Theme Quotes

1. "The Bible's "it's better to give than receive" was not the raving of a lunatic. It goes back to a recurring theme that I've found in almost all my experiments: behaviour shapes your thoughts. My brain sees me giving a gift to Julie. My brain concludes I must really love her. I love her all the more. Which means I'm happier in my relationship, if a bit poorer."
Author: A.J. Jacobs

2. "A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss."
Author: Alexander McCall Smith

3. "My theme for philanthropy is the same approach I used with technology: to find a need and fill it."
Author: An Wang

4. "Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family."
Author: Bill Drayton

5. "Interest in certain themes doesn't mandate a personal stake or personal experience of those themes. I've killed people in plays, but no one asks me what it's like to kill people."
Author: Billy Crudup

6. "The Christ within who is our hope of glory is not a matter of theological debate or philosophical speculation. He is not a hobby, a part-time project, a good theme for a book, or a last resort when all human effort fails. He is our life, the most real fact about us. He is the power and wisdom of God dwelling within us."
Author: Brennan Manning

7. "The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful."
Author: Carson McCullers

8. "I pray you indulge me for a space, for I am going to set out on a speech which may have some duration, but whose theme may be gleaned from its opening phrase: how dare you."
Author: David Mamet

9. "Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile."
Author: David Morrell

10. "All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you."
Author: Diane Setterfield

11. "The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth."
Author: Eric Schlosser

12. "God says in the Quran that there is only one true religion, God's religion. It's the same theme that God revealed to all of the prophets, even before Muhammad."
Author: Feisal Abdul Rauf

13. "Rather like Batman, I embody the themes of the movie which are the values of family, courage and compassion and a sense of right and wrong, good and bad and justice."
Author: Gary Oldman

14. "Despite its many layers, I THIRST is a simple tale. I have truly been honored by the positive feedback for my little story. As the author, it is my hope that it will be a parallel to your own journey, that you will be able to relate to the characters within and apply it to your own life. While there are universal themes, I think that each reader gets something different out of a book. May you find yourself in I THIRST. Perhaps it's not much, but, if I could offer a little rose to the world, this would be it."
Author: Gina Marinello Sweeney

15. "Look, then, into thine heart, and write!Yes, into Life's deep stream!All forms of sorrow and delight,All solemn Voices of the Night,That can soothe thee, or affright, -Be these henceforth thy theme.(excerpt from "Voices of the Night")"
Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

16. "Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story."
Author: Hugo Gernsback

17. "There can't be much development of action or theme in such stories, but at least there is some. By contrast, in the short short the very idea of character seems to lose its significance, seems in fact to drop out of sight. We see human figures in a momentary flash. We see them in fleeting profile. We see them in archetypal climaxes which define their mode of existence. Situation tends to replace character, representative condition to replace individuality.("Introduction")"
Author: Irving Howe

18. "Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashipn the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

19. "I don't know why my brain has kept all the words to the Gilligan's Island theme song and has deleted everything about triangles."
Author: Jeff Foxworthy

20. "Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty")"
Author: John Crowley

21. "Even on the drum level, it's all about stating your theme, going back to certain things that need to be emphasized, not doing fills for the sake of doing fills."
Author: John Otto

22. "And our big theme has been, you have made so much progress, we urge you on with the openings and market openings that have occurred. They clearly work and continuing on that path will produce further growth and further opportunities for the Indian people."
Author: John W. Snow

23. "During his reading hours, which were between one and five o'clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to the disconcerting conclusion that whistling was not an important theme in literature."
Author: Julio Cortázar

24. "Selling is crucial to your success because without the sale, you do not make any money. The great thing about writing a book to position yourself is that the book does a lot of the selling for you. People read the book and come to you for more answers. If you have products created to match the theme of your book, your platform (website) will do the selling for you. Automate as much of the process as you can with opt-in boxes, video sales landing pages and special offers. Make it as easy as you can for your fans and followers. Once your products are created, simply write about them, talk about them, and create articles from the content and say, "Yes" to interviews. The buzz created will point people back to your site where your automatic sales team is ready to take orders 24 hours a day."
Author: Kytka Hilmar Jezek

25. "Depressions and melancholy are often a cover for tremendous greed. At the beginning of an analysis there is often a depressed state of resignation-life has no meaning, there is no feeling of being in life. An exaggerated state can develop into complete lameness. Quite young people give the impression of having the resignation of a bitter old man or woman. When you dig into such a black mood you find that behind it there is overwhelming greed-for being loved, for being very rich, for having the right partner, for being the top dog, etc. Behind such a melancholic resignation you will often discover in the darkness a recurring theme which makes things very difficult, namely if you give such people one bit of hope, the lion opens its mouth and you have to withdraw, and then they put the lid on again, and so it goes on, back and forth."
Author: Marie Louise Von Franz

26. "The official report was a collection of cold, hard data, an objective "after-action report" that would allow future generations to study the events of that apocalyptic decade without being influenced by the "human factor." But isn't the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past? Will future generations care as much for chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts of individuals not so different from themeslves? By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from a history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it?"
Author: Max Brooks

27. "The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness - all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since."
Author: Michael Heizer

28. "We spend more time at cinemas, theaters, art galleries and theme parks than we do at churches, and they have become our new cathedrals. We can spend hours at any of these places of entertainment but if church service goes on too long we get impatient."
Author: Michael Huffington

