Descriptive Quotes

#1. The sun, like a boil on the bright blue ass of day, rolled gradually forward and spread its legs wide to reveal the pubic thatch of night, a hairy darkness in which stars crawled like lice, and the moon crabbed slowly upward like an albino dog tick striving for the anal gulch.

Joe R. Lansdale

#2. You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there.

Diana Gabaldon

#3. Rowley had thought at first the beast had no name; it had taken him a while to understand that it had a perfectly good, descriptive name to which it was as likely to answer as any other, and that name was Cat. There was something terribly Clem about that.

K.J. Charles

#4. The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.

Brian Morton

#5. The violence in the Old Testament and New Testament is descriptive. The violence in the Koran is for all time and it is prescriptive. And Mohammed said "I have been made victorious through terror.".

Pamela Geller

#6. All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.

Joseph Conrad

#7. He's been spoiled 'til salt won't save him.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

#8. Because I am fully aware of what the word "fat" means - what it really means, when you say it, or think it. It's not just a simple, descriptive word like "brunette" or "34." It's a swear word. It's a weapon. It's a sociological subspecies. It's an accusation, dismissal, and rejection.

Caitlin Moran

#9. If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary.

Robert Delaunay

#10. Morning came in through the blinds cutting everything into ribbons.

Amber Dawn

#11. Dawn rose from the desert and turned the river to wine

Tanith Lee

#12. I suggest that the emergence of descriptive language is at the root of the human power of imagination, of human inventiveness, and therefore the emergence of world 3.

Karl R. Popper

#13. Her shoes were comfortable. They reflected her hope for the evening.

William Peter Blatty

#14. In my mind, President Snow should be viewed in front of marble pillars hung with oversized flags. It's jarring to see him surrounded by the ordinary objects in the room. Like taking the lid off a pot and finding a fanged viper instead of stew.

Suzanne Collins

#15. The day was gray, the color of Europe.

Markus Zusak

#16. Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.

Hilary Mantel

#17. In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods.

Hans Arp

#18. The trees were like black skeletons reaching to the sky, pleading with their bony arms for the sun to get stronger.

J.R. Ward

#19. The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body, but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

Louise Brooks

#20. Yin and yang are descriptive terms that are used to describe all levels of phenomena. Yin is the stable, unmoving, hidden aspect of an object. Yang is the changing, moving, revealing aspect of an object.

Paul Grilley

#21. He looked okay. No, to be honest. He looked a lot better than okay. He looked ... fine. Fine, as in get the Chiffons over here to sing a chorus.

Josh Lanyon

#22. Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.

Ernst Boris Chain

#23. Air grew heavy, damp, almost solid. I was breathing bricks.

Khaled Hosseini

#24. I found out after reading quite a lot of it that it is not rated very high. He has a very descriptive way of writing but also lengthy. May not want to finish!!!!! This was his 1sr and only try ast Historical Fiction!

Wilkie Collins

#25. And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.

Catherine Lacey

#26. We have faith in the photograph not only because it works on a physically descriptive level, but in a broader sense because it confirms our sense of omnipresence as well as the validity of the material world.

Fred Ritchin

#27. Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes.

Jonathan Sacks

#28. I like writing in an illustrative, descriptive way. I prefer describing to rather than explaining.

Iron & Wine

#29. He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the little town with its long smuggling history, where colorful houses tumbled down to the beach.

Robert Galbraith

#30. Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

Douglas Wood

#31. Interactive Decision Theory would perhaps be a more descriptive name for the discipline usually called Game Theory.

Robert Aumann

#32. For Aaron, looking like a skeleton was very much for life, not just for Halloween

Kestral M. Gaian

#33. Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved.

Gavin Bryars

#34. The other contested term is recovered memory therapy. As far as I can tell, no one practicsing psychotherapy today endorses this term as a descriptive of what they do... there are no self-described recovered memory therapists...

Richard J. McNally

#35. The blast of hot air lifted Tazeem from his feet and threw him onto his back in the road. He blinked up into the night sky; raindrops glowed orange as they fell towards the earth.

