Novice Quotes

1. "That morning, there was "nothing" to do for Scott, but it took me almost an hour to achieve it. It was a peculiarly distasteful task for me: much of ICU care has this futile quality, this illusion of purposefulness generated by the trappings of technology and invasive procedures. A novice in medicine sees only the drama of the pacemaker and the Swan-Ganz catheter; more years in medicine and you see how suffering is prolonged, hospital bills multiplied tenfold, the possibility of a dignified death diminished."
Author: Abraham Verghese

2. "In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes."
Author: Adelbert Von Chamisso

3. "When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist."
Author: Andrea Mitchell

4. "He was accustomed to women wanting him. What shocked him was the simple fact that he wanted her.Not hot, energetic sex. Not a blow job from a novice. He wanted her with aperplexing intensity he hadn't felt in years. He was the King of Death, and she was his consort.And no amount of common sense could distract him."
Author: Anne Stuart

5. "Being a novice is not an alibi to become a zilch."
Author: Anyaele Sam Chiyson

6. "If the other novice wizards on the row hadn't broken into Raeshaldis's rooms, pissed on her bed and written WHORE and THIEF on the walls, she probably would have been killed on the night of the full moon."
Author: Barbara Hambly

7. "Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it's futile to continue playing (conceptualizing)."
Author: Bill Gaede

8. "It is always the novice who exaggerates."
Author: C.S. Lewis

9. "Elvis's Twin SisterIn the convent, y'all,I tend the gardens,watch things grow,pray for the immortal soulof rock 'n' roll.They call meSister Presley here,The Reverend Motherdigs the way I move my hipsjust like my brother.Gregorian chantdrifts out across the herbsPascha nostrum immolatus est...I wear a simple habit,darkish hues,a wimple with a novice-sewnlace band, a rosary,a chain of keys,a pair of good and sturdyblue suede shoes.I think of itas Graceland here,a land of grace.It puts my trademark slow lopsided smileback on my face.Lawdy.I'm alive and well.Long time since I walkeddown Lonely Streettowards Heartbreak Hotel."
Author: Carol Ann Duffy

10. "Of course, Storm-Lord! But why would a god marry a poor farm girl?" asked one of the bound novices, his voice thin and chirping as an insect."All things must eventually mate," I shrugged, "having been cast into a man's flesh I must do as flesh does. And it hardly matters whether one mates with a woman or a rock or a river - the end result is the same. Once all the world wed stones and trees - but this is a degenerate age, and no one keeps to tradition."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

11. "Normal life? Nothing about this is normal, Novice. I'm Death, not a Genie. I don't go granting wishes unless absolutely necessary." He levels his face to mine. "You do remember your family's souls, don't you?"
Author: Cecilia Robert

12. "Rebelliousness is not a good quality in a novice."
Author: Elif Shafak

13. "[Referring to passage by Alice Munro] Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out -- don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams "yay" and jumps up and down for joy -- when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language."
Author: Francine Prose

14. "For the novice runner, I'd say to give yourself at least 2 months of consistently running several times a week at a conversational pace before deciding whether you want to stick with it. Consistency is the most important aspect of training at this point."
Author: Frank Shorter

15. "Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

16. "Let me tell you, novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without them."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

17. "Des Grieux was like all Frenchmen, that is, cheerful and amiable when it was necessary and profitable, and insufferably dull when the necessity to be cheerful and amiable ceased. A Frenchman is rarely amiable by nature; he is always amiable as if on command, out of calculation. If, for instance, he sees the necessity of being fantastic, original, out of the ordinary, then his fantasy, being most stupid and unnatural, assembles itself out of a priori accepted and long-trivialized forms. The natural Frenchman consists of a most philistine, petty, ordinary positiveness--in short, the dullest being in the world. In my opinion, only novices, and Russian young ladies in particular, are attracted to Frenchmen. Any decent being will at once notice and refuse to put up with this conventionalism of the pre-established forms of salon amiability, casualness, and gaiety."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

18. "From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. I changed the color of her eyes according to my state of mind: the color of water when she woke, the color of syrup when she laughed, the color of light when she was annoyed. I dressed her according to the age and condition that suited my changes of mood: a novice in love at twenty, a parlor whore at forty, the queen of Babylon at seventy, a saint at one hundred."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

19. "In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."
Author: George Bernard Shaw

20. "A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their future life together as the novice is prepared for the cloister—by experiencing its utmost contrast."
Author: George Eliot

21. "I am trying now to re-create in my mind the picture of the man as I saw him in 1939- he, the revered author of Sinister Barriers, I the novice. I think I can rely on my near-photographic memory for the purpose. (I call it "near-photographic" because I can only remember things that happen to be lying around near photographs.)Let's see, as I recall, he is six-feet seven-inches tall (when he is sitting down, that is) with a long and majestic English face. Then, too, I distinctly remember, there was a small flashing golden aura about his head, the occasional play of hissing flashes when he moved it suddenly, and the distant rumble of thunder when he spoke."
Author: Isaac Asimov

22. "I came to the party with the sole purpose of getting completely shit-faced, to be perfectly honest. That was it, that was The Plan from the very beginning. I wanted more than anything that ever regrettable, forgetting-everything-you-learned-as-a-toddler kind of wasted that only either the completely stupid venture into or the complete novice (given how naive I was I think I fall more into the latter category). It was a very simple plan, but I like to think the simplest ones tend to be the most effective. The Plan sure as hell didn't involve everything else that happened that night, as all of that occurred quite naturally on its own."
Author: J.C. Henderson

23. "The novice in the military art flew from point to point, retarding his own preparations by the excess of his violent and somewhat distempered zeal; while the more practiced veteran made his arrangements with a deliberation that scorned every appearance of haste"
Author: James Fenimore Cooper

