Surface But Quotes

#1. The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.

Saul Bellow

#2. Nothing moved on the surface but faint coruscations of starlight, caught like fireflies in a spider's web.

Diana Gabaldon

#3. Sometimes people are layered like that. There's something totally different underneath than what's on the surface. But sometimes, there's a third, even deeper level, and that one is the same as the top surface one. Like with pie.

Joss Whedon

#4. Elimae was a magician with a key in her mouth, a foreign language, a matryoshka doll: uncomplicated on the surface, but with a dozen secret selves hidden inside. She thought I didn't notice her, but she's all I did notice.

Kirsty Logan

#5. You can have your pick of pretty women. Why me?
You're like the ocean, Pattyn. Pretty enough on the surface, but dive down into your depths, you'll find beauty most people never see. Lucky me. I fell in, headfirst.

Ellen Hopkins

#6. I mean, jillian gushed. you have this force connecting you. it's under the surface, but it runs deep.

Joan Bauer

#7. Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do ...

E. O. Wilson

#8. Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

Neil Gaiman

#9. There's plenty going on that's substantial and transformative, beneficial and authentic. Just because somebody is in the media, it doesn't mean they're bad. It may mean they're the best, and occasionally you know the cream rises to the surface, but not always everything on the surface is cream.

Surya Das

#10. There is always more in one of Ramanujan's formulae than meets the eye, as anyone who sets to work to verify those which look the easiest will soon discover. In some the interest lies very deep, in others comparatively near the surface; but there is not one which is not curious and entertaining.

G.H. Hardy

#11. Always behave like a duck- keep calm and unruffled on the surface, but paddle like the devil underneath.

Jacob M. Braude

#12. The snow is lovely because it has only one colour, the sea is lovely because it appears to be a completely flat surface, but both sea and snow are deep and know their own qualities.

Paulo Coelho

#13. In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I've always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I've loved, I've pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.

Fernando Pessoa

#14. Be like a duck . . . keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath. - Unknown

Jolene Brackey

#15. We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

William James

#16. You can see how he changed on the surface. But at the core of it all, I think Superman has remained the same - a character with incredible powers but almost superhuman humility and restraint.

Jim Lee

#17. As an actor, what's interesting is what's hidden away beneath the surface. You want to be like a duck on a pond - very calm on the surface but paddling away like crazy underneath.

Alexander Skarsgard

#18. The biggest energy losses for most people are relationships, interrelations with other people. That is where we lose the most energy, through our attachments - opening up to people who might be very nice on the surface but underneath they have a lot of problems.

Frederick Lenz

#19. This type of guy was every type of wrong on the surface, but there was something more there, something I'd seen in that flash of vulnerability that sucked me in.

Nicole Williams

#20. I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.

Margaret Atwood

#21. It's because those events never really become wounds or scars on the surface, but parts of you deep down inside," he said, answering his own question. "You can't see them with the naked eye, but they nevertheless shape the way you move and everything you say and do - until the day you die.

Erik Valeur

#22. It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets.

James McBride

#23. You seem all normal and quiet on the surface. But you are so much weirder than I am, and I am, extremely, fucking, weird.

Neil Gaiman

#24. The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.

Philip Guston

#25. A novelist is like a scout commissioned to go and see what is happening in the depth of the soul. He comes back and reports what he has observed. He never lives on the surface but only inhabits the darkest regions

Julien Green

#26. Your repressed feelings desperately try to climb to the surface but fail to do so, and in therapy we seek to reveal -- to uncloak, if you will -- these unconscious desires, the things that your mind tries to repress, those secrets of your soul.

Allan Dare Pearce

#27. And that is how Goodwin problems were always fixed. Fix them on the surface but don't go to the root, always ignoring the elephant in the room. I think that morning was when I realized I'd grown up with an elephant in every room of my life. It was practically our family pet.

Cecelia Ahern

#28. Nothing improper was occurring, on the surface, but she hadn't said a word about her new friend to Max; and by consistently failing to mention and event of significance in her day she was practising a form of duplicity.

Patrick McGrath

#29. Jealousy is a word with too many meanings. It's a TARDIS of a word, bigger on the inside, a small, mean thing on the surface, but a complicated dance of emotions and negotiations within. I'm suffering with every single meaning of the word jealous.

Sierra Simone

#30. The pole's center was a gleaming lump about the size of a person's head, which any Spacer would recognize as a small nickel-iron asteroid, as common in space as dead leaves were on the reforested surface. But rare down here, even after the Hard Rain.

Neal Stephenson

#31. And that is how the problems were always fixed. Fix them on the surface but don't go to the root, always ignoring the elephant in the room. I think that morning was when I realized I'd grown up with an elephant in every room. It was practically our family pet.

Cecelia Ahern

#32. Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.

