Best 451 quotes in «description quotes» category

It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying.

It is perfectly scientific,' Lev protests, rising to draw the heavy dining room curtains against the streetlamp light, reducing it to a glow that bleeds amber round the edges and between the panels of plum brocade. Lev turns back into the room but stays by the window a moment to observe the new play of light, the chandelier casting shards of glitter upon mahogany and bold shadows across the high brow and long sharp plains of Katya's timeless face. Oh my wife.

It slowly began to dawn on me that I had been staring at her for an impossible amount of time. Lost in my thoughts, lost in the sight of her. But her face didn't look offended or amused. It almost looked as if she were studying the lines of my face, almost as if she were waiting. I wanted to take her hand. I wanted to brush her cheek with my fingertips. I wanted to tell her that she was the first beautiful thing that I had seen in three years. The sight of her yawning to the back of her hand was enough to drive the breath from me. How I sometimes lost the sense of her words in the sweet fluting of her voice. I wanted to say that if she were with me then somehow nothing could ever be wrong for me again. In that breathless second I almost asked her. I felt the question boiling up from my chest. I remember drawing a breath then hesitating--what could I say? Come away with me? Stay with me? Come to the University? No. Sudden certainty tightened in my chest like a cold fist. What could I ask her? What could I offer? Nothing. Anything I said would sound foolish, a child's fantasy. I closed my mouth and looked across the water. Inches away, Denna did the same. I could feel the heat of her. She smelled like road dust, and honey, and the smell the air holds seconds before a heavy summer rain. Neither of us spoke. I closed my eyes. The closeness of her was the sweetest, sharpest thing I had ever known.

I turn my head and stare out the casement window at the royal gardens instead, wet and slippery and dark as the center of a body, where the roses twitch an extinguished red.

It was a chilly morning after the night's rain, and the sun hung in the sky like a pale coin lost by someone high up in the clouds.

It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.

It was dark now. A thin moon was visible, a bright portent, but giving no light.

It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.

It was night, and the sky spreading into a rain that fell like darkness visible, a glistering where there was no light.

It was raining when Amarelle Parathis went out just after sunset to find a drink, and there was strange magic in the rain. It came down in pale lavenders and coppers and reds, soft lines like liquid dusk that turned luminescent mist on the warm pavement. The air itself felt like champagne bubbles breaking against the skin. Over the dark shapes of distant rooftops, blue-white lightning blazed, and stuttering thunder chased it.

It was so pure, the snow, the purest of all powders, I thought, so pure it must be from elsewhere, from another planet.

... it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct...

I wanted this day, the perfect buttery sun like peach ice cream, the speed, the satin leather of the car seat, the fair. Forbidden fruit, a day like no other.

Living above the world, each discovering his own weight, seeing his face brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence that was at once a judge and a justification among them. The world, here, became a personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those in whom equilibrium has not killed love.

Mankind has uncovered two extremely efficient theories: one that describes our universe's structure (Einstein's gravity: the theory of general relativity), and one that describes everything our universe contains (quantum field theory), and these two theories won't talk to each other.

Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race.

Meantime the clang of the bows and the shouts of the combatants mixed fearfully with the sound of the trumpets, and drowned the groans of those who fell, and lay rolling defenceless beneath the feet of the horses. The splendid armour of the combatants was now defaced with dust and blood, and gave way at every stroke of the sword and battle-axe. The gay plumage, shorn from the crests, drifted upon the breeze like snowflakes. All that was beautiful in the martial array had disappeared, and what was now visibke was only calculated to awaken terror or compassion.

Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.

Mitch looks in her direction. He can't meet her eyes. It's as if she's semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur.

Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained.

Morrissey was singularly small, a man in his mid-thirties who had once been compared to a ferret. He had a thin trap of a mouth and greased black hair that he perpetually attended, directing it back from his forehead with a clogged comb. He was dressed now, as invariably he was, in flannel trousers and the jacket of a blue striped suit over a blue pullover, and a shirt that was buttoned to the neck but did not have a tie in its collar.

More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy, the Young Electrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarily vital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine faces that fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous existence in a prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting still, with the tingling, psychic prophecy of some amazing emotional experience yet to come.

