Tropes Will Ruin Your Life/Quotes

"I just want to say to you guys: Get out of my head! Thanks to the amount of time I've spent here, it's been months since I was able to sit down and watch a movie or TV show without knowing by the first commercial break, every major event that was going to happen in the Plot."

—Red Shoe

Abandon free time all ye who enter here.

—Anonymous

"Do you know the end? Did Mom tell you that Fox is--"
"Oh, shit," Jeremy's father interrupts. "They killed Fox?"

That's the problem with being a writer, Jeremy knows. Even the biggest and most startling twists are rarely twists for you. You know how every story goes.

—"Magic for Beginners", by Kelly Link

"Have we started linking tropes in conversation now?"
--This Trooper

"Yes."

—This Troper.

I FORGOT TO TIE OFF A ROPE AND NOW I'M DROWNING"—queenanthai, on scans_daily

the TVtropes QC page is every single idiotic comment from my forums distilled into one HTML document

—Jeph Jacques

TV Tropes must be the only wiki where I can start off looking at Doctor Who and end up with advice over what gun I should buy.

—TV Tropes

The main reason to avoid putting something incorrect or unrealistic-looking in a TV show or film is that it disrupts people's suspension of disbelief ... [but] the only people whose ability to suspend their disbelief might suffer are those who work in TV -- and they will have lost that ability long ago. When they watch telly, all they can see is the work that's gone into it and the mistakes. It's like taking an Egyptian slave on a tour of the pyramids -- he doesn't marvel, he just gets sympathy backache.

—David Mitchell

10. *BZZRT* WE DON'T *ZAP* ZOMBIES *ZAP* MENTION *BZZRRT* TVTROPES HERE *BZZRT* CAAAEEEEEEEEEKK! *BZZRT* *STATIC* *BUZZ* ore you wil dai.

—the rules for http://www.fsdlcookies.myadopts.com/

I once overheard two ~~botanists~~ tropers arguing over a Damned Thing that had blasphemously ~~sprouted in a college yard.~~ happened on a T.V. show. One claimed that the Damned Thing was a ~~tree~~ Xanatos Gambit and the other claimed that it was a ~~shrub~~ Batman Gambit. They each had good scholarly arguments, and they were still debating when I left them.

The world is forever spawning Damned Things— things that are neither ~~tree~~ Xanatos Gambit nor ~~shrub~~ Batman Gambit, ~~fish~~Bittersweet Ending nor ~~fowl~~ Earn Your Happy Ending, black nor white— and the categorical thinker can only regard the spiky and buzzing world of ~~sensory fact~~ Canon as a profound insult to his card-index system of classifications. Worst of all are the facts which violate ~~"common sense,"~~ "Magic A Is Magic A," that dreary bog of sullen prejudice and muddy inertia. The whole history of ~~science~~ TV Tropes is the odyssey of a pixilated card-indexer perpetually sailing between such Damned Things and desperately juggling his classifications to fit them in.

—Hagberd Celine, of the The Illuminatus Trilogy, on tv tropes

Go ahead, wreck your life,
That might be good,
Who can say what's wrong or right?
Nobody can.

—"Spiraling Shape," They Might Be Giants

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax," said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!"

—"Hotel California," The Eagles

TV Tropes is a veritable black hole of hyperlinks, each leading further into the center of oblivion. The entire site is made up of a community that spends its life collecting patterns and commonalities between fictional worlds. It applies names to every plot device, every story arc and every cinematic tool ever captured by a camera and then links them to one another. The result is like being in the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic deciphering hidden codes in newspapers. Clicking on one link will ensure that you click on another, and another until you have lost your way back home and forgotten who you are.

—Cracked.com columnist Soren Bowie, "Charybdis"

There are two things about the book that make it purest evil: the first is that anyone can add to it, so it's always changing and growing larger. The second is that every entry contains several references to other cleverly-named tropes, and touching one of those names sends you to an explanation of that trope's name, complete with references to other tropes . . . and at some point you look up and see you're eight years older than when you started.

—Kingdom of Loathing, "Tome Of Tropes" encounter

During Lost, after writing scripts and editing episodes all day, it was nearly impossible for me to come home and watch scripted television without my critical brain kicking in. Instead of being caught up in the narrative, I could see only what was underneath — the blueprints and building materials.

—Show Runner Carlton Cuse, The New York Times