Deftly Done Quotes

#1. Here's a writing craft tool that you can remove from your toolbox and throw away: description. It's the stuff that most readers skim. Even when deftly done using the five senses it's a lead weight. It isn't needed anymore.

Donald Maass

#2. Softly, deftly, music shall caress you. Hear it, feel it, Secretly possess you.

Charles Hart

#3. Deftly whipping a small tuning fork from his pocket, he struck it smartly against a pillar and held it next to Jamie's left ear. Jamie rolled his eyes heavenward, but shrugged and obligingly sang a note. The little man jerked back as though he'd been shot.

Diana Gabaldon

#4. The ocean tries to flood a boat, fire wants to eat the wood, the mind wills to regret, and silence shapes a landscape more deftly than sound - all of that was true.

Christopher Bollen

#5. Often touching ... Monumental Propaganda is a novel that slashes and rips ... In his translation, Andrew Bromfield deftly shifts his tone and tools as required, remaining true to Voinovich's Vonnegut-like playfulness and appreciation of the absurb.

Ken Kalfus

#6. David Corbett has combined his unique talents as a gifted writer and an extraordinary teacher to create a superb resource on character development. Deftly crafted and impeccably researched, The Art of Character is a thoughtful and insightful book that is immensely readable and practical.

Sheldon Siegel

#7. Deftly engineered. McCarthy challenges us all - not just engineers - to take responsibility for the ways in which we all increasingly engineer the world.

Carl Mitcham

#8. I twisted words, phrases, and idioms around,
and deftly nixed the budding metaphor bounds.
Voila, a virtual book in a blog became softbound!

Rebecca Rose Orton

#9. I desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love.

Dan Simmons

#10. A story is told that Whistler once painted a tiny picture of a spray of roses. The artistry involved in the picture was magnificent. Never before, it seemed, had the art of man been able to execute quite so deftly a reproduction of the art of nature.

Sterling W. Sill

#11. Katz traces the courageous role of Black women in settling the West (and] deftly shows how these pioneering spirits helped stabilize early communities in Texas, Oklahoma, California and elsewhere.

Herb Boyd

#12. There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

Diane Setterfield

#13. She deftly snatches her mace and holds it in her purse for cover. She's totally not about to be taken in by some pale silver eyed maniac.

Solange Nicole

#14. And I have seen long fingers that would stare
With fiery eyes, and then the eyes would crawl
Deftly across the counterpane and fall
Soundless, with a wink of mild despair.

Allen Tate

#15. Today she wore a navy blue suit that deftly minimized a slight tendency to heft.

Tim Farrington

#16. He deftly dealt his swiftest blow
I fell further than, I was meant to go.

Lang Leav

#17. What has happened over the ensuing two millennia is that we who confess Christ have deftly (and mostly unconsciously) crafted a religion that neatly separates the Jesus who died on the cross for the radical ideas he preached - ideas that Jesus foresaw would lead to his crucifixion.

Brian Zahnd

#18. It's not the obviousness or the complexity of the things that's deftly deluding mankind. It's man himself.

Pawan Mishra

#19. Arguing face to face can be a powerful thing, and done deftly and persistently, it can reinforce and build respect itself, even across major differences.

Anthony Weston

#20. ... In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with enormous care. Part of it was to allow what was enormous, what was profound, without limiting it.

Jesse Ball

#21. Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

Stanley Kunitz

#22. Voters are looking for credibility and are wary of polish. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter which candidate can more deftly read a teleprompter.

Mark McKinnon

#23. The executive branch maneuvered this result deftly.

Andrew Cohen

#24. I hate you," Haley mumbled, storming past him to grab a carriage.
"You love and adore me," Jason informed her as he deftly snagged her carriage away from her and headed towards the men's department.

R.L. Mathewson

#25. There are those on Wall Street and in the plutocracy who feel that Geithner is a hero who deftly steered the country from economic ruin. To many ordinary Americans, however, he is considered a Wall Street puppet and a servant of the so-called banksters.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#26. Toys to deftly pluck up like animal crackers and deposit safely into a crate decorated with friezes of bright circus trains carrying aardvarks, dodos, swift dromedaries, baby elephants, and plastic dinosaurs. A box of mixed metaphors.

Patti Smith

#27. Rap, rap! upon the well-worn stone, How falls the polished hammer! Rap, rap! the measured sound has grown A quick and merry clamor. Now shape the sole! now deftly curl The glassy vamp around it, And bless the while the bright-eyed girl Whose gentle fingers bound it!

John Greenleaf Whittier

#28. What before seemed a ... frustrating wall, the comic deftly and fearlessly steps through, proving the absurdity of it all.

Bill Hicks

#29. Silence itself could be used as deftly and cruelly as a kire

Frances Hardinge

#30. It was not that the woman boasted. Quite the opposite. She was modest to a fault, the fault being she insinuated her modesty, deftly, into almost any conversation, proclaiming her insignificance and ignorance, thereby assuring a correction.

Cathleen Schine

#31. I must confess that I do not understand why things are so arranged, that women seize us by the nose as deftly as they do the handle of a teapot: either their hands are so constructed, or else our noses are good for nothing else.

Nikolai Gogol

#32. I assure you that even the most beautiful women are not pretty all over. They have merely learned to use clothes deftly enough to give
others the impression that they are.

Edith Head

#33. The River Swish

Deftly maneuvered through
the dark green abyss ~
The wooden raft seemed
in tune with this ~
Canorous rush of the
river swish....

Muse

#34. Learn to use your brains as deftly as your powder box, and then maybe you have a powder box and do not need ...

Sophia Loren