To Describe Quotes

#1. The little that he had said, thus far, had been sufficient to convince me that I was speaking to a gentleman. He had what I may venture to describe as the unsought self-possession, which is a sure sign of good breeding, not in England only, but everywhere else in the civilized world.

Wilkie Collins

#2. If you were to describe me as teetotal, on behalf of my constituency I'd have to sue; that would lose me every vote in the Highlands.

Charles Kennedy

#3. What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

Robert Nozick

#4. To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.

Maya Angelou

#5. When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.

Edouard Bourdet

#6. If I allow journalists to describe a collection and they make mistakes, I'm upset, because the retractions are never noticed.

Calvin Klein

#7. It's funny how there's a word like overprotective to describe some parents, but no word that means the opposite. what word do you use to describe parents who don't protect enough? underprotective? neglectful? self-involved? lame? all of the above. olivia's family

R.J. Palacio

#8. Whatever word you use to describe diving into the deepest part of a human. Take your pick; they're all woefully inadequate, but they're also all we have.

Marisa De Los Santos

#9. I love telling stories, that's it. I love it. That's the word I would choose to describe what I love the most.

Jeff Probst

#10. I'm always focussed on the actual work, and I think that's a much more succinct way to describe what you care about than any speech I could ever make.

Jonathan Ive

#11. All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'

Martin Amis

#12. 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

#13. It is not easy to describe the present position of legal opinion on advertising and free speech. Only a poet can capture the essence of chaos.

Bill Vaughan

#14. Grief. I don't know how to describe it other than as a roller coaster that drops you into the pit of hell with the rats and the demons, and then lifts you up above the clouds to the place where heaven begins.

Jessica Thompson

#15. Nirvikalpa Samadhi means that you've gone off the board; you've gone off the map. There is no way to describe it. You have attained liberation and are no longer bound by the cycle of existence. You just are, and yet you're not, at the same time.

Frederick Lenz

#16. I ran my fingers along his jaw and he stroked my hip. We didn't talk because there were no words to say, nothing to describe the moment where we grew from boys who were best friends to men who were lovers.

Megan Erickson

#17. We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist. [The first use of the word.]

William Whewell

#18. Wagner thought Rossini unserious; Rossini thought Wagner 'lacked sun'. Wagner also became the butt of a phrase Rossini had used down the years to describe musicians about whom he had certain reservations - "He has some beautiful moments but some bad quarters of an hour!

Richard Osborne

#19. The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.

Marc Bloch

#20. We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms, it 'excludes', it 'represses'... in fact power produces, it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.

Michel Foucault

#21. There is really no satisfying or new way to describe beauty, and besides, I find it embarrassing to do so. So I will say only that he was beautiful, and that I found myself suddenly shy, unsure even of how to address him

Hanya Yanagihara

#22. I like to describe my life as a black hole with a little light out there.

Dennis Rodman

#23. How can I describe how much I love you?
Is it even possible to describe a love like that? I don't know, but as I
sit here with pen in hand, I know that I have to try.

Nicholas Sparks

#24. So many words commonly used to describe childbirth-support, patient, management, delivered by, coached, helped, guided-suggest that a woman does not have the power to give birth without being dependent on somebody else. This isn't the case at all.

Michel Odent

#25. Even in merely reading a fairytale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#26. Back in the day, I came up with the expression "Same Animal - Different Cages" to describe our songs. I suppose over the years I've just broadened the meaning of that.

David First

#27. There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

#28. It is impossible to devise a scientific experiment to describe the creation process, or even to ascertain whether such a process can take place. The Creator does not create at the whim of a scientist.

Henry M. Morris

#29. Such hours are beautiful to live, but very hard to describe ...

Louisa May Alcott

#30. As soon as you try to describe a close friendship, it loses something.

Dean Smith

#31. Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

Mahatma Gandhi

#32. The ship shudders as we make the leap, passing into grimspace. Pleasure spikes through me, as if I'm taking a hit of my favorite chem. It sings through my veins, echoing the mad whorl of colors outside the view screen. If I had to describe it, I'd say it's like entering the heart of a dying star.

Ann Aguirre

#33. To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn't possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.

Mary-Louise Parker

#34. Ask any teenage girl to describe her perfect bedroom, and you'll get answers like 'a room with a private phone line, a place to hang out with friends, and for it to be way-cool and funky.' Ask parents the same question, and 'a locked door that opens on their 21st birthday' might top the list!

Candice Olson

#35. 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

#36. Political folk talk a lot these days about 'messaging' - a neologism designed to describe the way in which parties and politicians consciously characterize their efforts. It is only intended to be positive - i.e., 'Our messaging is designed to show we care.'

John Podhoretz

#37. I think that women definitely have a special bond as friends that is hard to describe to men, and we don't often see that portrayed narratively.

Ava DuVernay

#38. It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable.

