Best 451 quotes in «description quotes» category

Rew looked like he had put his face up to the sky in a rainstorm of freckles

Right now I felt like a person learning that a surgeon had left a pair of scissors inside her during a operation.

Salander was an information junkie with a delinquent child's take on morals and ethics.

Serving humanity is fulfilling the description of Christ

She crooned on until her cigarette was gone. The ash in the wind blew around us like hesitant snow.

She gave a shiver, and suddenly clutched her arms about her body. She spoke, Gascoigne thought, with an exhilarated fatigue, the kind that comes after the first blush of love, when the self has lost its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide. But addiction was not love; it could not be love. Gascoigne could not romanticize the purple shadows underneath her eyes, her wasted limbs, the dreamy disorientation with which she spoke; but even so, he thought, it was uncanny that opium's ruin could mirror love's raptures with such fidelity.

She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds.

She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.

She had always wanted to do every thing, and had made more progress in both drawing and music than many might have done with so little labour as she ever would submit to... She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.

She can feel it scratching at her, her anger, wedged in the space where the two halves of her rib cage meet.

...she felt as if her entire body were glowing with the taste of sunlight, of wind blowing in wide spaces and trees reaching their burdened arms to boundless skies.

She had an idea, but it was the wrong idea. It was hardly even an idea, just a white idea balloon with no writing inside it.

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks.

She looked like Lee Miller if Lee Miller had been a bedroom drunk.

...she shot him in the face as he slid down the door facing and she shot him in the face as he sat on the floor and she ran to him and shot him twice in the face as he sprawled against the wall, scalp down to his chin and his hair on fire.

She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gunpoint.

She stood at the edge of a glassy river lined with impossibly tall trees, fanning out their wide emerald leaves among the puffy white clouds. Across the river, a row of crystal castles glittered in the sunlight in a way that would make Walt Disney want to throw rocks at his “Magic Kingdom.” To her right, a golden path led into a sprawling city, where the elaborate domed buildings seemed to be built from brick-size jewels—each structure a different color. Snowcapped mountains surrounded the lush valley, and the crisp, cool air smelled like cinnamon and chocolate and sunshine.

She had short curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.

She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke.

She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams, her arms streaked and pocked like relief maps of vast planets, her massive calves stuffed like forcemeat into lung-colored support hose. She was quixotically vain about her appearance and spent an hour each morning making up her face.

She wasn't dressed like a student. She wore an elaborate burgundy dress with long skirts, a tight waist, and matching burgundy gloves that rose all the way to her elbows. Moving deliberately, she managed to get down off the stool without tangling her feet and made her way over to stand nest to my table. Her blond hair was artfully curled, and her lips were a deeply painted red. I couldn't help wondering what she was doing in a place like Anker's.

She was strong and stubborn but loving. She was an untouchable angel with a devil’s mark. She was beautiful.

She watches her mother drink, then sits by her again before the picture window to watch the snow fall, watching closely until she can hear it. . . . Rachel listens to snow. And beyond snow.

Sidney: The woman took a seat to reorganize, and Lucy cataloged an almost perfectly symmetrical face with cheekbones that could part hair. The woman's pale face hid underneath the lip-gloss and mascara that ran interference, distracting onlookers from a sagging spirit. She was dressed in a baggie sweater and jeans that made her look like a casual starlet waiting for the paparazzi to snap her photo.

. . . sitting up cross-legged and noting the light, how it fills the room in streams, etching out the shape of Zach recumbent, a bold coastline in a clarion sky. I drop anchor here, thinks Rachel. Anywhere here. You are my home, my horizon, my shore. How long is the coast of Britain?

Sit yourself down," Joan instructed as we reached the the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room.

Smoked like it was fuel and he was going to get every last inch to the gallon.

... so beautiful that he could not refrain from moving his lips towards her...

So long as our untried senses and our naïve heart recognize themselves and delight in the universe of qualifications, they flourish with the aid and at the risk of the adjective, which, once dissected, proves inadequate, deficient. We say of space, of time, and of suffering that they are infinite; but infinite has no more bearing than beautiful, sublime, harmonious, ugly.... Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing—each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture—pryrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness.

Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.

Since its sudden birth the city had expanded, swallowing up acre upon acre of the surrounding grasslands and drawing thousands into its domain. Hardly built on the most advantageous ground, miles from the open waters, decades from the mines at the mountain summits, it yet remained the only settlement of note on the isle. This sprawling mass of a city, once a compact kingdom, was now the keystone of the Castilian Empire.

Some people in the town did not seem to care about the festival and were watching football on TV. The players were dotted about in neon green. They looked unreal, the way they might be seen by the forgotten man in the moon and the rabbit if they were watching the floodlit pitch forlornly from above.

Sometimes in the corner of my eye, I saw a girl running through the loft. A see-through girl, a silhouette. She looked the way the world looks without my glasses. Vaguely hued, indistinct. She looked the way a body looks underwater, lost in the blur of bubble and wave.

Son front, quoique peu ridé, semble porter le sceau d'une myriade d'années. Ses cheveux gris sont des archives du passé et ses yeux, plus gris encore, sont des sibylles de l'avenir.

Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated, and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude.

... that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable...

The air outside was sharp and the wind fickle, clouds moving across the sky in patters that resembled spilled milk on a kitchen table. That was, if the milk had been left out on the table for three weeks and turned grey.

The atmosphere felt unexpectedly intense and the music was frantic. The beat made it both difficult to think straight and pleasant to move – like swimming almost.

The bar lights glittered on the wet pavement, and jazz wailed out of the open doors of the bars, collinding with the more discordant, driving beats coming from the strip joints, where bored-looking dancers, both male and female, gyrated their hips and humped poles and pretended to be sexy.

The boy's candlecolored skin was all but translucent.

The child-like, gum-chewing naïveté , the glamour rooted in despair, the self admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones…

The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.

The color palette is confined to that of a Gustave Dore' engraving, greys and blacks, and subtle shadings of these rendered in harrowing crosshatches and highlighted with sudden glaring areas of nothingness, like splotches of vitiligo sent to haunt the dead with memories of what real light did to the eyes.

The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the floor.

The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.

The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.

The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;...

... the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate. more human - filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover, wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before the mystery of the human presence which those lighted windows at once revealed and screened from sight...