“Characters have a way of taking on a life on their own, expressing themselves in the simple philosophy of their times, and expressing beliefs acquired through living, working, and being.”

Preface, in A Trail of Memories : The Quotations Of Louis L'Amour (1988) by Angelique L'Amour
Context: Characters have a way of taking on a life on their own, expressing themselves in the simple philosophy of their times, and expressing beliefs acquired through living, working, and being. Once characters are established, they become their own persons and the ideas of the characters are such ideas as they might have acquired in the circumstances of their daily existence.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Characters have a way of taking on a life on their own, expressing themselves in the simple philosophy of their times, …" by Louis L'Amour?
Louis L'Amour photo
Louis L'Amour 65
Novelist, short story writer 1908–1988

Related quotes

“A poem is an imaginary work, living in time, indicated in language. It is and it expresses; it allows us to express.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 181
Context: The creation of a poem, or mathematical creation, involves so much sense of arrival, so much selection, so much of the desire that makes choice — even though one or more of these may operate in the unconscious or partly conscious work-periods before the actual work is achieved — that the questions raised are very pertinent.... The poet chooses and selects and has that sense of arrival as the poem ends; he is expressing what it feels like to arrive at his meanings. If he has expressed that well, his reader will arrive at his meanings. The degree of appropriateness of expression depends on the preparing. By preparing I mean allowing the reader to feel the interdependences, the relations, within the poem.
These inter-dependences may be proved, if you will allow the term, in one or more ways: the music by which the syllables resolve may lead to a new theme, as in a verbal music, or to a climax, a key-relationship which makes — for the moment — an equilibrium; the images may have established their own progression in such a way that they serve to mark the poem’s development; the tensions and attractions between the poem’s meanings may mark its growth, as they must if the poem is to achieve its form.
A poem is an imaginary work, living in time, indicated in language. It is and it expresses; it allows us to express.

Joseph Conrad photo
Novalis photo

“Man has ever expressed some symbolical Philosophy of his Being in his Works and Conduct”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Novalis (1829)
Context: Man has ever expressed some symbolical Philosophy of his Being in his Works and Conduct; he announces himself and his Gospel of Nature; he is the Messiah of Nature.

Eric Hoffer photo

“Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things — have even discovered them over and over again — and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1960)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things — have even discovered them over and over again — and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways.

Michel Henry photo

“How capitalism finds its substance and its essence in the living work, in such a way that it comes exclusively from it, can't go without it, lives only drawing at each time its life from that of the worker, life that then becomes his own, this is what expresses in the whole work of Marx the theme of vampire. "Capitalism is dead work which, such as a vampire, animates itself only in sucking the living work and the more it pumps, the more its life is cheerful."”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Marx II. une philosophie de l’économie, éd. Gallimard, coll. « Nrf », 1976, p. 435
Books on Economy and Politics, Marx. A Philosophy of Human Being (1976)
Original: (fr) Comment le capital trouve sa substance et son essence dans le travail vivant, de telle manière qu’il provient exclusivement de lui, ne peut se passer de lui, ne vit que pour autant qu’il puise à chaque instant sa vie dans celle du travailleur, vie qui devient ainsi la sienne, c’est ce qu’exprime à travers toute l’œuvre de Marx le thème du vampire. « Le capital est du travail mort qui, semblable au vampire, ne s’anime qu’en suçant le travail vivant et sa vie est d’autant plus allègre qu’il en pompe davantage ».

Robert Henri photo
Erik Naggum photo

“Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: S-exp vs XML, HTML, LaTeX (was: Why lisp is growing) http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9a30c508201627ee (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Martha Graham photo
Hsu Szu-chien photo

“At the end of the day, nothing matters more than protecting our way of life - one that features being the captain of your own life, being free to choose your own faith, being free to express yourself, and being free from coercion.”

Hsu Szu-chien Taiwanese politician

Hsu Szu-chien (2019) cited in " Dr. Szu-chien Hsu Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Republic of China (Taiwan) Remarks https://www.csis.org/analysis/dr-szu-chien-hsu-deputy-minister-foreign-affairs-republic-china-taiwan-remarks" on Center for Strategies & International Studies, 10 June 2019.

Gaston Bachelard photo

“To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)

Related topics