R.D. Ronald

#36. [T]welve year old Libby O'Shea coasted on a homemade swing, toes touching a blinding-blue heaven dolloped with clouds.

Julie Lessman

#37. Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

Sylvia Plath

#38. His voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking

George R R Martin

#39. So to me, fat just seems to be right to the point and the most descriptive way to say it.

Camryn Manheim

#40. The pale sword came shivering through the air

George R R Martin

#41. Now here he was: sartorially, facially and interpersonally sharpened; every inch the beatific boffin.

Sam Byers

#42. The leader gives me another hard stare. He's not very old, but he's going bald. His wispy pale hair looks like it's trying to get as far away as it can from his angry face.

Morris Gleitzman

#43. Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive.

Elliott Erwitt

#44. Always refer to those of the female gender as ladies.
The descriptive woman is usually reserved in Dixie for females of questionable respect.

Ann Barrett Batson

#45. Wizened and white, with brown blotched on her face the size and complexity of unshelled peanuts, Midge had a jitter in her head that made her pew like a chicken trying to make up its mind what to peck.

John Irving

#46. The particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn't really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape.

Hanya Yanagihara

#47. I could see tongues of dense fog licking over the ridge in the distance, where this world ended and the next one began, cold, damp, and sunless.

Ransom Riggs

#48. We, who have had tender, perfect mothers, would like to make it law that the other kind should always be called 'she-parents,' or 'female progenitors,' or any other descriptive title, but not profane the sacred name of mother!

Florence L. Barclay

#49. Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal - a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty.

Brian Morton

#50. Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.

Sarah Hall

#51. The moon hung heavy over the lake like an overripe orange, trickling its golden stream of light across inky depths.

Julie Lessman

#52. What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy.

Joseph Pulitzer

#53. The child was slender as fleeting hope.

William Peter Blatty

#54. I was just being honest and descriptive." "No, you were being an asshole." "It's not my fault they have to always be the same thing.

Paul Neilan

#55. A shrieking battle cry echoed on the wind, a spine-tingling scream that sounded like the baying of the wolves closing in on their prey.

Raymond E. Feist

#56. There was a hazy damp film in his eyes that I recognized from emotions in old movies, projected large on darkened screens.

Alexandra Kleeman

#57. Dave was a confirmed serotonin junkie. Any day of the year, he chose a good book, a hot cupper, and air-conditioning over jeopardy to life and limb.

Dan Sofer

#58. Cloying tendrils of mist searched the city like skeletal fingers reaching deep into crevices, hoping to capture the elusive prey needed to satisfy gnawing hunger...

Jillian Kent

#59. we may experience an absolute positive change and do the undone if we shift our thoughts from descriptive thinking to prescriptive thinking

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#60. At this the Wart's eyes grew rounder and rounder, until they were about as big as the owl's who was sitting on his shoulder, and his face got redder and redder, and a breath seemed to gather itself beneath his heart.

T.H. White

#61. The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.'

Moby

#62. Just as there was a day every spring when the women of the town, as though by some secret signal, appeared in their summer dresses before the first heat was felt, there was as well a day when winter showed the knife before the first laceration.

Robert Goolrick

#63. Metrical geometry is thus a part of descriptive geometry, and descriptive geometry is all geometry.

Arthur Cayley

#64. She had large, questioning eyes that seemed to draw me in and a sense of quiet outrage that simmered just beneath the surface. More than anything, within her features, there was a streak of wild quirkiness that made her dazzlingly attractive.

Jasper Fforde

#65. As I lay, a pink, dreamlike glow seeped into the room, gradually turning a bright, chemical red. The light inched towards the bed, slowly picking out our two bodies - developing us, I thought, the way photographs used to be made - until it was daylight and everything had its normal definition.

Olivia Sudjic

#66. The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level.

John Von Neumann

#67. I could be described, sure, with words like cool guy or, again, cool incarnate, rebel, badass, whatever, but I viewed these as just descriptive words . . . they serviced me; I no longer was defined by any of them, and I no longer sought to become the definition of anything other than myself.

