Best 451 quotes in «description quotes» category

Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.

To me, self-description is a calamity.

Unfortunately, unless the job description included a translation of the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, I was dreadfully under-qualified.

Trade is a social act. Whoever undertakes to sell any description of any goods to the public, does what affects the interest of other persons, and of society in general; and thus his conduct, in principal, comes within the jurisdiction of society.

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

We live in a description of reality.

We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.

What is your one-sentence job description?

What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.

What girls do to each other is beyond description. No chinese torture comes close.

A draught made the flames of the candles dance and the air grew thick with the smell of hot wax. Marianne's eyes had grown more and more accustomed to the candlelight and she made out knobs and swags of craving in the ceiling, flowers, cherubs, jacks-in-the-green, death's heads, hourglasses and memento mori, all covered with dust. Trunks, chests and cases were littered everywhere, covered with dusty utensils and more books even than in her father's study. He must have a special cart to himself to transport them all. Yellow weeds blossomed in the walls and somewhere moisture dripped.

What we need now is the description of the "describer" or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

You are a genius beyond description, so start telling yourself that and become aware of who you really are.

Above the front door the fanlight glowed blue, delicate as wing-bones.

a constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects.

Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.

A fighter, muses Rachel, is a fighter through and through, consistently irregular, a fighting man on every scale. Fractal, fractious, with a rough complexity! Nothing she can do. A fractal, Papa once told her, is a way of seeing infinity. In Zachariah, she sees infinity. Mandelbrot famously wrote a paper called 'How Long Is the Coast of Britain?,' the answer to which, of course, is that it depends how you look at it. The closer one looks, the larger it is. And more and more intricate, on an infinite scale. There is a template for all things.

Alfred is taken past this broom, and enters this room; which can only be described as 'piecemeal'. It is full of pieces of fish-market paraphernalia, pieces of military-regalia; and pieces of rusted-steel. It is full of these spiky-hooks, fishmongery-books; and saline-scalers. These bayonet-blades, grenades; and dusty loud-halers.

Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him.

All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep to my dying day. :ike a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he washes over me, his devastating presence - dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating. I was turned to small stones.

All the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took shape and grew solid before his eyes, and at the same time they soothed his troubled heart.

...an old guy with a Hemingway beard and the build of a girl.

Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.

Art is the reflection of pure emotion and mind, the nature of sensation. An artist illustrates that.

A solitary finger of light fell upon it, illuminating motes of golden dust floating in the air.

A song called 'Earth Angel' played in her head all morning—also three trumpets and a piano.

As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetle-bung trees afire.

At last he said, "Did you come out of the big mountains?" Gitano shook his head slowly. "No, I walked down the Salinas Valley." The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. "Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?" The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano's head.

At the moment when, ordinarily, there was still an hour to be lived through before meal-time sounded, we would all know that in a few seconds we should see the endives make their precocious appearance, followed by the special favour of an omelette, an unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind.

A vast field opened like a blossoming tulip, flowers blooming in the rippling airs of spring. High and frothy trees hugged air and sun as they gallantly cast a shade over the earth. On the horizon a florid vessel of mountains trailed to the never-ending, blue as memories distant, poised as statues embroidered into time’s eternal drift.

Bicycles, bullock carts, and buses that belched thick, black smoke moved in anarchic streams with the auto rickshaws and cars along the streets. Many of the shops—normally selling everything from groceries to stainless steel cookware to shoes—stood silent behind shutters and honeycomb grilles.

Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else's blood on his shirt. You could trust him to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to watch your back. You couldn't trust his eyes though. He had kind eyes, and you couldn't trust them.

But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so, when she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for her defence, unconfident of success, she was inclined to weep from sheer exhaustion, as children weep sometimes when they have not slept. She knew, also, that her lie, as a rule, was doing a serious injury to the man to whom she was telling it, and that she might find herself at his mercy if she told it badly. Therefore she felt at once humble and culpable in his presence. And when she had to tell an insignificant, social lie its hazardous associations, and the memories which it recalled, would leave her weak with a sense of exhaustion and penitent with a consciousness of wrongdoing.

Callahan dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain.

Captain Dave is a salt-and-pepper guy who looks older than forty-six. He doesn't have kids of his own. Some people are born to be uncles and Captain Dave is that kind of people. He's also a recovering alcoholic who's obsessed with what everyone else is drinking at all times. Life is hard for some people.

C'est un vieil homme auquel on ne peut plus donner d'âge, sec, boucané, fripé comme des pommes reinettes oubliées sur les planches d'un fruitier, mais qui garde encore, sous leur peau ridée, une chair ferme et saine.

CONSTANTINE Trigorin has worked out a process of his own, and descriptions are easy for him. He writes that the neck of a broken bottle lying on the bank glimmered in the moonlight, and that the shadows lay black under the mill-wheel. There you have a moonlit night before your eyes, but I speak of the shimmering light, the twinkling stars, the distant sounds of a piano melting into the still and scented air, and the result is abominable.

Dark spruce frowned on either side of the frozen waterway.

Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.

Drunken women in very sheer catch-a-cold-or-catch-a-man dresses were acting like they were on spring break in Cancún. Inebriated men in dark suits were . . . making passes and grabbing asses and refilling glasses.

Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.

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.

Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees- willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them.Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!

All description is obscene. If it's real, if it exists, why do you need the words?

All kinds of weird stuff going down, whisperings in corners, significant matches struck and blown out. The whores, unoccupied, were drinking heavily. The police, occupied were drinking even more heavily. The grass in the corner wanted to drink most heavily, but lacked the poke.

…although her mouth uttered fond words, her eyes spoke only venom.

Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled so soon as - in the moment when she has failed to meet us - for the pleasure which we were on the point of enjoying in her charming company is abruptly substituted an anxious torturing desire, whose object is the creature herself, an irrational, absurd desire, which the laws of civilised society make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage - the insensate, agonising desire to possess her.