Static Character Quotes

The presentation of self in everyday life. This guy Goffman had the idea that in different situations, you perform yourself differently. Your character isn’t static. It’s an adaptation.

For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux.

Static people love to compensate for their inability to change themselves by always trying to change the world.

I have a thing about losers. Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws. Not that Dostoyevsky's characters don't generate phatos, but they're flawed in ways that don't come across as faults. And while I'm on the subject, Tolstoy's characters' faults are so epic and out of scale, they're as static as backdrops.

Who knows how long he might have stayed in that city, cozy, dousing his guilt with wine, cauterizing it with tobacco, had the city remained static. But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.

So this book, while continuing the Psy-Changeling storyline—because nothing is ever static in this world—is also a walk through the interconnected lives of many of the characters who’ve become important to us over the past books and novellas. With

In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.

[I]n every real part of the existing world, as well as in every real individual. positive and negative traits are always combined. because there is always a reason for praise as well as for abuse. Such an explanation has a static and mechanical character; it conceives parts of the world scene as isolated, immovable. and completed. Moreover. separate features are stressed according to abstract moral principles. In Rabelais' novel praise-abuse is aimed at the entire present and at each of its parts. for all that exists dies and is born simultaneously, combines the past and the future, the obsolete and the youthful, the old truth and the new truth. However small the part of the existing world we have chosen. we shall find in it the same fusion. And this fusion is deeply dynamic: all that exists, both in the whole and in each of its parts. is in the act of becoming. and therefore comic (as all that is becoming), but its nature is also ironic and joyful.

Novels begin and end with, consist of, and indeed in one sense are nothing but voices. So reading is learning to listen sensitively, and to tune in accurately, to varying frequencies and a developing programme. From the opening words a narrative voice begins to create its own characteristic personality and sensibility, whether it belongs to an 'author' or a 'character'. At the same time a reader is being created, persuaded to become the particular kind of reader the book requires. A relationship develops, which becomes the essential basis of the experience. In the modulation of the fictive voice, finally, through the creation of 'author' and 'reader* and their relationship, there is a definition of the nature and status of the experience, which will always imply a particular idea of ordering the world. So much is perhaps familiar enough, and a useful rhetoric of Voice' has developed. Yet I notice in my students and myself, when its vocabulary is in play, a tendency to become rather too abstract or technical, and above all too spatial and static. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves what it can be like to listen to close friends, talking animatedly and seriously in everyday experience, in order to make sure that a vocabulary which often points only to broad strategies does not tempt us to underplay the extraordinary resourcefulness, variety and fluctuation of the novelist's voice.

The great weakness of Christianity lies in the fact that it ignores rhythm. It balances God with Devil instead of Vishnu with Siva. Its dualisms are antagonistic instead of equilibrating, and therefore can never issue in the functional third in which power is in equilibrium. Its God is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, and does not evolve with an evolving creation, but indulges in one special creative act and rests on His laurels. The whole of human experience, the whole of human knowledge, is against the likelihood of such a concept being true. The Christian concept being static, not dynamic, it does not see that because a thing is good, its opposite is not necessarily evil. It has no sense of proportion because it has no realisation of the principle of equilibrium in space and rhythm in time. Consequently, for the Christian ideal the part is all too often greater than the whole. Meekness, mercy, purity and love are made the ideal of Christian character, and as Nietzsche truly points out, these are slave virtues. There should be room in our ideal for the virtues of the ruler and leader-courage, energy, justice and integrity. Christianity has nothing to tell us about the dynamic virtues; consequently those who get the world's work done cannot follow the Christian ideal because of its limitations and inapplicability to their problems. They can measure right and wrong against no standard save their own self-respect. The result is the ridiculous spectacle of a civilisation, committed to a one-sided ideal, being forced to keep its ideals and its honour in separate compartments.

But roles are not fixed. They are not static. Roles come and go; they shift and they change. They are relative to our culture and subject to changing circumstances. It’s not our roles that define us, but our character. A calling, on the other hand, when rooted deep in the soil of one’s soul, transcends roles. And I believe that my calling, as a Christian, is the same as that of any other follower of Jesus. My calling is to love the Lord with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. Jesus himself said that the rest of Scripture can be rendered down into these two commands. If love was Jesus’ definition of “biblical,” then perhaps it should be mine.

The definition of superb animation is that each character on the screen makes you believe it is a thinking being. Whether it’s a T-Rex or a slinky dog or a desk lamp, if viewers sense not just movement but intention—or, put another way, emotion—then the animator has done his or her job. It’s not just lines on paper anymore; it’s a living, feeling entity. This is what I experienced that night, for the first time, as I watched Donald leap off the page. The transformation from a static line drawing to a fully dimensional, animated image was sleight of hand, nothing more, but the mystery of how it was done—not just the technical process but the way the art was imbued with such emotion—was the most interesting problem I’d ever considered. I wanted to climb through the TV screen and be part of this world.

The trouble is that such categories do not take us much further. They are academic abstractions that do not do justice to the process-character of the observable social data to which they refer. Underlying them is the idea that the tidy division into epochs we usually find in history books best fits the actual course of social development. Each figure who is known through the magnitude of his or her achievement is then allocated to one epoch or the other as its high point. On closer examination, however, it not uncommonly emerges that outstanding achievements occur most frequently at times which could at most be called transitional phases if static concepts of epochs are used. In other words, such achievements arise from the dynamics of the conflict between the canons of older declining classes and newer rising ones.

We think of memory as if it were a hard drive, he said, and in some ways that’s what it’s like, but it’s like something altogether different, too. It’s a stage and a director, and over time the play changes, the characters are changed, but it’s a funny play because we lose sight of what those characters once were to us. Memory is not static but a thing in motion, and because we are passengers without a frame of reference, the motion is imperceptible, so that at any given point in time, all we have is a set of memories, a thing of the instantaneous present and not of the past. I read somewhere, some researcher explaining that every time we recall something, our future memory of it changes, as if we rewrite or overwrite the memory with a new memory after each use in an ongoing palimpsest. Which, it strikes me, must make it hard to lose the memory of something whose memory you dearly wish to lose, which is to say that if memory serves us well, sometimes some things are blessedly forgotten.

One of the most effective ways to quicken your story’s pace is to move from a static description of an object, place or person to an active scene. The classic method for accomplishing this is to have your character interact with the subject that’s been described. For instance, let’s say you’ve just written three paragraphs describing a wedding dress in a shop window. You’ve detailed the Belgian lace veil, the beaded bodice, the twelve-foot train, even the row of satin buttons down the sleeves. Instinctively you feel it’s time to move into an action scene, but how do you do it without making your transition obvious? A simple, almost seamless way is to initiate an action between your character (let’s call her Miranda) and the dress you’ve just described. Perhaps Miranda could be passing by on the sidewalk when the dress in the window catches her attention. Or she could walk into the shop and ask the shopkeeper how much the dress costs. This method works well to link almost any static description with a scene of action. Describe an elegant table, for instance, complete with crystal goblets, damask tablecloth, monogrammed napkins and sterling silver tableware; then let the maid pull a cloth from her apron and begin to polish one of the forks. Or describe a Superman kite lying beside a tree, then watch as a little girl grabs the string and begins to run. You will still be describing, but the nature of your description will have changed from static to active, thus quickening the story’s pace. Throughout

Despite these heady attractions, Dewey gradually drifted away from Hegel. Darwin replaced Hegel as a source of inspiration for the organic, dynamic, changing character of life. But the “subjective” factors that originally attracted Dewey to Hegel stayed with him throughout his life and deeply marked his own experimentalist version of pragmatism. Dewey, in effect, naturalized Hegel. Dewey’s concept of experience as a transaction that spans space and time, involving both undergoing and activity, shows the Hegelian influence. Subject and object are understood as functional distinctions within the dynamics of a unified developing experience. Like Hegel, Dewey is critical of all dualisms and the fixed dichotomies that have plagued philosophy, including mind and body as well as nature and experience. Dewey’s hostility to the merely formal and static was inspired by Hegel. Dewey, like Hegel, was alert to the role of conflicts in experience: how they are be overcome in the course of experience, and how new conflicts break out. Typically he approaches philosophical problems in a Hegelian manner by delineating opposing extremes, showing what is false about them, indicating how we can preserve the truth implicit in them, and passing beyond these extremes to a more comprehensive resolution.

[I]n nature being and nothing, or solid and space, constitute a relationship as inseparable as back and front. In the same way, the formally static character of our words for feelings conceals the fact (or better, the event) that our feelings are directions rather than states, and that in the realm of direction there is no North without South.

The structures of collective and personal life in Polish shtetls were so exactly defined as to be infinitely replicable — as the structure of a honeycomb is replicable throughout a beehive. Each shtetl was a self-contained world, and each was utterly recognizable as an instance of its kind. This consistency, the patterned predictability of life, was undoubtedly part of the shtetl's strength. But it also meant that the shtetl was a deeply conservative organism, resistant to innovation, individuality, or rebellion. It is hard to think of any analogues to the early shtetl society, for its character was part untouchable and part Brahmin, simultaneously ancient and pioneering, both pragmatically materialistic and sternly religious. It was a peculiar, idiosyncratic form of a rural, populist theocracy.

When she mentioned Hegel, the early-nineteenth-century philosopher, the other girls in the classroom rolled their eyes and began mumbling to one another in French, their voices hissing with disdain. Clearly Hegel had been a topic of discussion before. Corine was right that the famous philosopher thought little of Africa and African people. He wrote that African history, whatever there was of it, contributed nothing to global development and world history. In his work, he wrote of the inferiority of Africans and how they did not possess the capacity to be seen as fully human but instead existed as static subordinate entities. “From these various traits it is manifest that want of self-control distinguishes the character of the Negroes. This condition is capable of no development or culture, and as we see them at this day, such have they always been. The only essential connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes and the Europeans is that of slavery.

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

Sometimes this verb indicates that a sentence is currently in the passive voice, when you might be better off attaching the action described to a character (“the bomb is being defused” becomes “Angela defuses the bomb”); other times they indicate habitual actions or a static moment that might be better off happening within a single beat of narrative time (“we were fighting the dragon” becomes “we fought the dragon”).

Thus by loving we know God in God and through God for in love the Three Divine Persons are made known to us, sealing our souls not with a static likeness but with the impression of their infinite Life. Our souls are sealed with the character of God as the air is full of sunshine. Glory to God in the highest, who has sealed us with His holiness, sealed us all together, brothers, in His Christ. Amen. Amen.

Lewis told Margaret stories about Wren, who at times seemed like a character in a wonderful book, a static entity whose movements, while profound, would always be limited to a finite story.

Compared to the kata for sword fighting or jūjutsu, karate kata are longer. They are a sequence of scenes designed like a little drama. A long karate kata can include more than 70 different actions. Sword fighting or jūjutsu kata, however, are only single attack or defense actions. They are not dynamic forms like karate kata but static models. In fact, for the two kata types even different kanji are used. This specific character of karate kata must be well understood. Karate was created and developed in the Tokugawa period and was not protected and promoted by the ruling system like sword fighting. Instead it was highly suppressed by the officials. The technical and the psychological and spiritual knowledge could not be put down in a sophisticated language as it could be done for sword fighting. In order to explain the techniques to the students by using kata, to demonstrate what was to be observed in particular and what was not done correctly, one needed rather long sequences of actions. The old masters could not describe the techniques with written words or pictures and had to express them in the kata. This needed a lot of time, brains and effort. Furthermore, the kata had to become a means to teach without words not only the technical aspects but also the psychological and spiritual abilities to turn the methods of killing into methods of saving lives.

scripting language is a programming language that provides you with the ability to write scripts that are evaluated (or interpreted) by a runtime environment called a script engine (or an interpreter). A script is a sequence of characters that is written using the syntax of a scripting language and used as the source for a program executed by an interpreter. The interpreter parses the scripts, produces intermediate code, which is an internal representation of the program, and executes the intermediate code. The interpreter stores the variables used in a script in data structures called symbol tables. Typically, unlike in a compiled programming language, the source code (called a script) in a scripting language is not compiled but is interpreted at runtime. However, scripts written in some scripting languages may be compiled into Java bytecode that can be run by the JVM. Java 6 added scripting support to the Java platform that lets a Java application execute scripts written in scripting languages such as Rhino JavaScript, Groovy, Jython, JRuby, Nashorn JavaScript, and so on. Two-way communication is supported. It also lets scripts access Java objects created by the host application. The Java runtime and a scripting language runtime can communicate and make use of each other’s features. Support for scripting languages in Java comes through the Java Scripting API. All classes and interfaces in the Java Scripting API are in the javax.script package. Using a scripting language in a Java application provides several advantages: Most scripting languages are dynamically typed, which makes it simpler to write programs. They provide a quicker way to develop and test small applications. Customization by end users is possible. A scripting language may provide domain-specific features that are not available in Java. Scripting languages have some disadvantages as well. For example, dynamic typing is good to write simpler code; however, it turns into a disadvantage when a type is interpreted incorrectly and you have to spend a lot of time debugging it. Scripting support in Java lets you take advantage of both worlds: it allows you to use the Java programming language for developing statically typed, scalable, and high-performance parts of the application and use a scripting language that fits the domain-specific needs for other parts. I will use the term script engine frequently in this book. A script engine is a software component that executes programs written in a particular scripting language. Typically, but not necessarily, a script engine is an implementation of an interpreter for a scripting language. Interpreters for several scripting languages have been implemented in Java. They expose programming interfaces so a Java program may interact with them.

come alive and to speak, had to be chosen by the reader, who would vary the sounded breath according to the written context. By this innovation, the aleph-beth was able to greatly reduce the necessary number of characters for a written script to just twenty-two—a simple set of signs that could be readily practiced and learned in a brief period by anyone who had the chance, even by a young child. The utter simplicity of this technical innovation was such that the early Semitic aleph-beth, in which were written down the various stories and histories that were later gathered into the Hebrew Bible, was adopted not only by the Hebrews but by the Phonecians (who presumably carried the new technology across the Mediterranean to Greece), the Aramaeans, the Greeks, the Romans, and indeed eventually gave rise (directly or indirectly) to virtually every alphabet known, including that which I am currently using to scribe these words. With the advent of the aleph-beth, a new distance opens between human culture and the rest of nature. To be sure, pictographic and ideographic writing already involved a displacement of our sensory participation from the depths of the animate environment to the flat surface of our walls, of clay tablets, of the sheet of papyrus. However, as we noted above, the written images themselves often related us back to the other animals and the environing earth. The pictographic glyph or character still referred, implicitly, to the animate phenomenon of which it was the static image; it was that worldly phenomenon, in turn, that provoked from us the sound of its name. The sensible phenomenon and its spoken name were, in a sense, still participant with one another—the name a sort of emanation of the sensible entity. With the phonetic aleph-beth, however, the written character no longer refers us to any sensible phenomenon out in the world, or even to the name of such a phenomenon (as with the rebus), but solely to a gesture to be made by the human mouth. There is a concerted shift of attention away from any outward or worldly reference of the pictorial image, away from the

If I seem to the reader a somewhat static character he should appreciate the long conditioning of my career before retirement.

Character and motivation are not static qualities; they undergo growth and change in lives normally marked by crucial junctures and times of future-determining decision. Moreover, the selfhood or (in Erikson’s phrase) “psychosocial identity” formed in youth has a prospective or programmatic dimension. It comprises not simply an individual’s sense of who and what he is, but also his goals—his clear or inchoate beliefs about what he can, should, and will achieve. Hence later biographical vicissitudes cannot but impinge upon personality profoundly. Fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the inner life-scenario necessarily affects the individual’s relationship to himself, and this is something that lies at the core of personality. It is likewise bound to affect his relations with other persons significant to him and thereby, perhaps, his and their lives as a whole.

Having identity means that you know who you are and like who you are. You are able to be an authentic person in your disclosures to others.You have integrity.You believe in yourself and are responsible for your actions. You have your own opinions and you let others have theirs. You are confident of your abilities and respect those of others. To be able to make choices for yourself and to function as a separate individual is a demonstration of your autonomy. ... Having identity is becoming your own individual and being able to express it. It means that you know yourself. It means that you are able to fit together into an integrated whole all the different images of yourself that have accrued to you throughout the years. Within that whole, however, there must be room for future images. Our quest for identity involves both BEING and BECOMING, for we are constantly changing. The man who never changes is not the man who has found his ultimate identity - it is rather a man who is afraid to seek his identity and has instead attached himself to a static role like a barnacle to a rock.

Neat rooms are much like one-dimensional characters—they remain static, unchanging. They lack depth. Now this reminds me of a dynamic character—much more personality!

In a way, the view that we are chained to our natures and the belief that we are products of external forces are diametrically opposed. One sees each human as a product of his or her own static character and disposition. The other sees each individual as an object on which circumstances act. Both see human behavior as constrained rather than free. One can be agnostic about whether internal or external forces are more influential in any given case and still acknowledge that the end result is limit rather than choice.

Liberalism’s first guiding idea—conflict—was less an ideal or principle than a way to picture society and what to expect from society. Lasting conflict of interests and beliefs was, to the liberal mind, inescapable. Social harmony was not achievable, and to pursue it was foolish. That picture was less stark than it looked, for harmony was not even desirable. Harmony stifled creativity and blocked initiative. Conflict, if tamed and turned to competition in a stable political order, could bear fruit as argument, experiment, and exchange. Human power, second, was for liberals implacable. It could never be counted on to behave well. Superior power of some people over others, whether political, economic, or social, tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked. Liberalism’s call to resist power was often put negatively. Resistance required the refusal of submission and the prevention of domination by any single interest, faith, or class. Human character and human society as liberals saw them were, third, not static but dynamic. They were open to change. Liberal hope stiffened by liberal history suggested that both character and society might change for the better. The fourth liberal idea was that moral limits existed to how superior power could treat people. Might alone was not right. Power was obliged to respect people for themselves. Liberal respect could also be put negatively. It set out what superior power should not do: obstruct or intrude on people in pursuit of their chosen enterprises or beliefs. Once embraced democratically, respect for people as such forbade power from excluding anyone from the circle of liberal protection.