A.D. Aliwat

#68. Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#69. I'm not the most detailed writer. I have a tendency to be more action-oriented vs. descriptive.

Lisa Gardner

#70. The hardest thing about choosing good names is that it requires good descriptive skills and a shared cultural background. This is a teaching issue rather than a technical, business, or
management issue.

Robert C. Martin

#71. Then Royce's parry came a beat too late. The pale sword bit through the ringmail beneath his arm. The young Lord cried out in pain. Blood welled between the rings. It seemed red as fire where they touched the snow.

George R R Martin

#72. A long descriptive name is better than a short enigmatic name. A long descriptive name is better than a long descriptive comment.

Robert C. Martin

#73. Because of the foulness of her mother's emotional river, a current which ran swift, changing its path without warning ...

Tamara Rose Blodgett

#74. Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions.

Claude Bernard

#75. Beyond the haze, the globe was decorated with a mosaic of sapphire, emerald and amber. The planet glittered like a jewel in the moonlight.

L.T. Gibbons

#76. Sounds - the stretched-out, far-off kind - drift through the halls, and I close my eyes, trying to break them down.

Victoria Schwab

#77. My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to

Neal Stephenson

#78. the tall white windmills that came to her mind. How their skinny long arms all turned, but never together, except for just once in a while two of them would be turning the same way, their arms poised at the same place in the sky.

Elizabeth Strout

#79. At last he came to a strange land, where the rocks and mountain crests seemed as ragged and fantastic as the clouds of sunset, where wild and sudden lights, breaking out in nooks and clefts, were all that lit the sombre twilight of the world.

G.K. Chesterton

#80. Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back ...
The only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would beat time ...

Nalo Hopkinson

#81. The grass he walked through was new and a sweet smell clung to his clothes. There was blue dye on his hands from the wild irises ... that the color of the sky was a shade that could never be replicated in any photograph, just as Heaven could never be seen from the confines of Earth.

Alice Hoffman

#82. Just like the sun coming up yonder out of the sea, pushing rays of light ahead of it.

Esther Forbes

#83. Crabgrass is aptly descriptive of this hated weed, for it does scuttle quickly through a lawn.

Allen Lacy

#84. A young man who plays his part in society by looking on in green spectacles, and listening with a sickly smile, may be a prodigy of intellect and a mine of virtue, but he is hardly, perhaps, the right sort of man to have at a picnic.

Wilkie Collins

#85. And then there was a moment of silence. As if time was taking a deep breath.

Fredrik Backman

#86. Dorothy scratched her dark head, yawning wide, and white feathers floated out of her hair.

Laurie Lee

#87. A voice called out, cold as chloroform and old shame.

Scott Lynch

#88. I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy.

Daniel Handler

#89. The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honest.

Terry Pratchett

#90. Tess was carried along the wings of the hours

Thomas Hardy

#91. Blood began to flow, at first cautiously, as if embarrassed by its appearance; a few thin red lines exploring the gravitational trajectory of its new terrain. Now it flowed faster, steadily staining her pale flesh a horrific red.

R.D. Ronald

#92. The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness.

Edmund Husserl

#93. At least descriptive psychology is probably, taken as a whole, a form of anthropomorphism, a nibbling at our own limits.

Franz Kafka

#94. Though it had been over a year, she staggered through the world like one freshly bludgeoned by love.

Alexandra Kleeman

#95. People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.

Fredrik Backman

#96. A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.

David Mamet

#97. Fiery red curls catch my attention. I've never seen hair like hers. It's long and hangs to just above her ass, but it's not trashy looking. The curls are large and thick. If I were a descriptive man, I'd almost call her hair luscious. But, I'm not so I'll leave it at fiery and thick.

Rein Scott

#98. The roof was a gymnasium for the winds

Thomas Hardy

#99. Somewhere deep inside, his humanity had been shaken by something so unnatural, so foreign in its essence, his very being withdrew from it ...

Tamara Rose Blodgett

#100. What a hard thing it is to write of love! Easy enough to describe the burning brand of lust, or yearning of infatuation, that yearning that can never be assuaged. But love! There is only the word, and the knowing it.

Carolly Erickson