In Describing Quotes

#1. Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Jeffery Deaver

#2. In a film muddied by fictional detail, the new Spielberg production 'Fifth Estate's portrayal of the 'Guardian's work with Wikileaks is accurate in describing the running dispute between journalists who wanted to redact documents to make them safe and Julian Assange, who wanted no such restraint.

Nick Davies

#3. The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images; we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately.

Jean De La Bruyere

#4. Later, in describing its narrow escape, the creature credited doubly good luck in having mimicked the shape of a harmless doll and the fact that the paranormal investigators had been looking for a hump-free boggart. 3.

Giovanni Valentino

#5. In describing someone's character, I reveal my own.

Mason Cooley

#6. I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

Dana Spiotta

#7. Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.

Thomas Carlyle

#8. The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

#9. The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.

Francis Bacon

#10. Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.

Edward Witten

#11. I do not at all have the mind of a bully ... in my mind bullies are intolerant of contrary opinion, domineering and rather cowardly. I would hope that none of those terms could be fairly used in describing me.

Conrad Black

#12. There was a special challenge in describing the awful childhood of a person who happens to be my own husband. It was very painful at times, for both of us.

Pamela Stephenson

#13. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.

R.D. Laing

#14. Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Paul De Man

#15. impossible is an extremely limiting word in describing what is clearly taking place in front of one's eyes.

Fritz

#16. Barbara, you have done it again! Sweet Salt Air is a fabulous story of friendship, betrayal, courage and love with family and friends. Having been raised in Maine, she writes 'to the T, in describing beautiful and simple lives on a Maine Island.

Barbara Delinsky

#17. What is drawing? Not once in describing the shape of the mass did I shift my eyes from the model. Why? Because I wanted to be sure that nothing evaded my grasp of it ... My objective is to test to what extent my hands already feel what my eyes see.

Auguste Rodin

#18. While I have questions about the language used in describing the two economic systems, I think people have fairly good gut sense of the difference between socialism and capitalism.

Chris Matthews

#19. Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they make that description true of the movement as a whole, as if romanticism were essentially reactionary.

Frederick C. Beiser

#20. The problems in describing a person are essentially problems of knowing a person.

Donald Antrim

#21. What was doubly disconcerting for me was that he showed such extraordinary and precocious insight in describing his own feelings that I felt he was making my own confession.

Andre Gide

#22. English is weak in describing emotional states or intensities of interpersonal relationships.

Rita Mae Brown

#23. As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it's quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor.

David Graeber

#24. All photographs are about light. The great majority of photographs record light as a way of describing objects in space. A few photographs are less about objects and more about the space that contains them. Still fewer photographs are about light itself.

John Paul Caponigro

#25. In a while he would make the necessary notes, describing the only known cure for Vitriol: an awareness of life.

Paulo Coelho

#26. In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#27. Describing passive violence in this culture is kinda like someone who is drowning in the middle of the ocean giving you the low-down on water. The only way you can really understand passive violence is by going somewhere far, far away from phones, news, TV, the Internet.

Inga Muscio

#28. I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

Stephen Malkmus

#29. Technologies as users interacting with other technologies as prompters, through other in-between technologies: this is another way of describing hyperhistory as the stage of human development

Luciano Floridi

#30. I strenuously object to the very word "grotesque" which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea ... I would prefer my music to be described as "Scherzo-ish" in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo - whimsicality, laughter, mockery.

Sergei Prokofiev

#31. In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

Aleksandar Hemon

#32. Of course, politicians always say they're just describing their opponents' positions, even if they are in fact offering absurd caricatures, if not outright lies.

James Surowiecki

#33. Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.'

Timothy Noah

#34. His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science.

{Describing Ernest Rutherford upon his death at age 66. Thomson, then 80 years old, was once his teacher.}

J.J. Thomson

#35. The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening," Miss Pao said, "regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique." (describing a young man who flew off a bicycle at high speed)

Neal Stephenson

#36. In 2056, I think you'll be able to buy T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the unified laws of our universe.

Max Tegmark

#37. It's describing the mystery of faith. I think it describes how difficult it is to believe in God's presence even when we can't see Him, even when we feel so alone and need His presence.

