Tropes Quotes

“The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.”
― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

“the love
some girls
have for
other girls
is
so gentle
& so soft
& so fucking
beautiful,
& these girls
deserve
to have
better stories
than the ones
where they
are murdered
because they love
with too much
of their
hearts.
- love is never a weakness”
― Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in This One

“Tropes are the dreams of speech.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“So was she on the side of dragons and indifferent to the fate of princesses?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“Maybe [Snow White] never wakes up. More likely than anything else, really. You can’t kiss a girl into anything.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Once there was a girl who ate an apple not meant for her...Up until the apples, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Why are breakfast food breakfast foods?" I asked them. "Like, why don't we have curry for breakfast?" "Hazel, eat." "But why?" I asked. "I mean seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it's a breakfast sandwich.”
Dad answered with his mouth full.
"When you come back, we'll have breakfast for dinner deal?"
“I don't want to have breakfast for dinner." I answered, crossing knife and fork over my mostly full plate, "I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous construction that a scrambled egg inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at dinner time."
“You gotta pick your battles in this world Hazel.” My mom said, “But if this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you.”
“Quite a bit behind you.” My dad added, and mom laughed.
Anyway, I knew it was stupid, but I felt kind of bad for scrambled eggs.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You’re always dealing with a stereotype. There’s the superhuman trope and the vulnerable trope – the benefit scrounger, someone who takes, doesn’t offer anything to society because they’re so incapable. And if you’re trying to be the superhuman, you don’t want to look as if you’re leaning on anyone, because people will think, which one are you? It’s really hard to embody both. But the gap between the tropes is where we want to live.”
― Sophie L. Morgan

“The tropes are hungry and the hero is in the wrong goddamn story.”
― tumblr User runecestershire, daimonie & whopooh

“I stared at the list, as though willing the murderer's name to appear in red letters before my eyes. I felt I was so close to discovering something, if only I could find the right link, some bit of information that would point in the right direction. At least, that was how it worked in the mystery novels.”
― Ashley Weaver, Murder at the Brightwell

“In the novels, it always seemed best to keep the suspect talking. Inevitably, help would arrive. I really held out no hope for such an opportune occurrence, but it seemed the best course of action would be to distract her until I could determine what to do.”
― Ashley Weaver, Murder at the Brightwell

“Looking off to the horizon, properly and heroically squinting, Onni added, 'Get your washtub ready, brother. It will be a bloody business when the gnome empire strikes back.'

'Whoa,' Offi said, with feeling. 'You totally just gave me chills.”
― Delilah S. Dawson, No Country for Old Gnomes

“I suppose we are indeed a community; a collection of ice revenants, draugr kings, daemonprinces, and dragon lords… in a beautiful concert with one another when we’re not feuding over scraps at the dinner table.
Heroes, eat your hearts out.”
― K.M. Mayville, Jane the Lich

“I'm honestly kind of surprised. You've got a flair for drama, Misha. I thought you might get hard over some final sacrifice for love, or whatever. I mean, you're the writer, not me, but that's got Emmy written all over it."

"Bury your gays." I reply, utterly deadpan.

Jack rolls his eyes.

In film, in TV, in books... the queer characters never get a happy ending," I press. "Sometimes they're the first to go, other times they make some brave sacrifice in the finale, but it always ends in tragedy and death. That's why it's called bury your gays.”
― Chuck Tingle, Bury Your Gays

“As I stated earlier, I do not believe there is anything inherently wrong with even the most overused elements of epic fantasy. Magic swords, dragons, destined heroes -- even dark lords and ultimate evils can legitimately be used in literature of serious intent, not just mocked in satirical meta-fiction. To claim that they cannot would be much the same as claiming that nothing good can ever again be done with fiction involving detectives, or young lovers, or unhappy families. The value of a fictive element is not an inherent quality, but a contextual one, determined by its relationship to the other elements of the story it is embedded in.

In other words, whether a scene in which a dragon is introduced is affecting, amusing, or agonizingly dull depends primarily on the choices made by the scene's author. I say "primarily" because dragons have appeared in thousands of stories over the centuries, and almost any reader may be presumed to have been exposed to at least one such. The reader's reaction will naturally be influenced by how they feel this new dragon compares to the dragons which they have been introduced to in the past. (Favorably, one would hope. A dragon must learn to make a good first impression if it is to do well in this life.) Such variables are out of the author's control, as are any unreasoning prejudices against dragons on the part of the reader. All that can be done is to make the dragon as vivid and well-suited for its purpose as is possible. If all the elements of fantasy and fiction in a work are fitted to their purposes and combine to create a moving story set in a convincing world, that work will presumably be a masterpiece.”
― Alec Austin

“So what happened . . . with Rupert?' I asked at last. I was genuinely curious. If I were to be murdered tonight by a deranged killer, I should hate to do it with questions still lingering in my mind.”
― Ashley Weaver, Murder at the Brightwell

“Miss Foxe's other passion was fairy tales. She loved the transformations in them. Everybody was in disguise, or on their way to becoming something else. And all was overcome by order in the end. Love could not prevail if the order of the tale didn't wish it, and neither could hatred, nor grief, nor cunning. If you were the first of three siblings, then you were going to make a big mistake, and that was that. If you were the third sibling, you couldn't fail.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

“He was good-looking. Enough to make me feel uncomfortable. Tall and dark, etc.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox

“Clichés work by appealing to the collective unconscious. They are the Pachelbel’s Canon in D of writing, something familiar the talented can riff off to create a distinct work. I want to subvert tropes, but I have to make sure my audience understands the game first.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Added to the exigencies of structure are the necessities developing about the recurring characters in any [television] series. These types must remain stable enough for audience identification and development of residual personality, yet they are also responsible for satisfying the constant demand for variety. Irwin Blacker indicates the problem of developing character as one of the difficulties of creating a classic Western in the television format. If the story is to have any significance, says Blacker, the people in it must change; yet in a Western series the hero cannot risk change. The writer, therefore, must continually use "guest" characters who are able to develop, change, or die within the context of the weekly episode while the hero functions as a catalyst in that action. This constraint, though preventing the series from developing into a significant drama, achieves a twofold purpose necessary to the continuing story: the variety of secondary plots and character retains audience interest; the stability of the continually developing (but basically unchanging) residual personality of the hero sustains audience loyalty.”
― Rita Parks, The Western Hero in Film and Television: Mass Media Mythology

“All fantasy tales bathe in the same myth pool and soak in its archetypes and tropes. It's how each author tosses the stock ingredients of the salad that renders their telling unique.”
― Stewart Stafford

“…there is a particular boldness in metaphor, which is not to be found in the same degree in any of the figures of rhetoric. Without any thing like an explicit comparison, and commonly without any warning or apology, the name of one thing is obtruded upon us, for the name of another quite different, though resembling in some quality. The consequence of this is, that as there is always in this trope an apparent at least, if it cannot be called a real impropriety, and some degree of obscurity, a new metaphor is rarely to be risked.”
― George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“And as to ordinary metaphors, or those which have already received the public sanction, and which are commonly very numerous in every tongue, the metaphorical meaning comes to be as really ascertained by custom in the particular language as the original, or what is called the literal meaning of the word. And in this respect metaphors stand on the same foot of general use with proper terms.”
― George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“If the gods are so intent on having some random yokel do their dirty work for them, the least they can do is leave behind more than the vague notion of Save the world at all costs, Joe. Because Joe is going to fuck it up. Joes always do.”
― K.M. Mayville, Jane the Lich

“if he found a book misplaced at a bookstore, would return it to the shelf where it belonged.
Everything had its place.
He was a bullet journal guy, and I was a sticky note kind of girl.”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics