Depiction Quotes

I often wondered why I was attracted to certain landscapes and not others and why my photographs (and depictions by other artists) looked the way they did, Archetypes imprinted on my mind started me on a search ... ~ John Pfahl

The mass depiction of the modern woman as a "beauty" is a contradiction: Where modern women are growing, moving, and expressing their individuality, as the myth has it, "beauty" is by definition inert, timeless, and generic. That this hallucination is necessary and deliberate is evident in the way "beauty" so directly contradicts women's real situation. ~ Naomi Wolf

Our emotional valence – positive or negative experiences – affects not only how we narrate childhood events, but also which memories we retain. The interplay between a person encountering environment experiences meshed with self-editing of various aspects of their complex memory system results in a person becoming more than a collection of memories: a person creates their personalized version of a self. A person integrates many experiences into creating their being. Personal encounters with other people as well as moments of personal solitude contemplating ideas and personal existence congeal to form the depiction of a self. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I'm not ashamed to admit that occasionally I've found myself aroused by my own depictions of sex. ~ Louis Begley

I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. ~ Ray Bradbury

What are the things that make adults depressed? The master list is too comprehensive to quantify (plane crashes, unemployment, killer bees, impotence, Stringer Bell's murder, gambling addictions, crib death, the music of Bon Iver, et al.) But whenever people talk about their personal bouts of depression in the abstract, there are two obstructions I hear more than any other. The possibility that one's life is not important, and the mundane predictability of day-to-day existence. Talk to a depressed person (particularly one who's nearing midlife), and one (or both) of these problems will inevitably be described. Since the end of World War II, every generation of American children has been endlessly conditioned to believe that their lives are supposed to be great -- a meaningful life is not just possible, but required. Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it's interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. At the same time, we concede that a compelling life is supposed to be spontaneous and unpredictable-- any artistic depiction of someone who does the same thing every day portrays that character as tragically imprisoned (January Jones on Mad Men, Ron Livingston in Office Space, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby," all novels set in affluent suburbs, pretty much every project Sam Mendes has ever conceived, etc.) If you know ~ Chuck Klosterman

I just did an arc with Warren Ellis - and no one else on the planet could get away with this, because I think this is like harassment? - But Warren felt like there was a depiction of Spider-Woman where it looked like her waist perhaps didn't contain any internal organs. And he suggested very quietly ... 'You should fix that, or else I will come to your house and nail your feet to the floor and set your house on fire.' ... And it totally got fixed! ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick

There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour. ~ Dean Koontz

Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. ... "These Native Americans ... believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature." ... Stated flatly like this, the beliefs seem like make-believe, not the sophisticated theology of a higher civilization. Let us try a similarly succinct summary of the beliefs of many Christians today: "These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son's body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they died."

Textbooks never describe Christianity this way. It's offensive. Believers would immediately argue that such a depiction fails to convey the symbolic meaning or the spiritual satisfaction of communion. ~ James W. Loewen

Dispersal was a conscious strategy of the plunderers. Only by destroying these collections could they build up new ones. Many of these libraries were the results of decades, sometimes centuries, of careful collecting. There had been generations of learned collectors and readers. The books also said something about the people who owned and treasured them: what they read and what they thought and what they dreamed. Sometimes they left traces in the form of underlined passages, notations, notes in the margins, or short comments. The beautiful and personally designed ex librises that many readers had made for their books demonstrate the care and pride they took in their libraries. Each collection in its own right took form in a unique culture, a depiction of its creator's world, which was lost when the library was broken up. The books are fragments of a library, of a world that once existed. ~ Anders Rydell

When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. […] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication. ~ Harry G. Frankfurt

Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character. ~ Hedi Slimane

In assembling this group of portraits of women, I'm aware that I'm treading on dangerous ground. When I was in college, I learned to be distrustful of men's depictions of women. I remember seeing Garry Winogrand's book Women Are Beautiful in the school library and being shocked that it hadn't been defaced for its blatant objectification of women. But looking back, maybe I was too harsh. Whether one photographs men or women, it is always a form of objectification. Whatever you say about Winogrand, his depiction was honest. ~ Alec Soth

Before that first line of pale chalk, before the underdrawing fleshes out into shapes and proportions, there is a stab of grief for all the things she didn't get to paint. The finches wheeling in the rafters of the barn, Cornelis reading in the arbor, Tomas bent over in his roses in the flower garden, apple blossoms, walnuts beside oysters, Kathrijn in the full bloom of her short life, Barent sleeping in a field of lilacs, the Gypsies in the market, late-night revelers in the taverns…. Every work is a depiction and a lie. We rearrange the living, exaggerate the light, intimate dusk when it's really noonday sun. ~ Dominic Smith

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance. ~ Ralph Ellison

I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow. ~ Ellsworth Kelly

Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint. ~ Mason Cooley

Chauvet Cave is rather like the awakening of the modern human soul or I would say the awakening of modern human culture. Because Neanderthal men who still rode the landscape parallel to the people who did these paintings didn't have culture. There's no evidence of culture, no symbolic depiction, no evidence of music, no evidence of sculptures, no evidence of religious beliefs. ~ Werner Herzog

Dancer finds me the next day as I practice my Aureate accent in the penthouse's holomirror. I can see a three-dimensional depiction of my head in front of me. The teeth move strangely, catching my tongue as I try to roll my words. I am still becoming used to my body, even months after the last of the surgeries. My teeth are larger than I initially thought them. It also doesn't help that the Goldbrows speak as though they've had golden shovels stuck up their bloodydamn stinkholes. So I find it easier to speak like one if I see that I am one. The arrogance comes easier. ~ Pierce Brown

[Author's Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I'm interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I'm less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important - I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories a ~ Jeanine Cummins

Borat shows American stereotypes of Eastern Europe but it's an accurate depiction of what a certain type of American is. They think they can buy and sell these girls and then they get bought and sold. ~ Eli Roth

I'd like to change the depictions of life, love, and adventure under what's known as the typical, overused backdrop of Hollywood. ~ Romany Malco

The differences which exist between every one of our real impressions -- differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much resemblance to the reality -- derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at anyone epoch of our life was surrounded by, and colored by the reflection of things which logically had no connection with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of it for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which -- here the pink reflection of the evening upon the flower-covered wall of a country restaurant, a feeling of hunger, the desire for women, the pleasure of luxury; here the blue volutes of the morning sea and, enveloped in them, phrases of music half emerging like the shoulders of water-nymphs -- the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand vessels, each one of them filled with things of a color, a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres. ~ Marcel Proust

A mortal had woven it, a man who, having caught sight of the Seelie queen, had spent the remainder of his short life weaving depictions of her. He had died of starvation, raw, red fingers staining the final tapestry. ~ Holly Black

But when the seesaw of good fortune sinks downward for one person, it is very often on its way up for someone else. This little-known law of physics is called the Fulcrum of Fortune, and although most people prefer to think of fortune as a wheel that spins, the fulcrum (that is, seesaw) is a more accurate depiction for most of us, since the worse our own luck becomes, the more likely we are to notice the good fortune of those around us and brood about the injustice of it all. ~ Maryrose Wood

For all of [Fanny] Ardant's ability to depict a range of emotion, I most associate her with joy. Not necessarily the depiction of joy, but rather a joy of acting, a joy of being, a joie de vivre. Ardant, in her mature performances, conveys the sense of someone bringing to scenes her full being, her whole self and experience. There is an understanding of the value of life in such moments, in the value of the moments themselves. ~ Mick LaSalle

The Golden Bough was popular with both scholars and laymen, and it dramatically influenced the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung - Frazer's depiction of tales of myth and romance as echoes of ancient rituals chimed with Jung's description of archetypes that exist within the collective unconscious - as ~ George Pendle

The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own. ~ Alain De Botton

Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don't have anything to prove with that any more. ~ Martin Scorsese

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it. ~ David Hockney

I can't measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world's most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born. ~ David Benioff

Illness is a reminder that we don't really have any control. And I understand why people find schizophrenia frightening, believe me, I get it. Hallucinations, delusions, it's difficult to imagine having a mind that is not fully your own, just like it's difficult to imagine having cancer, where your body isn't fully your own. But people living with paranoid type often experience less dysfunction than people living with other subtypes. They're often able to live, work, and care for themselves. And yet, almost every depiction you find in books or movies make people living with paranoid schizophrenia the villains. Can you imagine if books and movies did the same thing to people with cancer? ~ Penny Reid

