Quotes About Structure

Let a play have five acts, neither more nor less.

The Growth and Structure of His Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)

The essay "Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability" (abbreviated here as CCC) is found in the collection of Kuhn's writings The Road since Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Our galaxy's mass and size is fine-tuned for life. A smaller galaxy will have its spiral structure more seriously disrupted by encounters with other galaxies. A larger galaxy will possess a much larger supermassive black hole in its nucleus.

I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity.

Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.

But games aren't magic, and the most special thing about them isn't unique to them anyway—their artificial, deliberately limited structures teach us how to appreciate everything else that has a specific, limited structure. Which is just to say, anything whatsoever. Play isn't our goal, but a tool to discover and appreciate the structures of all the malls and fishbowls we encounter. Once

Again we take our cue from Strunk and White: "Before beginning to compose something, gauge the nature and extent of the enterprise, and work from a suitable design…

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

Haosul nu este întâmpl?tor: el este o comportare aparent întâmpl?toare, rezultând din reguli foarte precise. Haosul este o form? criptic? de ordine.

Only three constants are significant for star formation: the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and a constant that governs nuclear reaction rates.

Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.

if Rose had set aside his musicianship he would have heard something strangely compelling in Hank's treatment of "Lovesick Blues." The brisk tempo and unusual structure, together with the yodels and little flashes of falsetto, made it wholly unlike any other country record.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

The English critic George Saintsbury once compared the act of sentence making--the letting out and pulling in of clauses--to the letting out and pulling in of the slide of a trombone or the "draws" of a telescope.

If you write short, crisp sentences without any sinces or whens or althoughs, try stringing varied sentences together by using subordinate conjunctions. If you already rely on subordinate conjunctions, try rebalancing your sentences with ands and buts and fors and sos. Does the change of conjunctions change your style?

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Nonexistent sex differences in language lateralization, mediated by nonexistent sex differences in corpus callosum structure, are widely believed to explain nonexistent sex differences in language skills.

AFTER OBSESSING OVER THE RELATIONSHIP OF ALL KNOWN CHEMICAL elements in 1869, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev fell asleep, and the solution came to him: the structure of the periodic table.

There was no love that I could see or feel between the men and the women; only boredom. Yet, paradoxically, I could also tell that this was what everyone wanted: a family structure they could be unhappy in; at least it formed the basis of a stable home, a baseline to a life that would otherwise not be tethered to anything.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

My biggest mentor has been the Benchmark partnership. We have six partners and a flat structure, and everyone is paid the exact same paycheck. It's a team model versus an individual model.

The skyscraper style first advocated by Louis Sullivan - a tower of strongly vertical character with clear definitions among base, shaft, and crown - has remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of this building type.

We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.