Eckhart Tolle

#33. My belief is that if I can achieve that level of entertainment by making the audience happy or sad or angry, then I have succeeded as an actor and have done my job. The profits and the fame as an actor will eventually surface, but first and foremost comes the work as an actor.

Cole Hauser

#34. A frozen river is not a dry one, it's just a still river on the surface but is still moving, and so am my winter writing.

Willie Nelson

#35. 'All we can see is the surface. But there's so much more we can't see beneath. I bet it's as big as the world down there, underneath the water. There could be anything down there. Things we can't even imagine. How can we understand anything if we can see so little of it?'

Augusta Li

#36. She might be a little introverted, livelier of movement than of conversation, neither bashful nor forward, with a soul that seemed submerged, but in a radiant moistness. Opalescent on the surface but translucent in her depths ...

Vladimir Nabokov

#37. And then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.

Virginia Woolf

#38. When we would consider the love of God in Christ, we are as one approaching the ocean: he casts a glance on the surface, but the depths he cannot sound. - R. C. C.

Alexander Strauch

#39. Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.

Michael Caine

#40. Your great power lies not on the surface, but deep within your being.

Roger McDonald

#41. It's important for a parent to learn to take delight in a child whose behavior might seem mystifying. In the case of an extroverted parent with an introverted child, it can be learning to see the inner riches of your child that may not always be expressed on the surface - but are there.

Susan Cain

#42. I was trying to lose weight on the surface, but deeper, I was acknowledging that I'd been wrong for sixteen years and had to work to right myself. How do you walk away from all you've ever been?

Andie Mitchell

#43. Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#44. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels.

Zora Neale Hurston

#45. That's the world that matters. The world where people glitter like diamonds with a million facets. Where people are like pearls, luminous as nacre on the surface but each with a speck that would destroy it if you were looking only for specks.

James A. Michener

#46. There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect.

Bruce Catton

#47. Hearn's death was happily smudged, or at least on the surface, but ever since the second ambush he had been feeling the apprehension of a man in a dream who knows he is guilty, is waiting for his punishment, and cannot remember his crime.

Norman Mailer

#48. The eyes witness what is carved on the surface, but the hearts are witness to something much deeper.

Dixie Waters

#49. But Mike was like a Bjork song-all happy and giddy and fun on the surface, but bubbling with turmoil and pain underneath.

Sara Shepard

#50. Everything with me is pretty close to the surface, but having kids has completely ruined my emotional equilibrium.

Olivia Colman

#51. I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

Henry David Thoreau

#52. I wish there were a way to spend more time on the surface. But oh well. 31 sols will have to do.

Andy Weir

#53. As a general thing, I've always been drawn to characters who appear to be one thing on the surface, but are actually something else underneath.

Michael Sheen

#54. As a surfer, I think of places like a wave: you see one thing on the surface. But you always know there's something different going on underneath.

Don Winslow

#55. My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

Mark Haddon

#56. The natural flow of discourse must be calm and serene; if wit, whim, fun and fire are present, they will not fail to flash brightly along its surface; but they can never constitute the main body of the stream itself.

Arthur Martine

#57. Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Jane Smiley

#58. It feels like a game, this work I do. It is totally heartfelt, and I love the sticky terrain, the straight-up cartoons, how the irrepressible and icky rise to the surface. But I am not just trying to call forth bugaboos and demons for the sake of it, for fun.

Kara Walker

#59. With girls, everything looks great on the surface. But beware of drawers that won't open. They contain a three-month supply of dirty underwear, unwashed hose, and rubber bands with blobs of hair in them.

Erma Bombeck

#60. She lived a life almost obsessively devoted to triviality. She'd turned into a pond skater, not because she didn't know what lay beneath the surface, but precisely because she did.

Pat Barker

#61. Meditation means to know life beyond the sphere of the physical; to know and experience life not just at the surface but at the source.

Jaggi Vasudev

#62. A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.

Joshua Ferris

#63. If things look right on the surface the underside is rarely questioned. However, things may be great in reality, but if one perceives them to be amiss, it is difficult to change that perception.

Aleatha Romig

#64. If people are given the chance to experience life in more than one country, they will hate a little less. It's not a miracle potion, but little by little you can solve problems in the basement of a country, not on the surface.

Marjane Satrapi

#65. And with all of the enemy's citizens living at the bottom of huge gravity wells, we don't even have to aim particularly well. Einstein was right. We will be fighting the next war with rocks. But the Belt has rocks that will turn the surface of Mars into a molten sea.

James S.A. Corey

#66. My mother and I had a lot of distance between us emotionally, although, on the surface, most of the time, we appeared good and friendly, and all that. But I was a problem. I was a street kid.

George Carlin

#67. I say everything and I do whatever I want to do. I'm just me. The polished version of me, I suppose, because I have on clothes and makeup. But emotionally, I am very on the surface.