Suzanne Elizabeth Anderson

#38. The word hammockable (describing two trees that are the perfect distance apart between which a hammock can be hung) is not in the dictionary, but it should be. [Of lying in hammocks]

Dan Kieran

#39. I really love baseball. The guys and the game, and I love the challenge of describing things. The only thing I hate - and I know you have to be realistic and pay the bills in this life - is the loneliness on the road.

Vin Scully

#40. I'm not in the business of telling people what to do. I'm much more in the business of describing things, situations and stuff like that and leaving them out there, and you can make up your minds about them.

Nick Cave

#41. As I've said repeatedly, Republicans are very good at describing things in black and white; Democrats are very good at describing the 11 shades of gray.

Joseph C. Wilson

#42. There was wildlife, untouched, a jungle at the border of the sea, never seen by those who floated on the opaque roof. Describing his early experience, in 1936, when a fellow naval officer, Philippe Tailliez, gave him goggles to see below the Mediterranean Sea surface.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

#43. Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.

Jess Walter

#44. In the teaching of geography and history a sympathetic understanding (should) be fostered for the characteristics of the different peoples of the world, especially for those who we are in the habit of describing as primitive.

Albert Einstein

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

Iron & Wine

#46. What men don't want, in fact what anyone who's any sort of thrill-seeking, intelligent adult doesn't want, is some crushing bore describing their emotions in real time every waking hour.

Julie Burchill

#47. What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence - a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer.

Michael Pollan

#48. You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.

Slavoj Zizek

#49. Romantic love has its place but to define relationship solely in romantic terms is like describing marriage only by what a couple does on their honeymoon.

Dermot Davis

#50. There is a kind of belief among my students that things that are true are interesting. But most things that are true are not interesting. Four pages describing how I got up and brushed my teeth in the morning would kill you.

Alistair MacLeod

#51. When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

Niels Bohr

#52. Strange to discover that describing his fears out loud was less frightening than trying not to think about them. Something about seeing your enemy out in the open. The

Mark Haddon

#53. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#54. There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers.

Mary Roach

#55. There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere:

Lyndsay Faye

#56. Some writers later, describing the events of that night and day, wrote that Wan'yen of the Altai had seen a spirit-dragon of the river and become afraid. Writers do that sort of thing. They like dragons in their tales.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#57. Why, listening to Obama talk about his economic triumphs over the last three years might make you want to move to the country he was describing. Too bad that country exists primarily in his own head.

John Podhoretz

#58. There's so much I can't read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.

Amy Hempel

#59. The moment i saw you my eyes became a poet describing your flawless beauty, dreaming of you in the boulevard of broken dreams

Manoj Kumar Duppala

#60. Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#61. I grew up in a world where the majority of people were black, so that wasn't the defining quality of anyone. When you're describing someone, you don't start out with 'he's black, he's white.'

Lupita Nyong'o

#62. Mo'Nique is so full of love. I've been describing her as the tree in 'Pocahontas.' She's so wise and loving. She is just everything.

Gabourey Sidibe

#63. [Describing the soap in the gulag] It smelt as if some sacred physical law had been demeaned in its creation.

Martin Amis

#64. When you etch your moral code in stone, you have no room for editing. You leave open the possibility that, as our ethical views evolve, your code becomes less relevant. You could find yourself with four of ten divine moral laws describing how to treat God and zero that prohibit rape or slavery.

David G. McAfee

#65. God is God, but he has various names in different languages, and each strand of monotheistic religion has multiple ways of describing the godhead.

Jay Parini

#66. When you are describing,
A shape, or sound, or tint;
Don't state the matter plainly,
But put it in a hint;
And learn to look at all things,
With a sort of mental squint.

Lewis Carroll

#67. It is as foolish to try to preserve obsolescent industries as to try to preserve obsolescent methods of production: this is often, in fact, merely two ways of describing the same thing.

Henry Hazlitt

#68. I think that a symbolism is attached to particular images, becomes marked in the unconscious. To exorcise it, to rearrange it, to reshape it, to make it my own, involves unearthing it, describing it, deploying it inform, and then rearranging it.

Sarah Charlesworth

#69. Representative Leo J. Ryan understood the manipulation phenomena people were describing to him and he lost his life in a Guyanese jungle investigating how Jim Jones bent minds.

Leo Ryan

#70. What's it a charm for?' she asked.
The man thought about this for a moment.
'It's your basic all-enveloping protection charm,' he said, his hands describing a cupped circle in the air. 'For protection against ... '
'Envelopes?' said Abigail.