24. "He's a novice, but he's had these - he's experienced in leadership in tight circumstances. He started - he dropped the first bomb, led the first air strike into North Vietnam."
Author: James Stockdale

25. "The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in ‘The New Biography' (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance, Harold Nicolson), her own memorable theory of biography, encapsulated in her phrase ‘granite and rainbow'. ‘Truth' she envisions ‘as something of granite-like solidity', and ‘personality assomething of rainbow-like intangibility', and ‘the aim of biography', she proposes, ‘is to weld these two into one seamless whole' (E4 473). The following short biographical account ofWoolf will attempt to keep to the basic granitelike facts that Woolf novices need to know, while also occasionally attending in brief to the more elusive, but equally relevant, matter of rainbow-like personality."
Author: Jane Goldman

26. "Most novices picture themselves as masters - and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters."
Author: Jean Toomer

27. "We were all novices. We really were. We didn't know a goddamn thing about doing a show."
Author: Jerome Robbins

28. "The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it's hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. It's hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one's prose."
Author: John Gardner

29. "I'm a bit of a novice myself." She smiled. Then she turned back to Jasper. "And please, call me Payton."Like one of my favorite quarterbacks," Jasper grinned.Only with an a instead of an e. And slightly fewer yards in passing," Payton said. Damn—now she'd already blown one of the three measly sports references she knew in the first two minutes.Jasper laughed. "Slightly fewer yards in passing—I like that." He turned to J.D., gesturing to Payton. "Where have you been hidin' this girl, J.D.?"
Author: Julie James

30. "I tell you, I feel like a real novice as far as horror goes."
Author: Lawrence Kasdan

31. "For all the Gods are one God," she said to me then, as she had said many times before, and as I have said to my own novices many times, and as every priestess who comes after me will say again, "and all the Goddesses are one Goddess, and there is only one Initiator. And to every man his own truth, and the God within."
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley

32. "I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as - but who cares about my disguises? Or God's."
Author: Mary Rose O'Reilley

33. "It was also, however, a favorite place for novices to stand and wait for innocent students to slip up by talking too loudly between classes.No novice has ever been created that could keep Gina quiet, however."
Author: Meg Cabot

34. "The tall monk who came striding down the shadowed monastery corridor was surprisingly young, barely thirty. As he swept past the novices, his dark robe flapping wildly around his legs, they bobbed their heads in fearful deference."
Author: Michelle Frost

35. "Cleaning is considered a vital part of the training process in all traditional Japanese disciplines and is a required practice for any novice. It is accorded spiritual significance. Purifying an unclean place is believed to purify the mind."
Author: Mineko Iwasaki

36. "World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap'n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap'n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds."
Author: Neal Stephenson

37. "Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life."
Author: Nicolas Chamfort

38. "Praise the world to the angel, not what can't be talked about.You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the grand cosmoswhere he so intensely feels, you're just a novice. So showhim some simple thing shaped for generation after generationuntil it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours.Tell him about things. He'll stand amazed, just as you didbeside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;how even grief's lament purely determines its own shape,serves as a thing, or dies in a thing — and escapesIn ecstasy beyond the violin."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

39. "I am told that César Aira writes two books a year, at least, some of which are published by a little Argentinean company named Beatriz Viterbo, after the character in Borges's story "The Aleph." The books of his that I have been able to find were published by Mondadori and and Tusquets Argentina. It's frustrating, because once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop. His novels seem to put the theories of Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the Word. Sometimes he is reminiscent of Roussel (Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood), but the only living writer to whom he can be compared is Barcelona's Enrique Vila-Matas. Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

40. "As novices, we think we're entirely responsible for the way people treat us. I have long since learned that we are responsible only for the way we treat people."
Author: Rose Wilder Lane

41. "A mute mentor & blind noviceI grabbed your hand; made me wise..."-Shahzaib"
Author: Shahzaib Ansari

42. "Neuroscientists are novices at deception."
Author: Teller

43. "Furnishing was not a priority in the Citadel. Shelves, stools, tables... There was a rumor among the novices that priests towards the top of the hierarchy had golden furniture, but there was no sign of it here. The room was as severe as anything in the novices' quarters although it had, perhaps, a more opulent severity; it wasn't the forced bareness of poverty, but the starkness of intent."
Author: Terry Pratchett

44. "The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select."
Author: Terry Pratchett

45. "What you study is more important than how you study. Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn't matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn't matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency material. Material beats method."
Author: Timothy Ferriss

46. "The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?"
Author: Umberto Eco

47. "William was deeply humiliated. I tried to comfort him; I told him that for three days he had been looking for a text in Greek and it was natural in the course of his examination for him to discard all books not in Greek. And he answered that it is certainly human to make mistakes, but there are some human beings who make more than others, and they are called fools, and he was one of them, and he wondered whether it was worth the effort to study in Paris and Oxford if one was then incapable of thinking that manuscripts are also bound in groups, a fact even novices know, except stupid ones like me, and a pair of clowns like the two of us would be a great success at fairs, and that was what we should do instead of trying to solve mysteries, especially when we were up against people far more clever than we."
Author: Umberto Eco

48. "We descend upon you and all things—we arrest you all; We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids; Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality; Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves. You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices! We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward; Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us; We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us; "We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also; You furnish your parts toward eternity; Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul."
Author: Walt Whitman

49. "As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus."
Author: Walter M. Miller Jr.

50. "The historic transition from Novice to Proficient to Adept was said to be accomplished virtually overnight by the progression from marijuana to peyote to lysergic acid. Instant mysticism had arrived. Before the court of law, hippies demanded freedom for LSD the way early Christians demanded freedom for the Eucharist."
Author: William Everson

Novice Quotes Pictures