Vanna Bonta

#39. If only one word is to be used to describe what Baupost does, that word should be: 'Mispricing'. We look for mispricing due to over-reaction.

Seth Klarman

#40. Dating meant nightclubs, heels, and black. It meant, "No, thank you. Really, I'm full." It meant matching bras and underwear. Clothes with the word MICRO used to describe them.

Stephanie Klein

#41. God is gracious beyond the power of language to describe.

Francis Asbury

#42. By nature, it's impossible to describe enlightenment! How do you plan on sharing your enlightenment? Hahaha, that's impossible. Wake up! That'll be the end of the world if you ever succeed!

Osamu Tezuka

#43. Nature's action is complex: and nothing is gained in the long run by pretending that it is simple, and trying to describe it in a series of elementary propositions.

Alfred Marshall

#44. ( ... ) "to have a hairy heart" has passed into everyday wizarding language to describe a cold or unfeeling witch or wizard.

J.K. Rowling

#45. Trademaster," he said.....

"Who is he?" Claire asked again.
"He is Evil. I don't know how else to describe it. He is Evil, and like all evil, he has enormous power. He tempts. He taunts. And he takes.

Lois Lowry

#46. The boys performance was so good that I've run out of expletives to describe it.

Micky Mellon

#47. It [the Earth] was breathtakingly beautiful, like something out of a fairy tale. There is no way to describe the joy of seeing the Earth. It is blue, and more beautiful than any other planet.

Valentina Tereshkova

#48. There had been something in the details he had chosen to describe that made her cry herself asleep that night, for the kitten, for Anthony for herself, for the pain and bitterness and cruelty of all the world.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#49. Consumerism is hard to describe when it's the ocean and we're the plankton.

Geoffrey Miller

#50. There are so many words I can use to describe the looks on people's faces. And for a long time I didn't get it. I'd just get mad. Mad when they stared. Mad when they looked away. "What the heck are you looking at?" I'd say to people - even grown-ups.

R.J. Palacio

#51. Desolation would not be the proper word to describe his feelings now; it was more the sense of emptiness he imagined he might feel standing all alone on the surface of the moon.

Shusaku Endo

#52. It's strange to describe reading a book as a really great experience, but that's kind of how it felt.

Stephen Chbosky

#53. I don't know how to describe it, but after the blush of my own company wore off, I became so aware of Earnest's absence it was as if the lack of him had moved into the apartment with me.

Paula McLain

#54. I always thought 'chick lit' meant third-person contemporary funny novels, dealing with issues of the day. I mean, it's not the ideal term; when I'm asked to describe what I do, I say I write romantic comedies, cause that's what I feel they are. But I'm quite pragmatic.

Sophie Kinsella

#55. If your parents are still alive, call them today and ask them to describe the day you were born. Write the details down here, on the following pages. Tell the story every year on your birthday until you know it by heart.

Amy Poehler

#56. When pressed to tell people how I got myself into my current nepotism-gone-bad situation, I like to describe it as a mini-breakdown. The prefix makes all the difference. It makes it sound more like a vacation than a condition best treated with medication and art therapy.

Jill A. Davis

#57. Imagine you saw a colour in your dream, which you have never seen before. It doesn't consist of any colours or shades that you know. Trying to describe that colour would be as difficult as trying to belive that there is enough love & compassion in the world so every human can feel happiness.

Egor Kraft

#58. While it is certainly the biographer's business to describe the foibles, passions and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be very meagre if these individual traits are not also seen as part of a universal drama - for each man's life is also the story of Everyman.

Iris Origo

#59. Courage is not measured by
Marching bands and banners in the wind.
If you have not walked
The bloody lines and seen the faces,
You have no right to describe it so.
We die here to keep you safe at home,
And what we suffer
Pray you may never know.

Charles Todd

#60. A woman is always ready to describe another woman as charming, but only if the other woman is not charming.

Evan Esar

#61. Something feels like it's missing when I haven't heard any music, and when I hear music, then I really feel like something is missing. That's the best I can do in trying to describe music.

Robert Walser

#62. THING TO TRY: If you are asked to describe a suspect to a police sketch artist, describe in precise detail, the features of the police sketch artist. This is one of the rare instances where two people can do one self-portrait.

Demetri Martin

#63. I describe things in terms of body movements. I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that's a good way of talking to musicians. Particularly bass players.

Brian Eno

#64. Whereas the complexity of an object measures how complicated it is to describe, its information content measures the extent to which it describes the rest of the world. In other words, information is a measure of how much meaning complexity has.

Max Tegmark

#65. Edda danced in the ballet. That was her job. 'Job' was not the word other people chose to describe what Edda did, but the right word nonetheless. Words were queer that way, Edda often thought. They classified things. In her case they could place someone in another dimension.

Brooke McEldowney

#66. The feeling that passed between them, so powerful there was no language to describe it... It was not mere friendship, but something born of and strengthened by it.