29. "You seem to be turning into the theme of all my paint­ings", she said. "The meeting of two worlds. A double exposure. Showing through the outline of Tomas the libertine, incredibly, the face of a romantic lover. Or, the other way, through a Tristan, always thinking of his Tereza, I see the beautiful, betrayed world of the libertine."
Author: Milan Kundera

30. "Adventure, the first great theme of the novel."
Author: Milan Kundera

31. "Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it."
Author: Nat Wolff

32. "The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?"
Author: Neil Gaiman

33. "Olive Ann describes Sanna as 'a perfectionist and a worrier.' She is obsessed with the idea of finding happiness, and for her, as Olive ann wrote in her notes for the novel, 'happiness means being first with somebody, having perfect, loving children...The theme of Sanna is disillusionment,' Olive Ann wrote. 'Her life is the pursuit of happiness and perfection, but she finds happiness and perfection impossible to obtain-her idea of happiness is constant joy, no changes."
Author: Olive Ann Burns

34. "My boyfriend and I just got a projector, so we've been screening movies on the roof and projecting them against the wall next door. The last one we did, the theme was, 'The Russians are coming.' So we screened 'Red Dawn' and 'Top Gun.'"
Author: Olivia Thirlby

35. "It wouldn't be practical to have sections called "Dog Stories", "Horse Stories", "Mid-life Crisis and Adultery", "Writers and Artists Struggling to Discover Themselves", "People in Past Eras Who Think and Talk Just Like Modern Americans", and "Reminiscences of Childhoods in Which Nothing Happened", even though these are all fairly popular themes for fiction."
Author: Orson Scott Card

36. "The one general theme I took away from that first week with my new friends, was that everyone had their issues. Life in its simplest form is an attempt to deal with and avoid potential impediments. Some families take dysfunction to lofty heights while other break apart like Oreos mixed in a blender."
Author: Phil Wohl

37. "But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language."
Author: Pierre Boulle

38. "Are broken windows a new decorating theme around here?" Archer asked, coming up behind Jenna and me and poking his head into the parlor."So it would seem," I said. I was still looking outside when a faint light appeared in the gloom. It took me a minute to realize that it was from Cal's cabin. Was someone out there? Was Cal out there?But just as quickly as it had appeared, the light went out again. Frowning, I turned from the doorway, and I went to slip my arm through Archer's. Then I remembered what Nausicaa had said earlier. Now wasn't exactly the best time for PDA, probably.The three of us trailed behind everyone else into the ballroom. Here, at least, things looked more or less the same. Of course, the ballroom had always been one of the more bizarre rooms at Hex Hall, so that didn't say much. Still, I was relieved to see the familiar jumble of tables and chairs and not, like, tree stumps or whatever."
Author: Rachel Hawkins

39. "...temporal experience is neither completely recurrent (in which case it would be wholly knowable) nor completely variable (in which case it would be wholly inscrutable). In effect, it is more like a piece of complex music, a Bach fugue heard for the first time. In one sense, we are excited and surprised by the novel disposition of tones and rhythms and by the uncanny variety of the treatment. In another sense, we realize that recurring ideas and cycles are what give the work its native character, and that the variations, however stunning, have significance only in terms of their relationship to these underlying themes. Conversely, the recurrent themes are realizable in their fullest sense only through the variations upon them. The careful student of time is thus as sure that certain things will recur as he is sure that they will recur in dazzling new forms."
Author: Robert Grudin

40. "Any film is about heroism: the triumph of good over evil. If you look back at my films, you will see that as a recurring theme."
Author: Salman Khan

41. "My husband is from Finland, so every so often I'll throw a Scandinavian-themed party."
Author: Sarah Rafferty

42. "I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I'm going to stick my Tom Sawyer Island in Love and Death in the American Novel Land right between the Jay Gatsby Swimming Pool and Tom Joad's Dust Bowl Lanes, a Depression-themed bowling alley renting artfully worn-out shoes."
Author: Sarah Vowell

43. "Hayden felt ready to snap. She felt out of control. She needed something. Unfortunately, she had a feeling that something was the six-foot-five hormone-whisperer walking beside her, whistling the Happy Days theme song."
Author: Tessa Bailey

44. "High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work."
Author: Thomas Keneally

45. "[On Female Attraction to Men in Uniform] That male military persona feeds a subconscious, passive-aggressive female desire to dominate the warrior as he is perceived an iconic example of masculinity (particularly amongst traditionally warlike cultures). The damsel in distress theme always struck me as embodying this: the hapless, innocently beautiful woman unwittingly enraptures the heroic male so completely that he would risk all to submit to her at his own peril, and quite in spite of it."
Author: Tiffany Madison

46. "The work is at such a high level and is so well executed, it really is a matter of taste... [Source: Project Runway — but consider, applied to the theme of book reviews, it seems apropos!]"
Author: Tim Gunn

47. "'Saw VI' has a really interesting theme about the ripple effect. Everything you do affects the guy next to you, which affects the guy next to him, which affects her over here. And you might think that what you're doing is not that significant, but just the way you respond to other people makes the world the way it is."
Author: Tobin Bell

48. "Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness…it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."from her essay, On Being Ill"
Author: Virginia Woolf

49. "He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes."
Author: Virginia Woolf

50. "My knees shook as they descended upon me like vultures, squeezing the life out of my fragile bones. Never had I witnessed such a loud group of guys who got wound up so high over nothing. All they did was hoot over Ellis's new apartment and belch the school's theme song. Joy."
Author: Wade Kelly

Theme Quotes Pictures