Top 100 Quotes About Describing
#1. 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
#2. In a while he would make the necessary notes, describing the only known cure for Vitriol: an awareness of life.
Paulo Coelho
#3. My other car is a vehicle with a bumper sticker describing this car.
Damien Fahey
#4. I'm no good at describing my books. 'Holes' has been out now for seven years, and I still can't come up with a good answer when asked what that book is about.
Louis Sachar
#5. 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
#6. The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.
E. M. Forster
#7. 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
#8. [Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
Bernard Berenson
#9. Beware of men who use words that relate pejoratively to females when describing the 'other side.
Jane Fonda
#10. 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
#11. Genuinely great humour recognises the world it's describing and yet we are also called into question by it. That's what great art should do. That's what great philosophy should do. The one thing about humour is that this is an everyday practice that does this.
Simon Critchley
#12. I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.
Stephen Malkmus
#13. I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.
Charles De Lint
#14. 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
#15. I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation. - Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life.
Chuck Klosterman
#16. Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#17. 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
#18. When a friend introduced me to a Bach chaconne, he started by describing it by saying that it has 256 measures (256=2^8) divided into 4 sections of 64 measures (64=2^6), and I liked it even before I heard a single note.
James Stein
#19. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product.
Jonathan Ive
#20. One of my book-reading friends used the term "our story unfolds" when describing a paper he was writing. He became somewhat less of a friend right at that moment.
Tommy Greenwald
#21. We need faith, not because there are beings who will punish us or reward us, but because gods are a wonderful way of describing things that are happening to us.
Ming-Dao Deng
#22. In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#24. 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
#25. A mathematician believes that describing the speed of Mercury with equations amounts to science.
Bill Gaede
#26. I'm really bad at describing my own life.
Helmut Lang
#27. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.
Janet Fitch
#28. She was beautiful, without comparison, but she exuded and icy and emotionless aura. She was as hard and as cold as ice and it was difficult to tell whether she was pleased or angry.
Jin Yong
#29. I try to avoid describing one interpretation of my books. Of course I have an opinion. I have things I want to say, but I don't ever want to limit anybody, to have them say, 'Oh, he said this, so that's what it's about.' I'm happy people bring their own stuff to it.
Patrick Ness
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. One must conclude that, contrary to the established and current wisdom, a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not been written.
Hubert Yockey
#34. Let me praise you tonight.
Because tomorrow you cannot be described by words,
While describing you.
Tomorrow, earth and sky will disappear altogether.
Rumi
#35. To try to explain something as "I love it" and "It's fun" would be like describing the sunset over the middle of the ocean as "bright and pretty." It's just not that simple.
Tara Dakides
#36. There were no monsters, her parents assured her, but Luce's repeated insistence on the presence of something wobbly and dark had gotten her several appointments with the family eye doctor, and then glasses, and then appointments with the ear doctor after she made the mistake of describing
Lauren Kate
#37. People hate to describe their music. What we have come to call it is "beat up your mom" music. As far as describing what it sounds like, I guess you'd have to listen.
Marilyn Manson
#38. 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
#39. I think that without sushi there would be no David Hasselhoff, because sushi is like the perfect way of describing the insides of David Hasselhoff. He is like a protein, clean and easy. That's how I feel about myself.
David Hasselhoff
#40. 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
#41. Describing one competitive advantage of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. It has no fear.
Yasser Seirawan
#42. A six-inch blade. I smiled. Did he buy it? It was actually just shy of four - but very nicely weighted - and as Aunt Bernice noted, a little exaggeration was always expected when describing weapons, victories, and body parts.
Mary E. Pearson
#43. The sergeant was describing a military life. It was all drinking, he said, except that there were frequent intervals of eating and love making.
Charles Dickens
#44. Her hair gives dawn it's fire, her eyes give dusk her soul"
He knew how to use his voice to melt a girl's heart, to make a girl want to believe. I steeled myself against the seductive words. "Excuse me?"
"It's a line of poetry describing a beautiful girl, one who doesn't seem to know it.