The Notebook ... that's my favorite one. I've read that book 30 times. It gives a true depiction of two people that are in love. ~ Kevin Gates

Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis is commonly regarded as one of the classics of cinema, and at the time it was probably the most expensive film ever made. Only in light of recent restoration work, though, can we see how explicitly it draws on apocalyptic themes in its prophetic depiction of modern society. Partly, Metropolis reflects the ideas of Oswald Spengler, whose sensationally popular book The Decline of the West appeared in 1918. Spengler presented nightmare forecasts of the vast megalopolis, ruled by the superrich, with politics reduced to demagoguery and Caesarism, and religion marked by strange oriental cults. Lang borrowed that model but added explicit references to the Bible, and particularly Revelation. In the future world of Metropolis, the ruling classes dwell in their own Tower of Babel, while the industrial working class is literally enslaved to Moloch. ~ Philip Jenkins

Africans who immigrate to America know how little racism exists there. They suspect it before emigrating from Africa, and they know it after arriving in America. Indeed, America, the Left's depiction of it notwithstanding, is the least racist country in the world. ~ Dennis Prager

In Turkey, ancient drawings that are two thousand or more years old show djinn in half human-half reptilian forms with horns, scaly skin, lizard-like eyes, and claws for hands. This depiction is similar to the Christian description of devils and demons. It is also interesting to note that Islamic art dating from only eight hundred years ago shows the djinn as more human-like. ~ Rosemary Ellen Guiley

The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known…Its presence everywhere is not the result of a conspiracy of Babylonian priests secretly buying up the mass media with Iraqi oil money, but a function of values endlessly reinforced by the Domination System. By making violence pleasurable, fascinating and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives. ~ Walter Wink

I think one of the most important American films is 'Jackie Brown,' which is such a humble depiction of humble characters but so powerful. The film was pure depiction of the American poverty of the '90s. ~ Arnaud Desplechin

The God of the Old Testament is the depiction of evil. ~ Joni Mitchell

Within Hobbes' depiction of the motives for conflict ... there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of human passions, interests, and desires, nor by the addition of a self-deceptive and egotistical desire for recognition and proof of one's perhaps illusory power. In this moment, it is the very rationality of other humans, reason in the broad sense, understood as roughly equal to oneself in both capacity and structure, that poses such a threat ~ Gregory B. Sadler

Your mind is your spirit; do not seek any other hidden soul inside you! All is in the brain! The depiction of a spirit rising to the sky is no more real than a medieval Scandinavian fairytales! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

A Concordance of Leaves is an epic poem of the indomitable yet fragile human spirit. Philip Metres brings Palestine and Palestinians into English with rare luminosity. One feels echoes of Oppen's succinct tenderness in the depiction of the numerous characters of this work. Without other, there is no self. And that other is the stranger who must be loved. Concordance is, after all, a wedding poem-leaves and pages in search of a certain passage toward harmony. ~ Fady Joudah

Stage performance is obviously a much grander sort of depiction. The audience isn't right in your face as close as a camera lens gets. ~ Amanda Schull

I think that all journalists, specifically print journalists, have a responsibility to educate the public. When you handle a culture's intellectual property, like journalists do, you have a responsibility not to tear it down, but to raise it up. The depiction of rap and of hip-hop culture in the media, I think, is one that needs more of a responsible approach from journalists. ~ KRS-One

I played a lot of the original 'Fight Night.' I think the depiction of Trinidad in the game was awesome. ~ Diego Corrales

Until the sixteenth century, men
priests, academics, judges, merchants, princes, and many others
wore skirts, or robes. For men, the skirt was a 'sign of leisure and a symbol of dignity,' writes Quentin Bell. This is still true for men in high positions. After all, can you imagine the Pope, or Professor Dumbledore, wearing trousers? Have you ever seen a depiction of God wearing pants? ~ Tim Gunn

Pretty, mysterious girl with braids … The depiction thrilled her. To be seen, to be described - it was as if the plain girl she always saw in the mirror might be magically transformed by the simple act of being observed by others. Pretty? Mysterious? What else might Clara be? ~ Kathleen O'Dell

