Best 451 quotes in «description quotes» category

The worst is itself the description of the pain in it. It hurts wherever it is.

They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond.

... they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.

They lay there, two starfish on a galactic beach, the lights twinkling and the pink and blue clouds hovering like distant nebulae.

The young man who stood there was the handsomest mad Rand had ever seen, almost too handsome for masculinity.

Things that in other circumstances would have excited him left him unmoved now, for they were simply part of his life, until the moment he was back in his room using all his strength and care to smother the flame of life that burned within him.

This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.

This morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet.

This was the neighborhood of the cheap addicts, whisky-heads, stumblebums, the flotsam of Harlem; the end of the line for the whores, the hard squeeze for the poor honest laborers and a breeding ground for crime. Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corners swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn't anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal — always running, ducking and dodging. God help them if they got caught. Listless mothers stood in the dark entrances of tenements and swapped talk about their men, their jobs, their poverty, their hunger, their debts, their Gods, their religions, their preachers, their children, their aches and pains, their bad luck with the numbers and the evilness of white people. Workingmen staggered down the sidewalks filled with aimless resentment, muttering curses, hating to go to their hotbox hovels but having nowhere else to go.

Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.

Through my sudden tears, the train lights smeared like shooting stars. Lying before the rippling blue window, below the slurred lights of the world above, it was as if we were underwater.

Thump Milton loomed over Ree, a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched.

To begin with, the room was not large enough for two. It looked out on a small courtyard. 'Looked out' means only that the room had two windows, against which the courtyard malevolently pressed, encroaching day by day, as though it had confused itself with a jungle.

Tirza, his youngest daughter, the one who turned out best. Turned out wonderfully, both inside and out.

Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. That's what time is like.

To describe one's character is difficult and not necessarily illuminating. The story which follows will reveal, whether I will or no, what sort of person I am.

To demonstrate is to show clearly & deliberately, and to describe is to give a detailed account in words. That thing called 'Love' is defined when demonstrated, not when described.

To put it succinctly: description without prescription is the germ of resignation, and prescription without description is mere whim.

Tomorrow was over the horizon and it would take an entire day to reach

Tonight the sun has died like an Emperor ... great scarlet arcs of silk ... saffron ... green ... crimson ... and the blaze of Venus to remind one of the absolute and the infinite ... and along the lower rim of beauty lay the hard harsh line of the hills ...

Tornadoes were, in out part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense.

To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow 'resembles' the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.

To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers.

To those who may have wisely kept their fancies within the boundary of the fields we know it is difficult for me to tell of the land to which Alveric had come, so that in their minds they can see that plain with its scattered trees and far off the dark wood out of which the palace of Elfland lifted those glittering spires, and above them and beyond them that serene range of mountains whose pinnacles took no colour from any light we see. Yet it is for this very purpose that our fancies travel far, and if my reader through fault of mine fail to picture the peaks of Elfland my fancy had better have stayed in the fields we know. Know then that in Elfland are colours more deep than are in our fields, and the very air there glows with so deep a lucency that all things seen there have something of the look of our trees and flowers in June reflected in water. And the colour of Elfland, of which I despaired to tell, may yet be told, for we have hints of it here; the deep blue of the night in Summer just as the gloaming has gone, the pale blue of Venus flooding the evening with light, the deeps of lakes in the twilight, all these are hints of that colour. And while our sunflowers carefully turned to the sun, some forefather of the rhododendrons must have turned a little towards Elfland, so that some of that glory dwells with them to this day.

... washed clean like a porcelain, with housewifely care...

Una rosa se despertó en su sangre y ensombreció sus mejillas. Un agitado aliento separó los pétalos de sus labios, que temblaron. Sobre ella sopló algún viento sur de pasión y movió los delicados pliegos de su vestido

Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

... until it had acquired the strength to create in my mind a fresh example of absolute, unproductive beauty...

Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.

We awoke to a fabulation of ice, the sun shining like a weapon, light rocketing off every surface except the surfaces of the Army's clean streets and walks.

When he did appear his eyes were as brown as I remembered, pupils flecked with gold like beach pebbles.

We swam in sunshine and in rain; we swam in the morning, when the sea was sluggish as soup, we swam at night, the water flowing over our arms like undulations of black satin; one afternoon we stayed in the water during a thunderstorm, and a fork of lightning struck the surface of the sea so closer to us we heard the crackle of it and smelt the burnt air.

What it must feel like to lie back with cut wrists in a warm bath, a voluptuous dwindling feeling.

When he arrived at the flat, he found Keston sitting in his leather armchair wearing a quilted maroon smoking jacket. He was drinking a Bloody Mary and looked like he was about to introduce Masterpiece Theatre or a tale of the unexpected.

We topped a rise just then, and the moor stretched out ahead of us, silvery-white and rustling, like a wide ghostly sea. In the distance lay Grimsgrave Hall, black and hulking as a ship adrift on moonlit waves.

What a wonderful description.

When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.

When Headmaster Conrady pointed out the white clapboard chapel, I wondered whether there might be at least one structure with a softer name, like Church of the Good Shepherd or Chapel of the Non-Weapon-Bearing Angels. No such luck. Armistice Chapel was a place of peace, but only if you signed the treaty and sat at attention.

While the bible is GOD because the word of GOD is GOD, please understand that GOD cannot be contained in the bible. To believe otherwise is to make an infinite GOD finite.

When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly quiet, and she would imagine for a few seconds she was back there in that mausoleum of a ranch house in the San Fernando Valley.

. . . while we cooed and fretted and bent our faces into sympathetic shapes in his direction.

When she did walk, to the bathroom between the chairs and the customers leaning back in them, oblivious to her manoeuvres, the sight felt strangely moving and profound, like a baby, or a veteran getting out of a wheelchair, or a deer in snow. That is perhaps overdoing it. Maybe I didn't quite know that at the time, but it was striking. If you have not seen a deer in snow, I mean: moving with precision, but as if she might leap away in a completely different direction at any moment.

. . . where an iron bedstead was wrapped in stillness.

Wings of a half finished book across his chest.

Why so sad?" Zach queries in fairy-tale tones. "Rachel?" "O my brother Ivanushka," she recites. "A heavy stone is round my throat, silken grass grows through my fingers, yellow sand lies on my breast." "That's perishing gloomy," Zach remarks. "It ends happily though. Gracious! Everything sounds depressing this morning," adds Rachel. "There's a teacher at my school, she's very young, but she goes, Gracious! Just like a dowager. Makes me laugh. Except this morning. I can't help it. I am too depressed. I hate those voices so much. In the Gardens." "Stop listening," Zach scolds and put his hands in her hair—silken grass grows through his fingers.

You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You've got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don't get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head's in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam.

... with a quiet suggestion of infinity...

With his fair hair and milky skin and rosy cheeks, he looks like he could be an English farmer’s son. But he’s slim, so maybe the sensitive farmer’s son who steals away to the barn to read.

Your personality should be described in poem not in paragraph.