Elizabeth Chandler
#45. There should be a word for an attitude between snobbish and unconscious, describing someone who doesn't realize how strongly he holds his own opinions.
Edmond Manning
#46. Younger writers are always looking for "blurbs," one of the few words that sounds exactly as awful as the crime it's describing.
Brian K. Vaughan
#47. You might be a redneck if ... you've been on TV more than times describing the sound of a tornado.
Jeff Foxworthy
#48. Describing the person I am would best be through music. When I'm up on stage and I'm singing my heart out, I am always reminded of life's best things.
Thia Megia
#49. He looked natural and unrushed, and had obviously had a lot of experience at either chicanery or skulduggery, depending on which word was better suited for describing officially sanctioned mischief.
Jeff Lindsay
#50. I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like.
Steven Amsterdam
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. We have this interesting problem with black holes. What is a black hole? It is a region of space where you have mass that's confined to zero volume, which means that the density is infinitely large, which means we have no way of describing, really, what a black hole is!
Andrea M. Ghez
#56. 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
#57. Everything that can happen, does. That's quantum mechanics. But this does not mean everything happens. The rest of physics is about describing what can happen and what can't.
Antony Garrett Lisi
#58. If you've lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it, and if you didn't - you will never understand.
Jodi Picoult
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. I've found out so much about electricity that I've reached the point where I understand nothing and can explain nothing.
[Describing his experiments with the Leyden jar.]
Pieter Van Musschenbroek
#62. Words were not just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.
Barbara Kingsolver
#63. I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.
Penelope Lively
#64. 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
#66. The computer models are very good at solving equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly.
Freeman Dyson
#67. 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
#68. You are describing the world and by describing it you are creating it
Stevens
#69. 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
#70. Do you know how writers often say the characters take over ... But that is more or less what it always feels like to me, too. Even though that's just a way of describing how your brain is working, it's still what you tend to feel.
Wes Anderson
#71. We think of enterprise architecture as the process we use for fully describing and mapping business functionality and business requirements and relating them to information systems requirements.
Tony Scott
#72. I like writing in an illustrative, descriptive way. I prefer describing to rather than explaining.
Iron & Wine
#73. -Write 12 statements describing what you do. -Write 12 statements describing what you sell. -Write 12 statements describing your service. -Write 12 statements why you can do it better or why you are unique.
Kathleen Gage
#74. I have a tiny infant of an idea, much too frail and defenseless to risk describing, even to you ... I am going to coddle it and feed it and see if I can make it grow.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#75. When it comes to describing our potential physical and cognitive capacities, we are individuals first, and members of the human race second.
Alexandra Horowitz
#76. I once started a detective story to make money-but I couldn't get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse!
Mary McCarthy
#77. In describing someone's character, I reveal my own.
Mason Cooley
#78. I think, describing Elvis for me would be a very generous king. He was the king of rock and roll, will always be. He's whats made it possible for everyone to be performers and to do the things they do now.
Jackie DeShannon
#79. I have trouble describing my own style, since it's sort of like describing my own eye color or something.
Aimee Bender
#80. The materialistic paradigm of Western science has been a major obstacle for any objective evaluation of the data describing the events occurring at the time of death.
Stanislav Grof
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I've always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what they read.
Gabrielle Zevin
#84. Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.
Robert Bork
#85. What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad, and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but "love" would have to do for now.
Nick Hornby
#86. Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase "meant to be"
usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.
Jennifer Egan
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.
G.K. Chesterton
#90. He is the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk but then insist on a stoical indifference to the fright afterward. Jefferson Davis's future wife describing him at first meeting.
Shelby Foote
#91. 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
#92. The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.
Richard Brautigan
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. For the writer under Actually Existing Socialism describing sex is a simple matter: he simply does not do it (the describing, I mean, not the sex).
Philip Sington
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Describing Woodstock as the 'big bang,' I think that's a great way to describe it, because the important thing about it wasn't how many people were there or that it was a lot of truly wonderful music that got played.
David Crosby
#99. While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.
Richard P. Feynman
#100. Painting doesn't mean just describing; it's a state of spirit.
Caryl Churchill
