the one hand, embodies and articulates the rage that has gripped large segments of the black community in recent years. Born of desperation and despair, this rage has produced burnings and lootings in the ghetto as well as a philosophy of black separatism that represents more a withdrawal from an intimidating and unresponsive white society than a positive program for political action. This rage was also the source of Cleaver's influence. He could ride its powerful currents to fame and notoriety--which the mass media were more than willing to heap upon him--but he could not begin to propose a solution to the injustices that had produced it. Indeed, to assuage the anger and frustration in the black community would have threatened his own base of power.

Wallace, on the other hand, has often been called the embodiment of white racism and reaction. That he is, but, more precisely, his preeminence was a result of the fear which gripped large sections of the white community throughout the country. The Wallace movement grew to frightening proportions not because of anything that Wallace did but because the politically polarized atmosphere in the country called forth the need for a man who would represent the fears and the very worst instincts of millions of people.

While Cleaver and Wallace seem on the surface to be so very different, ~ Bayard Rustin

There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals. ~ Ethel Waters