Most of the passenger cars are lined with thick patterned carpets, upholstered in velvets in burgundies and violets and creams, as though they have been dipped in a sunset, hovering at twilight and holding on to the colors before they fade to midnight and stars.

Mother wasn't afraid of the sky in the day so much, but it was the night stars that she wanted to turn off, and sometimes I could almost see her reaching for a switch in her mind, but never finding it.

Mrs. Shah was a media favorite and the paparazzi loved her but only because she could be entertainingly obnoxious with her potty mouth and caustic mannerisms

My body, still too heavy with sleep to move...

My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.

my digs look as if they've been dug

[My father] had a name for the bottom of the sky--'the hem of heaven.

My head felt like it was going to crack down the middle, like some demented dwarf was driving glass pins through my brain.

My mother likes odd numbers and is suspicious of the even ones. She reads a new book every week and is bewitched by black holes in the universe. She describes herself as an optimist but she worries about everything—worries incessantly—worries on behalf of others when she feels they are not worrying adequately for themselves. And my mother misses her own mother, my grandmother, immensely, who only has a past now; who is only allowed to be as we remember her.

Naming can satisfy a need, it can shorten a conversation that otherwise might go on for hours.

Narziss was dark and thin of face, and Goldmund open and radiant as a flower. Narziss was a thinker and anatomiser, Goldmund a dreamer and a child. Yet things common to both could bridge these differences. Both were knightly and delicate; both set apart by visible signs from their fellows, since both had received the particular admonishment of fate.

Newly Found Sugary Spill: Tastes Like Dried Spit or Old Soda

Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted - never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache.

Night was fading over the fields as if the rain had washed the darkness out of the hem of its garment.

No shadows steal upon this hard glare, the stony vineyards shimmer in the sun and the bougainvillaea is white with dust.

Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind. He used to entertain them at his house.

... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.

Of course the idiot was more stunning at close, perfect shaped lips, dark luminous hair, and golden eyes like liquid gold...

...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.

Only the lighted houses remaining, the lemon blush of their inhabited windows.

Outside, I could smell the Zebra. Even if for some reason I stopped feeling cold or hot or rain or sun, I bet I could close my eyes and still tell which season I was in just by the smell of the trees and dirt there. Spring was sweet mud and flowers. Fall has a kind of moldy edge to it, and winter was all dust and bark. As for summer, the Zebra carried a mossy, thick aroma full of baking leaves and oozing sap, which I guessed was its growing smell.

Outside the window there was snow falling, falling like movie snow, all the dreamy fluffy bits drifting around in the light of a single streetlamp . . . I watched the snow slow down, thin out. Then it was two or three pieces at a time, falling reversibly, wavering up and down and up again like they didn't know where to go.

Outdoors; everything one might dream. The fairy-gray clouded sky and the fairy-green misted wood. Her tall horse shying at a sparkling brook. All dreams.

Out from the servient shoulders of some smooth-tongued Waiter it stares, into the scared dilating pupils of the White Satin Bride with her pledged hand clutching her Bridegroom's sleeve. Up from the gravelly, pick-and-shovel labor of the new-made grave it lifts its weirdly magnetic eyes to the Widow's tears. Down from some petted Princeling's silver-trimmed saddle horse it smiles its electrifying, wistful smile into the Peasant's sodden weariness. Across the slender white rail of an always out-going steamer it stings back into your gray, land-locked consciousness like the tang of a scarlet spray. And the secret of the face, of course, is "Lure"; but to save your soul you could not decide in any specific case whether the lure is the lure of personality, or the lure of physiognomy—a mere accidental, coincidental, haphazard harmony of forehead and cheek-bone and twittering facial muscles.

Outside the windows, everything is getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night.

Over the bed hung the picture of her beloved, the Polish Rider. He was looking, with his authoritative pensive mouth and his calm wide-apart eyes, past Moy, over her left shoulder and away into some vast distance. He was a knight upon a quest. He was brave, innocent, chaste, good.

People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows. From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel–engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast–iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four–roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612. Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front.

Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream.