Top 100 Quotes About Describing
#1. When my husband first read a draft, he said, "You spend too much time describing the characters' outfits." He was right. I removed much of the clothes talk, but quite a bit remained.
Heidi Julavits
#2. Once, when I was describing to a friend from Syracuse, New York, a place on the plains that I love, a ridge above a glacial moraine with a view of almost fifty miles, she asked, "But what is there to see?" The answer, of course, is nothing. Land, sky, and the ever-changing light.
Kathleen Norris
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had.
Bill Buford
#6. impossible is an extremely limiting word in describing what is clearly taking place in front of one's eyes.
Fritz
#7. Writing about sex at length is a bit like describing mastication at length. It's the causes and the consequences and the meaning of it that are interesting, not the anatomical descriptions.
Richard Flanagan
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. We are working on creating self-describing, self-organizing, self-diagnosing and self-repairing networks.
John Seely Brown
#11. The most telling and profound way of describing the evolution of the universe would undoubtedly be to trace the evolution of love.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#12. 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
#13. As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.
Michael Nesmith
#14. The negative way [of describing God] is a cardboard prop of Christianity to conceal its unknowable God. When this prop collapses, theistic agnosticism emerges, complete with its package of contradictions and non-sensical utterances.
George H. Smith
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Its palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope. - William Castle, describing leukemia in 1950
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#19. 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
#20. Twitter Terrorist, billionaire heir, ex-con, computer geek, bad boy - none of those terms came close to describing Kyle Rhodes. He was, simply, a good person, and a confident, intelligent man to boot, and she found that combination absolutely irresistible.
Julie James
#22. I am only describing language, not explaining anything.
Joseph Kosuth
#23. 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
#24. I study life by being close to it, this "native life" about which so little is known, and which is so disfigured by the descriptions of those who, not knowing it, insist on describing it anyway.
Isabelle Eberhardt
#25. Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt like crying.
Alison Weir
#26. Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.
Julian Jaynes
#27. Describing yourself by your earthly nativity is carnality. Being born again, your nativity is of divinity.
Chris Oyakhilome
#28. Although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said at the time of its discovery by Europeans to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied without possessing it.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#29. 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
#30. The world is complex, and we capture it with different languages, each appropriate to the process that we are describing.
Carlo Rovelli
#31. It's not a real place, not a real thing. Mom made up the Gray Space, the place of anti-art, antifeeling, the cold dark place that felt like death. It was just her zany way of describing the place she went when she felt most depressed, when making music at all became impossible.
It isn't real.
Kate Ellison
#32. I've never thought of describing her beauty as delicate, because delicate just isn't a word that fits June ... but here, now that she's sick, I realize just how fragile she can be.
Marie Lu
#33. [Stieg] was describing Sweden the way it was and the way he saw the country: the scandals, the oppression of women, the friends he cherished and wished to honor.
Eva Gabrielsson
#34. My grandma forbid us from describing ourselves as poor. She said, 'we're broke.' Because broke is temporary.
Deval Patrick
#35. Our best theory of describing space at a fundamental level is probably string theory.
Alan Guth
#36. I learned I'm not a science writer. I'm not very good at describing how something is happening. I try to describe "So What?"
David Brooks
#37. One of the great things about working on C. elegans was the fact that it was transparent, and so when I first heard that seminar describing GFP, and realised, 'I work on this transparent animal, this is going to be terrific! I'll be able to see the cells within the living animal.'
Martin Chalfie
#38. Keep up your patient's spirits by music of viols and ten-stringed psaltery, or by forged letters describing the death of his enemies, or by telling him he has been elected to a bishopric, if a churchman.
Henri De Mondeville
#39. Suddenly he goes into the last phase - the human virus bomb explodes. Military biohazard specialists have ways of describing this occurrence. They say that the victim has "crashed and bled out." Or more politely they say that the victim has "gone down.
Richard Preston
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Several recent authors have written of "the imposter phenomenon," describing the feeling of many apparently successful people that their success is undeserved and that one day people will unmask them for the frauds they are.
Harold S. Kushner
#43. Trying to explain or define grace is like catching the wind in a cardboard box or describing the color green.
Cathleen Falsani
#44. You won't catch Liberal Democrats describing trade unionists as wreckers.
Charles Kennedy
#45. Describing the Internet as the Network of Networks is like calling the Space Shuttle, a thing that flies.
Jon Lester
#46. 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
#47. Depression is hard to describe not just because it is complex and abstract but also because it occupies the part of us capable of describing things.
Sarah Manguso
#48. But Phileas Fogg, who was not traveling, but only describing a circumfrence, ...
Jules Verne
#49. Australia is so cool that it's hard to even know where to start describing it. The beaches are beautiful; so is the weather. Not too crowded. Great food, great music, really nice people. It must be a lot like Los Angeles was many years ago.
Mary-Kate Olsen
#50. He was far more comfortable reading about the lives and ideas of others than describing his own.
Kate Morton
#51. A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It's a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.
Bill Nighy
#52. 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
#53. As we walked past a quad bike chained to a farm gate, he remarked "It's such a pity how times have changed. You can't leave a piece of machinery out on the road any more." He seemed to have forgotten that he had just been describing a time when you couldn't leave you cattle out.
Rory Stewart
#54. Mr. Adams, describing a conversation with Jonathan Sewall in 1774, says: "I answered that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon. Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination."
John Adams
#55. The Mahabharata was not composed with the aim of describing a battle. The description of the battle serves only as a pretext.
Mahatma Gandhi
#56. Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
Jean Cocteau
#57. What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.
R.D. Laing
#58. It was a different sexual situation going on than it is in the '80s and '90s, and I did a very poor job of describing that.
Wilt Chamberlain
#59. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing
Paul Kalanithi
#60. Steve's sales pitch on the NeXT operating system was dazzling," according to Amelio. " He praised the virtues and strengths as though he were describing a performance of Oliver as Macbeth.
Walter Isaacson
#61. 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
#62. Kerensky he dismissed in yet another snappy line, describing him as 'a balalaika on which they play to deceive the workers and peasants'.
Catherine Merridale
#63. She mock shudders the way you do when you talk about someone's misfortunes that have nothing to do with you, that don't touch you, and never will. I've never hit a woman in my life, but for one minute I want to punch her in the face, give her a taste of the pain she's so casually describing.
Gayle Forman
#64. Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of god and the sexually nonconformist as existing in a state of incurable mortal sin that can incidentally cause floods and earthquakes.
Christopher Hitchens
#65. There is one thing where people are always right. It is when they are describing what they have been feeling when watching your film. You cannot say: No, you did not feel like that!
Pirjo Honkasalo
#66. I have trouble actually describing myself because I'm always suspicious of people who start describing themselves. I'm like, OK, why are you trying to tell me what you are?
Zooey Deschanel
#67. Serendipity: Such a beautiful word describing the occurrence of events by chance. I like to think it's the energy you put out into the world
returning your energy with love.
Steven Aitchison
#68. The terms socialist and communist are mostly about describing the world we want after capitalism, and I think they are both important.
Cynthia Kauffman
#69. Describing a Navy SEAL-
I have no idea what 'unconventional warfare' really means, but i'm pretty sure i was on my way to meet a man who could kill me in 7 different ways with a flip-flop.
Dave Gorman
#70. The Old Testament is a chronicle of horrors, describing an egocentric collection of supernatural beings who were always doing rotten things to gentle souls like Job
John A. Keel
#71. Patients describing the benefits of prayer often talk about how it provides a sense of well being.
Armstrong Williams
#72. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.
Umberto Eco
#73. Women, when describing their roles in their organizations, usually referred to themselves as being in the middle of things. Not at the top, but in the center; not reaching down, but reaching out.
Sally Helgesen
#74. Along with tableity (the condition of being a table) and paneity (the state of being bread), cellarhood is a wonderful example of the spectacular ways English has of describing things that no ever thinks it necessary to describe.
Ammon Shea
#75. They [Americans] believe that the terrors of vast problems yield to the effects of many small solutions.
Use little things to break big things, says Saint Paul, describing an essential feature of the psychology of hope.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
#76. With Gnaw I was thinking about traditional sculpture, about carving. I was also interested in figurative sculpture. I put those two ideas together and decided that rather than describing the body, I would use the body, my body, as a tool for making art.
Janine Antoni
#77. Responded with a presidential note describing how Washington defined a "base." Work on the new facility was halted,
Walter Isaacson
#78. 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
#79. I didn't want to go there, to those places he was describing, but I didn't want to be where he wasn't.
Heather Demetrios
#80. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is.
Karl Marx
#81. He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail.
{Describing the writing style of famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss}
Niels Henrik Abel
#82. Nick turned out to be a shy boy, uncertain in groups and in new situations, but also very brave, determined to overcome his fear. - Will, as a parent describing his son
Lisa Goldstein
#83. It would be like describing colors to someone blind from birth: The words might be understood, but the concept would remain mysterious and private.
Nicholas Sparks
#84. Margot used to like describing men as 'my unhappy love affair.' But hadn't that presumed the existence of a happy love affair that made the others unimportant? What is unhappy is the only kind Margo ever has?
Francine Prose
#85. You know what I thought of when I saw her? That song, 'Boss's Daughter' by Pop Evil. It's like they're describing her." Scott Mason
Bella Jeanisse
#86. I'm really, really dumb about describing wine, but I like wine that's full-bodied and dry.
Esai Morales
#87. Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.
William Hazlitt
#88. PROVIDENTIAL, adj. Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it.
Ambrose Bierce
#89. Psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term ["biophilia"] in 1964 as a way of describing the innate attraction to processes of life and growth.
Adam Leith Gollner
#90. Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.
Tracy Chevalier
#91. I try to use all of my senses when describing a setting, and try to think of everything that would impact a character in any given scene.
Mercedes Lackey
#92. It's like describing music. He cannot bring it to life.
Khaled Hosseini
#93. It is no use describing a house; the reader will fix the scene in some spot he knows himself.
J. Milton Hayes
#94. Describing beauty is almost impossible because we perceive it, rather than describe it. If you look at a Rembrandt painting and start to try and describe what the beauty is you see, your words sound absolutely pathetic.
John Lennox
#95. As a writer, I never paid much attention to the length of titles. I've just wanted them to communicate the emotional overtones of the content of a record or song that they are describing
Jacob Bannon
#96. The story was heavy in her hands, the book spread open like legs, the letters very small i spite of describing such a big moment
Natalia Jaster
#97. For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.
Albert Camus
#98. A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.
Elizabeth Peyton
#99. All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.
Harold Bloom
#100. Discovering new phenomena, but describing those
Anonymous
