Florida Scott-Maxwell Quotes

Even ordinary people aren't ordinary, not really. They're filled up with thoughts and feelings that you might never know are there until they suddenly materialise.

We can bring to characters dark and bright sides that nobody even dreams about.

The heart of another is a dark forest.

A character should always have a secret. I feel like we all do.

There was so much about my dad that wasn't on the surface.

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

There's a sea secret in me / it's plain to see it is rising / but I must be flowing liquid diamonds / calling for my soul / at the corners of the world

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.

You don't know me, dude," he says, not smiling this time. Gonzo examines his cards, prepping for his next move. "People always think that they know other people, but they don't. Not really. I mean, maybe they know things about them, like they won't eat doughnuts or they like action movies or whatever. But they don't know what their friends do in their rooms alone at night or what happened to them when they were kids or if they feel ****ed up for no reason at all.

What seems conceit, bad manners or cynicism is always a sign of things no ear have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.

For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged by an overriding passion.

The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.

Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know.

Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.

Dona Crista laughed a bit. "Oh, Pip, I'd be glad for you to try. But do believe me, my dear friend, touching her heart is like bathing in ice." I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire.

Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?

There's such a fierce intense fire burning inside of me, so much that it just wants to explode.

And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.

I was an onion, layers and layers and layers under a thin, papery skin. If anyone had been able to cut me open, my bitter, irritating juices would have stung their eyes, and they would have cried. Although I couldn't cry myself, much at the time. But no one would cut me open.

Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.

All through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire- a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.

The thing about the books is that they really talked a lot about what was going on inside of Bond and the inner dialogue. It's very hard to project that onto a screen because Bond doesn't talk a lot about how he feels. But, when you have an actor like Daniel Craig, he's able to convey the inner turmoil and the conflicts. He's given Bond his humanity.