#character

A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down. ↗

— Rudyard Kipling

#character #descriptive #description

Man wishes woman to be peaceable, but in fact she is essentially warlike, like the cat. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzche

#kitty-lazarus #description

In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a). ↗

— John Scalzi

#gay #glbt #literature #raising-kids #writing

A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior. ↗

— Stendhal

#personality #melancholy

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#characterization #propaganda

That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin—that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character. ↗

— Emily Raboteau

#judge #judgement #skin-color #judgement

Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction. ↗

— Christian Baloga

#bipolar #character #christian-baloga #crazy #emotional

To me the interesting main character is never the one without flaws. ↗

— J. J. Abrams

#flaws #interesting #main #me #never

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel. ↗

— Charles Baxter

#deniability #mistakes #passive-voice #politics #villainy

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent. ↗

— Hugo Hamilton

#future #growing-up #growth #heritage #history