Ben Aaronovitch

#71. This is the 21st century, yet Western scholars are happy to keep it colonial, describing Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism in Greco-Hellenic or Judeo-Christians terms.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#72. The better and longer way is to describe the experience I want the users to have. That means describing the users' world and how my design fits in.

Giles Colborne

#73. REFLECTION. In discussing abortion, its supporters never defend the act of abortion itself, but only the alleged right of someone to have one. They focus on the freedom to choose it, but avoid describing what is chosen.

Catholic Book Publishing Corporation

#74. We create truths by describing, or by re-describing , our beliefs and observations. Our task, and the task of every artist and scientist, is to re-describe our inherited assumptions and invented fictions in order to create new paradigms for the future.

Anne Bogart

#75. Last night, it was so cold, the flashers in New York were only describing themselves.

Johnny Carson

#76. It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

#77. I have trouble describing characters because there is just too much going on in human beings.

Lisa Kudrow

#78. I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.

Aleksandar Hemon

#79. People sleep peacefully in their beds at night, because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

(By George Orwell) Describing your country's servicemen.

Steven Preece

#80. Writing for children is as easy as describing the history of the Byzantium in three words.

Mo Willems

#81. In Co-Masonry the term "lore" is employed as describing all these scriptures, since in the use of them we are in pursuit of wisdom. The term "law" is used in many other Lodges, but even then it is explained in the ritual that the object of the Volume of the Sacred Law is to illumine our minds.

Charles W. Leadbeater

#82. I think the tendency to over-explain and over describe is one of the most common failings in fantasy. It's an unfortunate piece of Tolkien's legacy. Don't get me wrong, Tolkien was a great worldbuilder, but he got a little caught up describing his world at times, at the expense of the overall story.

Patrick Rothfuss

#83. My gift, if that's not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that people want to read them.

Michael Dirda

#84. I just don't talk about who I'm going out with, that's it. It's an odd thing to sit around describing yourself to 10 different people every 5 minutes yet it's kind of therapeutic in a way.

Radha Mitchell

#85. Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful ... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment.

Anne Michaels

#86. Documenting trips makes them that much richer. I stick in train tickets and business cards from restaurants. It makes the whole experience poetic, describing the sights, smells and sounds around me. It means I can relive the holiday years later.

Hayley Atwell

#87. The Roswell incident, for instance, had over three hundred witnesses - some describing the bodies, some the craft, some the military procedures. Were they all perpetuating their own lives in a myth?

Dwight Schultz

#88. Don't confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in how they 'ought to be.' And I certainly have no interest in fixing them. I sincerely believe that if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!

George Carlin

#89. I got live tweeted once by someone who was opposite my home in some rented accommodation. He was actually describing on twitter what I was doing. 'I took a shirt off, I went to the window, I put a shirt back on ... ' And I've got blinds in my flat!

Benedict Cumberbatch

#90. All models divide naturally ... into two a priori parts: one is kinematics, whose aim is to parameterize the forms of the states of the process under consideration, and the other is dynamics, describing the evolution in time of these forms.

Rene Thom

#91. I always attempt to challenge and upend discourses that appear to be disinterestedly describing the world, but that are in fact wholly grounded in historically and culturally specific hegemonic modes of thought.

Richard Marshall

#92. Its palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope. - William Castle, describing leukemia in 1950

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#93. And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.

Lauren Oliver

#94. The majority of my UFO diet consists of reports describing suspected encounters. This is not surprising, as there are thousands of sightings annually. The emailer has seen something unusual in the sky that he interprets as probable evidence of alien presence.

Seth Shostak

#95. Poetry or science, what matters is saying it how you see it. Saying precisely what and how you saw, and no more. In science, poetry or describing a journey, accuracy is all you can do. Saying it as you saw.

Ruth Padel

#96. Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.

Guillermo Del Toro

#97. Words aren't very good at describing complicated, strange visual things. You can try, and the reader will have some sort of image in their mind, but words aren't good at that.

Yann Martel

#98. Trying to explain or define grace is like catching the wind in a cardboard box or describing the color green.

Cathleen Falsani

#99. The guy snarled out a string of profanity describing his night with Conn's mother.

"Sounds about right," Conn said, but Matt didn't miss the glint in Conn's eye. "She's been dead for twenty years, but dead's probably the only way you get laid.

Anne Calhoun

#100. She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

Anna Godbersen