"Rewriting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the years of close work upon her "Romola," "I began it a young woman, I finished it an old woman." One of Emerson's biographers says, referring to his method of rewriting, revising, correcting, and eliminating: "His apples were sorted over and over again, until only the very rarest, the most perfect, were left. It did not matter that those thrown away were very good and helped to make clear the possibilities ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... being the portrait of a man wholly given over to selfish ambitions finally attained, but "at the cost of every good thing in his life," including the loss of his "honour," his lady-love, and the trust and affection of his friends. Young Canby had worked patiently at his manuscript, rewriting, condensing, pouring over it the sincere sweat of his brow and the light of his boarding-house lamp during most of the evenings of two years, until at last he was able to tell his confidants, rather huskily, that there was "not one ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... amount to a quarter of the bulk finally published. This being returned to him from the printer in "slip" on sheets with very large margins, he would set to work on the correction; that is to say, on the practical rewriting of the thing, with excisions, alterations, and above all, additions. A "revise" being executed, he would attack this revise in the same manner, and not unfrequently more than once, so that the expenses of mere composition and correction ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... Doctor was followed, two years later, by Between Two Thieves. This novel has as a leading character Florence Nightingale under the name of Ada Merling. The story was at first to have been called "The Lady With The Lamp"; but the author delayed it for a year and subjected it to a complete rewriting, the result of a new and enlarged conception of ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... worked with his usual energy at the rehearsals, continually rewriting parts of the play, and besides this occupation spending hours in the theatre bureau, as he had determined to sell all the tickets himself. For the first night of "Les Ressources de Quinola" the audience was to be brilliantly representative ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... it is. I retained, I suppose, some tolerable opinion of my own composition, though Janet did not comprehend it, and felt loath to retrench those Delilahs of the imagination, as Dryden calls them, the tropes and figures of which are caviar to the multitude. Besides, I hate rewriting as much as Falstaff did paying back—it is a double labour. So I determined with myself to consult Janet, in future, only on such things as were within the limits of her comprehension, and hazard my arguments and my rhetoric ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... first two heads was done by myself. The language was so much the subject of criticism and of rewriting that the responsibility for item three cannot be put upon any one. The same may be said of the work under item four; although that work was unimportant comparatively. The copy of the Constitution which ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... author, and so proceeded to get up the subject at first hand. He took not one of the facts for granted. After three months he returned the revised manuscript to the magazine. It was sent back, with specific directions for rewriting. In due course he again remailed it to the editor, who congratulated him on his achievement—for that is what it was. Then the article, having attained a satisfactory form (it was on Fraternal Insurance), was sent round among the experts. The first man who read it was a high official ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the decade, I had written a book which remained unfinished, treating of the superstitions of the islanders; this new book, which will be called the tenth and last, I wish to dedicate to you, without rewriting my work or sending you my draft. Therefore, if on reading the ninth book you come across promises which are not realised, do not be astonished; it is not necessary ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... I am not swearing. [To Lubin] If you want the professional humbug of rewriting the Bible in words of four syllables, and pretending it's something new, I can humbug you to your heart's content. I can call Genesis Phylogenesis. Let the Creator say, if you like, 'I will establish an antipathetic ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... model, "the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the Birthmark in Hawthorne's romance. To recast a chapter of the Revolution in the form of a chapter of Macaulay would be like rewriting Tacitus in the form of Cicero, or Browning in the form of Pope. Carlyle is seldom obscure, the energy of his manner is part of his matter; its abruptness corresponds to the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often as it were ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... done with a view to that romance, that Hawthorne always adopted this laborious mode of making several drafts of a book. On the contrary, it is understood that his habit was to mature a design so thoroughly in his mind before attempting to give it actual existence on paper that but little rewriting was needed. The circumstance that he was obliged to write so much that did not satisfy him in this case may account partly for his relinquishing the theme, as one which for him had lost its seductiveness through too ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... eighteen hundred years, while warring and wrangling on a thousand other points, have agreed to give this one 25th of December to peace and good-will, who is he that shall gainsay them, and for an historic scruple turn his back on the friendly greetings of all Christendom? Such a man is capable of rewriting Milton's Christmas Hymn in the style of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Farm was published in Icelandic in 1908 (Bondinn a Hrauni), and in Danish in 1912 (Gaarden Hraun). In rewriting the play for the Copenhagen stage, Sigurjonsson gave it a happy ending, thus changing a tragedy into a pleasant dramatic idyl of contemporary country life in Iceland. It is the familiar Scandinavian theme ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... matter of fact, there was no end to the rewriting in my father's works. His industry in ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... can be quoted than the admirable chapter about the shipwreck. It was not always so long as Rabelais made it in the end: it was much shorter at first. As a rule, when an author recasts some passage that he wishes to revise, he does so by rewriting the whole, or at least by interpolating passages at one stroke, so to speak. Nothing of the kind is seen here. Rabelais suppressed nothing, modified nothing; he did not change his plan at all. What he did was to make ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to work rewriting all that had been lost. In 1837 the book was published, and from that time Carlyle took his place in the world as a man of genius. But money was still scarce, so as a means of making some, he gave several courses of lectures. But he hated it. "O ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... have ventured to publish in its original form, though I have heard you complain of a certain over-imitation of the antique in the style. If I could see any way of getting rid of the objection, without rewriting it entirely, I would make some sacrifices. But when I wrote John Woodvil, I never proposed to myself any distinct deviation from common English. I had been newly initiated in the writings of our elder dramatists: Beaumont and Fletcher, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... of editorial arrogance on the part of Alix on every sheet of David's manuscript. Her small, precise hand was to be seen here, there and everywhere,—sometimes in the substitution of a single word, often in the rewriting of an entire sentence. But nowhere on her own pages was to be found so much as a scratch by the clumsy hand of her ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon |
