Foil Character Quotes

When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader. Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. If a character's life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author's eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own. With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. In this, we don't merely write *about* a character -- we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser. What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator.

I’m a protagonist,” said Jaime. “I’m always lucky.” “Hamlet might disagree with you.” “Hamlet had a fencing foil and a codpiece. I have a sawed-off twelve-gauge and a nine-millimeter semi-automatic.

But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book so that his very absence becomes a kind of radiant presence. As the French say, il brille par son absence — "he shines by his absence." In connection with Bleak House we are concerned with one of those authors who are so to speak not supreme deities, diffuse and aloof, but puttering, amiable, sympathetic demigods, who descend into their books under various disguises or send therein various middlemen, representatives, agents, minions, spies, and stooges. [...] Roughly speaking, there are three types of such representatives. Let us inspect them. First, the narrator insofar as he speaks in the first person, the capital I of the story, its moving pillar. [...] Second, a type of author's representative, what I call the sifting agent. [...] The third type is the so-called perry, possibly derived from periscope, despite the double r, or perhaps from parry in vague connection with foil as in fencing. But this does not matter much since anyway I invented the term myself many years ago.

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Part IV If you are mighty, gain respect through knowledge And through gentleness of speech. Don’t command except as is fitting, He who provokes gets into trouble. Don't be haughty, lest you be humbled, Don’t be mute, lest you be chided. When you answer one who is fuming, Avert your face, control yourself. The flame of the hot-heart sweeps across. He who steps gently, his path is paved. He who frets all day has no happy moment, He who’s gay all day can’t keep house. Don’t oppose a great man’s action. Don’t vex the heart of one who is burdened; If he gets angry at him who foils him, The ka will part from him who loves him. Yet he is the provider along with the god, What he wishes should be done for him. When he turns his face back to you after raging, There will be peace from his ka; As ill will comes from opposition,. So goodwill increases love. Teach the great what is useful to him, Be his aid before the people; If you Set his knowledge impress his lord, Your sustenance will come from his ka As the favorite's belly is filled. So your back will be clothed by it, And his help will be there sustain you. For your superior whom you love And who lives by it, He in turn will give you good support. Thus will love of you endure In the belly of those who love you, He is a ka who loves to listen. If you are a magistrate of standing. Commissioned to satisfy the many, Hew a straight line, When you speak don't lean to one side. Beware lest one complain: “Judges, he distorts the matter!” And your deed turns into a judgment (of you). If you are angered by misdeed. Lean toward a man account of his rightness; Pass it over, don’t recall it, Since he was silent to you the first day If you are great after having been humble, Have gained wealth after having been poor In the past, in a town which you know, Knowing your former condition. Do not put trust in your wealth, Which came to you as gift of god; So that you will not fall behind one like you, To whom the same has happened, Bend your back to your superior, Your overseer from the palace; Then your house will endure in its wealth. Your rewards in their right place. Wretched is he who opposes a superior, One lives as long as he is mild, Baring the arm does not hurt it Do not plunder a neighbor’s house, Do not steal the goods of one near you, Lest he denounce you before you are heard A quarreler is a mindless person, If he is known as an aggressor The hostile man will have trouble in the neighborhood. This maxim is an injunction against illicit sexual intercourse. It is very obscure and has been omitted here. If you probe the character of a friend, Don’t inquire, but approach him, Deal with him alone, So as not to suffer from his manner. Dispute with him after a time, Test his heart in conversation; If what he has seen escapes him, If he does a thing that annoys you, Be yet friendly with him, don’t attack; Be restrained, don’t let fly, Don’t answer with hostility, Neither part from him nor attack him; His time does not fail to come, One does not escape what is fated Be generous as long as you live, What leaves the storehouse does not return; It is the food to be shared which is coveted. One whose belly is empty is an accuser; One deprived becomes an opponent, Don’t have him for a neighbor. Kindness is a man’s memorial For the years after the function.

Peary was born in 1908, son of a Portuguese immigrant, and christened Harrold José de Faria. He once pinpointed his first radio job as Jan. 21, 1923, at KZM, Oakland. In the late 1920s he worked at NBC in San Francisco. The Spanish Serenader, a series vintage 1928, gave him a chance to use his singing voice as well as acting talent. Landing in Chicago in 1937, he soon became one of radio’s insiders, gaining a reputation as a top utility man. For a year he played various characters named Gildersleeve on the McGee program: then he approached writer Don Quinn with an idea of a meatier role for himself—a pompous windbag, perfect foil for McGee, who himself ran the biggest bluff in Wistful Vista.

In Singin’ in the Rain, Lina Lamont provides both an effective “beard” for Don and Cosmo and a foil, representing both the reason for Don’s “unattached” state and the basis for their mutual contempt for women. Yet the signs are all there to be read for those interested in reading them: Cosmo and Don performing as a burlesque team, in which they sit on each other’s laps and play each other’s violins; Cosmo’s comment to Lina after the premiere of The Royal Rascal, “Yeah, Lina, you looked pretty good for a girl”;30 and their bullying, in “Moses Supposes,” of the fogyish diction coach, figuratively drawn out of his closet only to be ridiculed as an asexual “pansy” who can’t sing and dance (thus both confirming and denying homosexuality at the same time).31 On a broader scale, Kelly’s career as a dancer, offering a more masculinized style of athletic dance (in opposition especially to the stylized grace of Fred Astaire), represented a similar balancing act between, in this case, the feminized occupation of balletic dance and a strong claim of heterosexual masculinity. Significantly, the process of exclusion they use with the diction coach is precisely what Cosmo proposes they apply to Lina in converting The Dueling Cavalier into a musical: “It’s easy to work the numbers. All you have to do is dance around Lina and teach her how to take a bow.” But they also apply the strategy to Kathy, who is only just learning to “dance” in this sense (conveniently so, since Debbie Reynolds had had but little dance training, as noted).32 Early on, we see her dance competently in “All I Do Is Dream of You,” but she then seems extremely tentative in “You Were Meant for Me,” immobile for much of the number, not joining in the singing, and dancing only as Don draws her in (which is, of course, consistent with her character’s development at this point). With “Good Mornin’,” though, she seems to “arrive” as part of the Don-Cosmo team, even though for part of the number she serves as a kind of mannequin—much like the voice teacher in “Moses Supposes,” except that she sings the song proper while Don and Cosmo “improvise” tongue-twisting elaborations between the lines. As the number evolves, their emerging positions within the group become clear. Thus, during their solo clownish dance bits, using their raincoats as props, Kathy and Don present themselves as fetishized love objects, Kathy as an “Island girl” and Don as a matador, while Cosmo dances with a “dummy,” recalling his earlier solo turn in “Make ’em Laugh.

Sensation Hunters (January 3, 1934), features Brennan as a stuttering waiter in a nightclub, whose scenes usually end before he can finish a sentence. Dressed in a short cutaway jacket with a lock of hair curled in the middle of his forehead, he is ridiculously slow on the uptake when he is addressed ironically by his employer—“Hey, Handsome,” “Hey, Honey”—as she brushes past him. Before he can say much, she is gone, leaving him to stare dumbly at the tray in his hands. This a typical example of the comic relief he brought to otherwise ordinary scenes, but in this case he also serves as a foil to the fast-paced world of showgirls, con artists, and pickpockets. In a way, Brennan became a specialist, employed to get scenes off to a fast start, or to make a snappy transition with just a little bit of the actor’s business—in this case straining for words that his impatient employer cannot bother to take in. His one moment of joy comes when several showgirls jostle him on their way to the stage, his one brush with stardom. And then he vanishes from the film, no longer of use to the plot.

Paul has employed the account of Moses and the veil as a foil to the openness that characterizes the †new covenant ministry and as a metaphor to explain Israel’s blindness. Now, through the image of unveiled faces, he describes the transformation brought about by the life-giving Spirit. He teaches that the Spirit empowers his recipients to take on the character and likeness of Christ Jesus.

