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Surface Quotes

Browse 1836 quotes about Surface.

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Surface Quotes

“Life's an act of magic, too. Claire Hamill sings a line in one of her songs that really sums it up for me: 'If there's no magic, there's no meaning.' Without magic- or call it wonder, mystery, natural wisdom- nothing has any depth. It's all just surface. You know: what you see is what you get. I honestly believe there's more to everything than that, whether it's a Monet hanging in a gallery or some old vagrant sleeping in an alley.”

IfsKnowsBelieveSongNaturalLinesSleepWonderMagicMysteryDepthSurfaceHonestlyGalleryAlleysClaireSleeping InVagrantsMonet
Author:Charles de Lint
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“Self-painting is a further development of painting. The pictorial surface has lost its function as sole expressive support. It was led back to its origins, the wall, the object, the living being, the human body. By incorporating my body as expressive support, occurrences arise as a result, the course of which the camera records and the viewer can experience”

HumansSelfBodyCoursesLostResultsSupportRecordsObjectsPaintingWallDevelopmentFunctionCamerasSurfaceAriseSoleViewersHuman BodyExpressivePictorialIncorporating
Author:Gunter Brus
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“[...] a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere, while the sun [...] rose higher in the sky its tassels dropping with flame threatening every moment to melt the precarious highway of glass. And the people: giant pathworks of colour with limbs missing and parts of their mind snipped off to fit them into the outline of the free pattern.”

PeopleMindMomentsSunViolenceSkyMissingHigherFitDespairRoseGlassesPatternsSpreadSurfaceTinyFlamesGiantsColourLayersRainbowShellsThreateningLimbsHighwaysDroppingOutlinesPrecariousSidewaysCrabsTassels
Author:Janet Frame
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“Cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description, telling yourself what is happening. Get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be immediately taken by the eyes, that it's deep, it's connected, it's complex. Everything holds within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else.”

MindIdeasSelfEyeUsedMemoriesTakenHappeningsComplexesConnectedSurfaceStreamsDescriptionAnticipationOngoingPenetrateDensityManifoldTactile
Author:Terence McKenna
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“Each night the sun sank right in our eyes along the sea, making an undulating glittering pathway, a golden track charted on the surface of the ocean which our ship followed unswervingly until the sun dipped below the edge of the horizon, and the pathway ran ahead of us faster than we could steam and slipped over the edge of the skyline - as if the sun had been a golden ball and had wound up its thread of gold too quickly for us to follow.”

IfsEyeNightSunSeaOceanGoldBallsEdgesTrackSurfaceWoundsShipsGoldenFasterRanHorizonThreadPathwaysSteamOver The EdgeSkylines
Book:The Loss of the S.S. Titanic
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“I suppose in our contemporary lives, our cumulative e-mails might constitute a kind of diary: that informal, moment-by-moment description of life as it goes by. . As I think of those notes now - what I wrote, what I said - it seems to me they danced across the surface just as my grandmother's diaries did - Anais Nin she wasn't, and I wasn't, either. Who is? Not even Anais Nin.”

ThinkingKindSaidMomentsSeemsMightNotesSurfaceContemporaryDescriptionGrandmotherMailMy GrandmotherDiariesCumulativeContemporary Life
Author:Sue Miller
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“But, for all that, they had a very pleasant walk. The trees were bare of leaves, and the river was bare of water-lilies; but the sky was not bare of its beautiful blue, and the water reflected it, and a delicious wind ran with the stream, touching the surface crisply.”

BeautifulWaterNatureWalksTreeSkyWindRiversBlueSurfaceRanStreamsPleasantTouchingDeliciousLiliesWater Lily
Book:Delphi Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated)
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“Surely there had been no figure leaning on the back of his chair; no face looking over it. It is certain that no gliding footstep touched the floor, as he lifted up his head, with a start, and spoke. And yet there was no mirror in the room on whose surface his own form could have cast its shadow for a moment; and, Something had passed darkly and gone!”