Overlooked in this ominous depiction might be our country's best- kept secret: in dealing with the most challenging issues of every gener- ation, resistance to duplicitous civil authority and its corporate enablers has defined our quintessential American story. ~ Jeff Biggers

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction. ~ Dan Simmons

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media. ~ Christopher Lasch

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon's public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind's gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind's self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation's effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

America is so accustomed to some depiction of native people that is entirely racist, and there's a perception that that is okay. ~ Winona LaDuke

There's all kinds of depictions of black men. You have the Denzel Washingtons and the Will Smiths; that's wonderful, but that doesn't represent everyone. There's a Russell Crowe ... well, you know, there's a black Russell Crowe. ~ Michael Jai White

Ladles and Jellyspoons, all rise for...'TRIUMPHʼ. And by Jupiter what a triumph it is! ...
For yet again the unfeasibly huge, nay the monstrously Gigantic, creative genius of the
inimitable Mr. Greg Broadmore, delivers us from evil. Expanding the universe
according to Dr.Grordbort, which teems with its ever growing cast of splendiferous
characters, creatures, and (most importantly) weapons, and is led by the greatest
bombast in the history of fiction, Lord Cockswain himself, GBʼs latest tome of
magnificence once more separates the mere pretender from the true originator of
fantasy art. This outing has me feeling that we have reached a tipping point in the
evolution of the oeuvre, where we cannot BUT believe that this world is real, that these
microscopically detailed inventions are not fanciful conceptual constructs, but an
authentic a depiction as any of our Glorious past, present... and perhaps our future. ~ Andy Serkis

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw
that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian. ~ Rebecca Mead

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time. ~ Kathryn Bigelow

Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names - crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That's concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened 'once upon a time. ~ Lee Strobel

They say that 'history is an argument without end.' In Thompson's skillful hands, this momentous argument between two old friends on the most critical issue of the last century is thus history at its best. Thompson's judicious and delicious depiction of Nitze and Kennan will fascinate anyone who cares about the Cold War or the ways that human beings shape the future. ~ Jonathan Alter

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia ~ Leo Tolstoy

Are you mad at me?" Her brow was wrinkled and her eyes were worried, and she wasn't smiling anymore. "I thought you would laugh." She shrugged. "I told Kathleen I was going to surprise you. And she said, 'Go right ahead!' So I did. I used your paints, but I put everything back."
"Why are you kicking me in the head?"
"It's our story. We meet. You save me. I kiss you. You kiss me back, but you keep acting like you don't like me even though I know you do. So I'm kicking some sense into you. And man, does it feel good." She grinned cheekily, and I looked back at her depiction. That was some kick to the head.
"It's a terrible mural." It was terrible. And funny. And very Georgia.
"Well, we can't all be Leonardo DiCaprio. You painted on my walls, I'm painting on yours. And you don't even have to pay me. I'm just trying to bond with you over art."
"Leonardo da Vinci, you mean?"
"Him too." She smiled again and laid back on my bed, patting the spot beside her.
"You could have at least given me some biceps. That doesn't look anything like me. And why am I saying, 'Don't hurt me, Georgia!'"
I plopped down on the bed and purposely landed partially on top of her. She wiggled and scooted breathlessly, trying to free herself from my intentional squishing...
She stroked my head and I breathed against her skin.
"Are we bonding over art?" she whispered in my ear.
"No. ~ Amy Harmon

In this vivid depiction of the wiseguys and poor sods who drift through his flawed hero's bar, Con Lehane also shows us their modest hopes and dreams ... There are no easy solutions in McNulty's world. ~ Margaret Maron

But I'd say 'How to Make It in America' is the most accurate depiction of the New York hipster community on television for sure. ~ Lake Bell

Justice, contrary to public belief, is not blind. Love is blind, but Justice? Look at any statue, at any depiction. She is blindfolded. ~ Antoine Wilson

In the midst of what appears to be a traditional male-power fantasy about war and politics, he serves up a grim, realistic, and harrowing depiction of what happens when women aren't fully empowered in a society. In doing so, by creating such diverse and fully rendered female characters and thrusting them into this grim and bitter world, Martin has created a subversively feminist tale. ~ James Lowder

They're in southern France. Oldest paintings ever found there. We're talking like thirty thousand years old. Scenes typical of the Paleolithic - horses, cattle, mammoths, that kind of thing. No pictures of humans but one depiction of a vagina, for what that's worth. The really interesting thing is what happened when they carbon-dated the place. They found pictures in the same room painted six thousand years apart. They looked identical."