Sarah J. Maas

#67. Asked to describe the Holy One, Jesus told the story of the father whose bond with his son, no matter the son's unworthiness, was unbreakable.

James Carroll

#68. I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting. My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self, not my own, and it felt so good.

Thandie Newton

#69. The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

Hanif Kureishi

#70. Were I forced to describe this woman in one word, that word would be ... herpes.

Jen Lancaster

#71. Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way, it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse.

Simon McBurney

#72. I imagine them very clearly and then attempt to describe what I can see. Sometimes I draw them for my own amusement! (talking about her characters and scenes)

J.K. Rowling

#73. [Yeah, thanks a lot, Sadie. You get to tell the part about the Land of the Dead. I get to describe Interstate 10 through Texas.]

Rick Riordan

#74. I'm adrift. That's the feeling I've had since setting out today - and, really, for much of this shitburger of a year - and I've finally found the word to describe that feeling.

Craig Lancaster

#75. We called the album 'Amarantine' to mean everlasting. Poets use the word to describe an everlasting flower and I loved the image of that.

Enya

#76. Being asked to describe what 'post-racial' means is a bit like being asked to describe a leprechaun, cold fusion or unicorns: we know what is meant, but, if we are willing to be honest, we also know that none of the four describe something real, something tangible, something true.

Tim Wise

#77. Far from being the rock or island in the Simon and Garfunkel song, it turns out that the best metaphor to describe the human body is 'sponge.

Rick Smith

#78. You don't use words like 'kind of interested' to describe how I feel about you.

Melina Marchetta

#79. We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it. So there is a chance that the best of all possible mathematics will be created out of physicists' attempts to describe nature.

Alexander Markovich Polyakov

#80. A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

John Updike

#81. It would be bad form for me to describe people I don't know and don't understand.

Francoise Sagan

#82. We have seen these bodies, she would think, and even long after we are gone some particle in the universe will hold a memory of the words we once used to describe their beauty.

Lydia Millet

#83. For years, my life has been flat. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I've never admitted it before. I'm not depressed, I don't think. That's not what I'm saying. Just flat, listless. So much has felt accidental, unnecessary, arbitrary. It's been lacking a dimension. Something seems to be missing.

Iain Reid

#84. It's like trying to describe a color you've never seen before. Words can't make you understand what real love is like. But until you've felt it ... you haven't really lived.

Lisa Kleypas

#85. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so inadequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.

Dean Koontz

#86. The long silences need to be loved, perhaps more than the words which arrive to describe them in time.

Franz Wright

#87. We shouldn't confuse the pleasure of being articulate about wine, of being able to describe the distinctive features of a wine, with the non-verbal ability of remembering what they are like, or of appreciating them without being able to say why

Kent Bach

#88. Would I use the word 'genius' to describe myself? No. 'Alive?' Perhaps. 'Befuddled?' Certainly.

Sean Gibson

#89. Be a good guide, tell me what you see, are sure is that?
Please try to describe the picture as much vocabulary as possible!

Deyth Banger

#90. Men and women who are used of GOD, if I had only a few words to describe them, they are the passionate-weak, they are the violently-desperate.

Paul David Washer

#91. There simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.

Jonah Lehrer

#92. I don't want you to describe to me - not ever - what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.

John Irving

#93. Elderly parents tend to think their relationship with their middle-aged children is smoother than the children do. Adult grandchildren, who have little stake in pulling away from their grandparents, tend to describe that relationship as less rose-colored than do Gram and Gramps.

Robin Marantz Henig

#94. I almost never use B.C. and A.D. to describe time periods. I use BKCWC. Before Kirk Cameron Went Crazy. That's how I judge time. *

Jenny Lawson

#95. As human beings, we tend to describe our vast
universe and complicated emotions by comparing
them to things we already know and comprehend.
And many of us suffer by comparison.

Rachel C. Weingarten

#96. I like to describe Himalayan climbing as a kind of art of suffering. Just pushing, pushing yourself to your limits.

Wojciech Kurtyka

#97. I would try to find joy despite the necessary work of grieving, and I knew full well that work was exactly the right word to describe it. It was John's life that was over, not mine.

Elizabeth Berg

#98. If the moral good of fiction stems mainly from a habit of mind it inculcates in the reader, styles are neither good nor bad, and to describe some fictional enterprises as false is pointless.

Mary Gordon

#99. Technically you need the extra dimensions. At first people didn't like them too much, but they've got a big benefit, which is that the ability of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their forces along with gravity depends on using the extra dimensions.

Edward Witten

#100. Easy. Easy is a word that's used to describe other people's jobs. "That should be easy for you to do, right?" But notice how rarely people describe their own tasks as easy. For you, it's "Let me look into it" - but for others, it's "Get it done.

Jason Fried