Details Quotes - Page 15

• The truth of the story lies in the details.

  Paul Auster

  Lying, Stories

  Paul Auster (2007). “The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel”, p.158, Macmillan

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• If, for example, I saw my grandparents or my daughter for an instant, would I recognize them? Probably not, because in looking so hard for a way to keep them alive, remembering them in the most minimal details, I have been changing them, adorning them with qualities they may not have had. I have given them a destiny much more complex than the ones they lived.

  Isabel Allende

  Daughter, Destiny, Grandparent

  Isabel Allende (2003). “My invented country: a memoir”, HarperPerennial

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• Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Fascination, Holiness, Accurate

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “I Have Landed”, p.47, Harvard University Press

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• Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Ostriches, Ideas

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• To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say-- no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Beautiful, Men, Italian

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.68, A&C Black

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• It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Men, Thinking, Details Of Life

  Alexis de Tocqueville (2001). “Democracy in America”, p.314, Penguin

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• Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

  John Stuart Mill

  Mean, Details Of Life, Practice

  John Stuart Mill (2017). “The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Memoirs…”, p.189, e-artnow

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• Note to self on waking. Lay off the beer on an empty stomach. This dream is even more screwed up than the time I had a donkey and a corkscrew. (Aiden) Donkey and a corkscrew? (Leta) I don’t know you well enough to fill you in on those details. (Aiden)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Dream, Beer, Self

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2007). “Upon The Midnight Clear”, p.76, Macmillan

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• ...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.

  Thomas Bernhard

  Suicide, Causes, Reason

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• Father may have been wanting in some things, but here he was masterful. Night upon night, I marveled at his power to hold listeners in rapt attention. He could tell a story with such detail, such flourish, that afterwards a man could swear it had been his own memory, and not a tale at all.

  Seth Grahame-Smith

  Memories, Father, Night

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• It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible.

  Diana Gabaldon

  Beautiful, Memories, Heart

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• As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it.

  Joshua Lederberg

  Real, Needs, Process

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• Exhortations to obstruct the operations of Government in detail, should; Exhortations to resist all.

  James Mill

  Government, Should, Operations

  James Mill (1829). “Essays on Government, Jurisprudence, Liberty of the Press, and Law of Nations. Written for the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica”

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• Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Boring, Worst, Educated

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• The devil is in the details, and everything we do in the military is a detail.

  Hyman Rickover

  Military, Devil

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• What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

  Mark Twain

  Schedules, Crafts, Landscape

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• So I made an outline. Well, you know, days are going by, and I am not writing anything because this thing is laid out in front of me. It's as if you get every brochure for a trip you are going to go on and you get the minutest details of every step along the way. Well, I really doubt you're going to then get in the car and go. You know, it's like, why bother if it's all laid out in front of you?

  Steve Tesich

  Writing, Car, Doubt

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• Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Writing, Story Writers, Stories

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• Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned,-the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.

  Lord Acton

  Fall, Writing, Learning

  John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton (2016). “The History of Freedom (and other Essays)”, p.231, Jazzybee Verlag

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• In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

  Anton Chekhov

  Dog, Stars, Eye

  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1987). “The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings”

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• I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Character, Writing, Hands

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• I always choose an area that is of personal interest, but I don't plan my travels in detail. There are so many variables one cannot predict: the changing light, weather, personal mood, and often just plain luck. Of course, you must have a starting point, so I establish some fixed points then improvise as I go. In many cases the locations seem to choose me.

  Josef Hoflehner

  Photography, Light, Weather

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• At the root of creativity is an impulse to understand, to make sense of random and often unrelated details. For me, photography provides an intersection of time, space, light, and emotional stance. One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to 'hear through the eyes'.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Art, Creativity

  Paul Caponigro (2002). “New England Days”, p.38, David R. Godine Publisher

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• The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Organization, Expression

  "Cartier-Bresson's classic is back - but his Decisive Moment has passed" by Sean O'Hagan, www.theguardian.com. December 23, 2014.

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• With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.

  Peter Singer

  Religious, Acceptance, Animal

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