What made Quebec unique, for Valaskakis, was that it escaped the prison of monolithism that entrapped so many other societies. Montreal symbolized “a veritable mosaic of nationalities, ideas, and points of view. Here we have an open society, and therefore a rich and fertile one. Here we have, in opposition to the old European capitals, a human dimension which is a language without nationality, an aggregate of values, a free spirit.” But Montreal was not only different from Europe – it was also an alternative to the rest of North America. “This character,” he argued, “exists only because of francophone Quebec culture which, through its vitality, has foiled North America. And it is this same society which can either remain multi-dimensional or itself become monolithic.” He worried that nationalism had the potential of denying Quebec’s diversity, and that, if this were to happen, the “transatlantic and multicultural symbiosis of Quebec will be eliminated. The American melting-pot will be neutralized, but only to be replaced by a new French-language one. Individualities will be broken, dissidents will be treated as foolish and a monolithism as ruthless … and as ugly as its American version will transform us.” “We can therefore ask ourselves,” he wrote, “what would be the interest of being ‘melted’ in French rather than in English?

Never mind about Savoir-faire now, I have high standards. I am not like most men who proclaimed to be knights in shining armour while wearing tin foil to mask their characters. I am incorruptible, my word is my integrity, my justice, my manners, my moral code my philosophy, my principles this is what my word stands for, this is my life. You should be honoured to have a giant of a man like me to call your younger brother!

Secretly, she fretted about her vanished children, lost to unknown stories in what was then a very distant elsewhere. She also had the sorrow all Kerry people have when they’re not in Kerry, but this she countered with copious letter-writing. Letters took several days to write, the lost art of composition then a tenet of civility, and sheets of blotting paper with traceries of script indicative of the hand-pressed, my-hand-to-your-hand nature of the thing. She’d write those letters until the day she died, her forefinger inked and with a permanent pen-welt. She had many correspondents. One was Aunt Nollaig, who went to America, and defeated the physics of space by writing ever smaller on the single page of the aerogramme, her character apparent the moment Doady ran the knife carefully along the dotted line and held to the light the script that with Ganga’s loupe would take days to fully decipher. Doady’s own missives went across the river and over the mountains and brought replies that were read over several times, then folded back into their envelopes and stored inside a foil-lined tea chest stamped CEYLON, where in ink, paper and penmanship a kind of inner Kerry endured, and could be visited easier than the real thing.

Tempest, on the other hand, was like her antihero or foil character. You know the one who made the hero look good?

What is Anikwenwa doing in my house? What is a worshiper of idols doing in my house? Leave my house!’” (Adichie 70). At this part of the story, the dad is yelling at a person who entered under his roof that was not Christian and contradicted the Christian belief which is worshiping one God. I chose this quote for three main reasons, the first being that as a reader this was one of the first times I was able to see the dad’s other side. Normally, he is portrayed as quiet, strict but it was unknown to what extent he cared about following the Christian beliefs. Secondly, I was taken aback by the character’s development, as the man he is yelling at is a grandfather. I don't quite understand how one would have the heart to do so which is able to show me how strong his beliefs are. Lastly, it truly shows the theme of the story of how closing your minds to other religions, start to tear you down. His closed mindset prevents him from seeing the goodness in other cultures, this failure is what sets him apart and almost acts as a foil for the mother in the story. No exposure to other religions makes him blinder to new/different ideas that may be presented in front of him.

He labored under a terrible strain that would have destroyed a lesser man. Ennobled by adversity and leading by example, he had been dismayed and depressed but never defeated. The cheerless atmosphere at Valley Forge was much more the rule than the exception during the war. Few people with any choice in the matter would have persisted in this impossible, self-sacrificing situation for so long. Washington’s job as commander in chief was as much a political as a military task, and he performed it brilliantly, functioning as de facto president of the country. His stewardship of the army had been a masterly exercise in nation building. In defining the culture of the Continental Army, he had helped to mold the very character of the country, preventing the Revolution from taking a bloodthirsty or despotic turn. In the end, he had managed to foil the best professional generals that a chastened Great Britain could throw at him. As Benjamin Franklin told an English friend after the war, “An American planter was chosen by us to command our troops and continued during the whole war. This man sent home to you, one after another, five of your best generals, baffled, their heads bare of laurels, disgraced even in the opinion of their employers.