MomentsFacesFormCertainRoomsGoneFiguresShadowMirrorsCastsSurfaceTouchedChairsSpokesOver ItFootstepsSpookyGliding
Book:Dickens' Christmas Spirits: A Christmas Carol and Other Tales
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“One thing about this face was very strange and startling. You could not look upon it in its most cheerful mood without feeling that it had some extraordinary capacity of expressing terror. It was not on the surface. It was in no one feature that it lingered. You could not take the eyes or mouth, or lines upon the cheek, and say, if this or that were otherwise, it would not be so. Yet there it always lurked-something for ever dimly seen, but ever there, and never absent for a moment.”

IfsLooksMomentsCharacterFeelingsEyeFacesLinesInterestingOne ThingStrangeMouthsCapacityExtraordinaryTerrorSurfaceMoodFeaturesLook UpCheeksCheerfulAbsentInteresting Characters
Book:Barnaby Rudge, And, Hard Times: With Ten Illustrations
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“But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.”

DreamYoungSciencePlanetsVoteSurfaceClockFeaturesOver ItPeculiarCatastropheVenusResetCraters
Book:Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
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“Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that overlap in the sets of their attributes. ... Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and some of the cognitive metaphor theorists, people can read through to an underlying mapping, but only when the surface metaphor is new to them.”

PeopleTwoIdeasPoetryLiteratureShareMetaphorSurfaceContraryAttributesOur ThoughtsDomainAssertionCognitiveTheoristsMapping
Author:Don Paterson
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“After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's.”

FirstsSometimesStoriesSeemsRememberFallConsciousnessFocusMinutesChangedTerribleClothesDiscoveryConsequenceFruitSurfaceAdamEmbarrassedThings ChangeEmbarrassmentModernismFiltersAdam And Eve
Author:Philip Pullman
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“While things on the surface seem more quiet than at any time since last summer, I do not like the maintenance of what amounts to almost full mobilization in aggressor countries. Surely they cannot afford it and if they had any definite policy of trying to work out economic salvation (except by arms) they would be showing some signs of cutting military expenditures.”

IfsTryingWarCountrySeemsWould BeLastsCuttingEconomicMilitaryPolicyArmsAmountQuietSummerSalvationWork OutSurfaceAggressionDefiniteMaintenanceExpendituresAggressorsLast SummerMobilization
Author:Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be--to speak Greek--Baubo?... Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity!”

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Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
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“This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fault for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice.”

KnowsMindWorkMoralPrideGeniusFaultsDeedsExcuseSurfaceWoundsBarsJournalistFeaturesCowardiceStrokesAcquaintanceSanctionsGermsDistinctiveRustTreacheryCamaraderieScruplesGood NatureNew Acquaintances
Author:Honore de Balzac
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“The electrical matter consists of particles extremely subtile, since it can permeate common matter, even the densest metals, with such ease and freedom as not to receive any perceptible resistance. If anyone should doubt whether the electrical matter passes through the substance of bodies, or only over along their surfaces, a shock from an electrified large glass jar, taken through his own body, will probably convince him. Electrical matter differs from common matter in this, that the parts of the latter mutually attract, those of the former mutually repel each other.”

IfsShouldMatterBodyCommonTakenDoubtGlassesSurfaceResistanceFormerSubstanceEaseShockConvinceLatterMetalsElectricityParticlesJarsElectrical
Author:Benjamin Franklin
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“It is well known, that on the Ohio, and in many parts of America further north, tusks, grinders, and skeletons of unparalleled magnitude are found in great numbers, some lying on the surface of the earth, and some a little below it ... But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain that such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings.”

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Author:Thomas Jefferson
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“Consider the number of young people all over the world who are getting married, day in and day out, for no other reason than thatsomeone of the opposite sex looks well in a green jersey or sings baritone, and then tell me that divorce has reached menacing proportions. The surface of divorce has not even been scratched yet.”

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Book:My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew
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“And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.”

FirstsChildrenBodyWaterWatchesWonderfulChildhoodStrangeKeysSorrowDiscoveryFirst TimeExperienceCleanEverydaySurfaceFamiliarPianoShockSpontaneityPrimalPiano Keys
Author:Anna Quindlen
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“Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.”

WorldFeelsMindTwoSelfHandsSidesExistenceMiddleSurfaceDividesPartitionFoilsThickness
Book:The collected works of Samuel Beckett
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