Description Quotes - Page 23

• landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.

  Patricia Hampl

  Stories, Landscape, Beloved

  Patricia Hampl (1993). “Spillville: A Collaboration”, Milkweed Editions

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• In Virgil's account of the good housewife, who rises early in order to measure out the work of the household, and in Solomon's description of the thrifty woman of his time, one sees the value set upon feminine industry and economy in times far removed from our own.

  Julia Ward Howe

  Order, Economy, Feminine

  Julia Ward Howe (1880). “Modern Society”

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• At boarding schools of every description, the relaxation of the junior boys is mischief; and of the senior, vice.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Senior, School, Boys

  Mary Wollstonecraft (1999). “A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution”, p.243, OUP Oxford

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• The trouble with God isn't that He so seldom makes Himself known to us... He's holding you and me and everybody else by the scruff of the neck practically _constantly... Contentedly adrift in the cosmos, were you?... That is a perfect description of a non-epiphany, that rarest of moments, when God Almighty lets go of the scruff of your neck and lets you be human for a little while.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Letting Go, Perfect, Religion

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• Multiple descriptions are better than one.

  Gregory Bateson

  Multiple

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• To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Reality, Trying, Structure

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• But then one is always excited by descriptions of money changing hands. It's much more fundamental than sex.

  Nigel Dennis

  Money, Sex, Hands

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• Men have jobs, while women have Roles: Mother, Wife, Goddess, Temptress, etc. That's probably why it's so hard for women to rewrite the rules. You're not just changing a job description, but an ancient myth. You're revising the Bible, Poetry, Legend and Psychoanalytic Scripture.

  Caryl Rivers

  Mother, Jobs, Men

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• Many there are who, not comprehending, not being affected with, that divine, spiritual description of the person of Christ which is given us by the Holy Ghost in the Scripture, do feign unto themselves false representations of him by images and pictures, so as to excite carnal and corrupt affections in their minds. By the help of their outward senses, they reflect on their imaginations the shape of a human body, cast into postures and circumstances dolorous or triumphant; and so, by the working of their fancy, raise a commotion of mind in themselves, which they suppose to be love unto Christ.

  John Owen

  Spiritual, Imagination, Mind

  John Owen (2001). “The Person of Christ”, p.159, Sovereign Grace Publishers,

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• The description you have been given of the world is an aberrant one. It does not accept and give proper place to the nagual, to the mysterious unknown that is our heritage.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Giving, Doe

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• the only real time as far as Buddhism is concerned is right now. Right now there is no old age or death because old age and death are descriptions of things as they are now when we compare them to things as they used to be.

  Brad Warner

  Death, Time, Real

  Brad Warner (2010). “Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate: A Trip Through Death, Sex, Divorce, and Spiritual Celebrity in Search of the True Dharma”, p.54, New World Library

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• Description needs to slide into a story like a snake through grass - silently, almost invisibly, without calling attention to itself. It should enrich every story moment without slowing the action.

  Marion Dane Bauer

  Snakes, Needs, Attention

  Marion Dane Bauer (1996). “Our Stories: A Fiction Workshop for Young Authors”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• You couldn't find nobody deader, not if you'd sarched for a week. Why, door nails, and Julius Caesar, and things o' that description, would ha' been lively compared with your poor ma when I see her. Lively! that's what they'd ha' been.

  Laura E. Richards

  Death, Doors, Nails

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• To have children is a double living, the earthly fountain of youth, a continual fresh delight, a volcano as well as a fountain, and also a source of weariness beyond description.

  Josephine Winslow Johnson

  Children, Volcanoes, Delight

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• If there is a lack of specificity in Grossman's description of the town and the walkers, and if the story perhaps sometimes becomes lost and confusing, then it is because the landscape and its inhabitants are really shadows, creatures of an interior world, whose journey and whose quest are within. Falling Out of Time is short, and clearly a deeply personal book, but its importance and impact ought not to be underestimated.

  Ian Sansom

  Book, Fall, Journey

  "Falling Out of Time by David Grossman - review" by Ian Sansom, www.theguardian.com. February 6, 2014.

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• I have nothing to tell except travellers' stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.

  George Eliot

  Play, Saws, Stories

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• Science is the description of phenomena and the formulation of their relations.

  Boris Sidis

  Relation

  Boris Sidis (1914). “The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology”

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• Adam Smith's image of competition in the marketplace was intended as an adjunct to his detailed description of human motivation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments , in which the pursuit of profit is tempered at every juncture by sympathy and benevolence, and by the posture of the "impartial spectator" which is forced on us by our moral nature.

  Ted Malloch

  Motivation, Competition, Moral

  "Doing Virtuous Business: The Remarkable Success of Spiritual Enterprise". Book by Ted Malloch, 2011.

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• The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. A constitution of things in which the liberty of no one man, and no body of men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in the society. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice.

  Edmund Burke

  Philosophy, Mean, Men

  Edmund Burke (1999). “The Portable Edmund Burke”, p.503, Penguin

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• There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Art, Rocks, Dragons

  Arthur C. Clarke (2012). “2010: Odyssey Two”, p.110, RosettaBooks

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• The most lively fancy aided by the strongest description cannot equal the reality of the opera.

  John Marshall

  Reality, Opera, Fancy

  John Marshall, Herbert Alan Johnson, Charles T. Cullen, Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) (1974). “The Papers of John Marshall: Correspondence and papers, January 1796-December 1798”, Chapel Hill, N.C : University of North Carolina Press

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• I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it.

  Philip Glass

  Years, Minimalist, Used

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• Younger women tend to be busier, wearing more layers and more make-up. I don't know if it's because older women are more confident, or just that we don't care any more. But that pared-down approach is the same with the sentences I write; I take out adjectives and adverbs and keep the description to a minimum.

  Tracy Chevalier

  Writing, Adjectives And Adverbs, Care

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• If you look at most womens writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writers description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. Theyre looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Character, Males

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• There arent many great passages written about food, but I love one by George Millar, who worked for the SOE in the second world war and wrote a book called Horned Pigeon. He had been on the run and hadnt eaten for a week, and his description of the cheese fondue he smells in the peasant kitchen of a house in eastern France is unbelievable.

  Sebastian Faulks

  Running, War, Book

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