India.Arie

#68. Romantic Love delivers us into the passionate arms of someone who will ultimately trigger the same frustrations we had with our parents, but for the best possible reason! Doing so brings our childhood wounds to the surface so they can be healed.

Harville Hendrix

#69. They knew that mere appearance and disappearance are on the surface like waves on the sea, but life which is permanent knows no decay or diminution.

Rabindranath Tagore

#70. The ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.

Ellen Glasgow

#71. By turning herself into a fucking machine, she has created a kind of temporary grid. But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand.

Mary Gaitskill

#72. One who provokes a person by speaking has only called to the surface the passion that was already there. The person who becomes disturbed is like a rotten loaf of bread, which looks all right outside, but inside is mouldy, so that if anyone breaks it its rottenness appears. - Dorotheos

Dee Pennock

#73. The hideous thing is this: I want to forgive him. Even after everything, I do. A baby before my 17th birthday and a future as lonely as the surface of the moon and still the sight of him feels like a homecoming, like a song I used to know but somehow forgot.

Katie Cotugno

#74. In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.

Marya Hornbacher

#75. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.

Ruth Ozeki

#76. We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.

Marvin Minsky

#77. I had found that Americans were quick to smile when they greeted you, but often the smile was only on the surface

Twesigye Jackson Kaguri

#78. The old deep sadness of life lay in the bottom of her heart and she knew it was there, but she would not allow herself to sink into it. Out of the dark and sullen bottom of a lake the lotus flowers bloomed upon its surface, and she would pluck the flowers.

Pearl S. Buck

#79. Surface beauty: blond hair, blue eyes" - she was looking at me - "is always easy to recognize. But if someone is braver, stronger, smarter, that's harder to see." - Kendra Hilferty

Alex Flinn

#80. But history is that rare woman who doesn't like to look at herself in the mirror. History, when she finds herself in front of one, wipes and wipes its surface at though in this way she might change her face to something better

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

#81. I felt like I'd been swimming so hard, and the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn't there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers.

Sarah Dessen

#82. Not to live for the day, that would be materialistic - but to treasure the day. I realize that most of us live on the skin - on the surface - without appreciating just how wonderful it is simply to be alive at all.

Audrey Hepburn

#83. On the surface, humans appear to hate conflict, but in reality, they seek it.

Nagaru Tanigawa

#84. Where would I find enough leather
To cover the entire surface of the earth?
But with leather soles beneath my feet,
It's as if the whole world has been covered.

Santideva

#85. He couldn't do anything now but sit and wait for La Familia to surface, and when they did, he'd be ready.

Joe Awsum

#86. Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.

Alan Hirsch

#87. Americans are so often thrown by Japan. It looks familiar but, an inch below the surface, it isn't anything like the West at all.

Cathy Davidson

#88. I felt I should have been the happiest person in the world. But I looked inside, and that happiness was only on the surface, not so deep. Beneath it was hollow. Up until that time, I had been thinking meditation was a joke, a fad and a waste of time.

David Lynch

#89. The camel has his virtues - so much at least must be admitted; but they do not lie upon the surface.

Amelia B. Edwards

#90. Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss. I am left alone on the surface of a turning planet. What to do but, like Michelangelo 's Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?

R.S. Thomas

#91. I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface.

Moby

#92. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Margaret Atwood

#93. There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean.

Edward Humes

#94. Response is what we have trained ourselves to be; it is a reflection of our manhood, character, ideals. We cannot always control our surface reactions, but we can sit at the helm of our lives and control our responses to the blows of life.

Wilferd Peterson

#95. A subtle-witted man is like an arrow, which, rending little surface, enters deeply, but they whose minds are dull resemble stones dashing with clumsy force, but never piercing.

Magha

#96. But nothing is lasting in this world. Even joy begins to fade after only one minute. Two minutes later, and it is weaker still, until finally it is swallowed up in our everyday, prosaic state of mind, just as a ripple made by a pebble gradually merges with the smooth surface of the water.

Nikolai Gogol

#97. Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: It's four o clock. At five I have my abyss ...

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

#98. [Through practice] we can get to the point where some disturbance may occur but the negative effects on our mind remain on the surface, like the waves that may ripple on the surface of an ocean but don't have much effect deep down.

Dalai Lama XIV

#99. The last word smelled of desperation,and the old lawyer sighed. 'I can tell you that the law is an ocean of darkness and truth, and that lawyers are but vessels on the surface. We may pull one rope or another, but it is the client, in the end, who charts the course.

John Hart

#100. There's always a fundamental misery that's with me that I always relate to some bit of loss or something. I don't know what it is about me, but even though I'm happy on the surface, there's something there, I guess. So, it all comes from wherever it comes from. I really don't know where that is.

Don McLean