"Okay. So?"

"So think about that. For six thousand years there was no progress and no evidence of any impulse to change anything. People were fine with the way things were. In other words, this is not a people experiencing spiritual desolation. You and I need new diversions nightly. These people didn't change a thing for sixty centuries. This is not a people tired of their snack routine."

The drumming outside escalates for a moment and then fades "back into a kind of ominous tolling.

"Melancholy," Periwinkle says, "had to be invented. Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom. And when those things were birthed, so were people like me, to attend to them. So no, it's not patriotism. It's evolution. ~ Nathan Hill

After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not 'bury' us. We buried him. Neville Chute's On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Clash of 79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millennium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire? Is it not possible that today's most populous nations -China, India, and Indonesia- could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying. ~ Pat Buchanan

I have followed the procedure of the ancient painter
Zeuxis, who worked in a material temple as I propose to work in a
spiritual one. As Cicero tells the story, the people of Croton asked
Zeuxis to decorate a temple they held in high esteem with the finest
paintings he could devise.

He approached the task with care,
selecting five of the town's most beautiful women to sit beside him
as he worked and model their beauty for his painting. There were
several good reasons for this. Zeuxis, we know, was a master in portraying
women's beauty, which by nature is more elegant and delicate
than men's. But as Cicero makes it a point to explain, he chose
several
women because he did not think he could find
one
who was
uniformly lovely in all her parts. Nature, he thought, had never conferred
such beauty on a single woman that all her parts should have
an equal share: nothing composed by nature is complete in all
respects, as if, in bestowing all her bounties in one place, nature
would have none left to bestow elsewhere.
Similarly, in my depiction of the beauty of the soul ~ Pierre Abelard

He had never been interested in stories at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period. ~ Terry Pratchett

Qhuinn got down on one knee. Just dropped right on to the depiction of an apple tree in full bloom. "I don't have a ring. I don't have anything fancy in my mind or on my tongue." Qhuinn swallowed hard. "I know this is too early, and that it's out of the blue, but I love you and I want us to - " For once in his life, Blay had to agree with the guy - enough with the fucking talking. With a decisive shift of his body, he leaned down and kissed all that conversation right into silence. Then he pulled back and nodded. "Yes. Yes, absolutely, yes ... ~ J.R. Ward

Because I came into acting late, my references come from real life. That's my biggest inspiration. It's probably the reason I moved back to New York. I'm just a lot more inspired by real life than I am by depictions of real life. ~ Romany Malco

Erotica: the depiction of naked men. Depictions of naked women are far less innocent and are known as pornography. ~ Richard Summerbell

I have never written a book about my life, despite being offered purses of gold. I made 'Boxes' because I wanted to make a sincere depiction of a daughter who has lost her father, or the jealousy one can feel towards a daughter who has become more beautiful than you and whose stepfather starts to take her shopping. ~ Jane Birkin

Perhaps the book's greatest weakness is its romantic depiction of President Kennedy as a kind of knight in shining armor. ~ Theodore H. White

We are each authors of a self-concocted depiction establishing our present day identity. Our persona is woven from a range of truths interweaved with inspired imagination and occasionally bounded by convenient falsehoods. Creating our personal story generates an identity myth that allows us to carry on. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If fast-paced entertainment is not among the pleasures generally offered by the literary novel,
other pleasure often abound: a richness of language, a heart-breaking depiction of difficult emotions, and an exploration of interesting ideas. ~ Joshua Henkin

The French are very bizarre. There is this collective depiction: 'We're in decline, we're being assailed, we must protect ourselves.' ~ Alain Juppe

Depiction can override truth the same way that memory can override experience. ~ Cynthia Daignault

It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals ~ Angela Davis

If your depiction of loss doesn't make the reader feel loss, then you didn't depict it right. ~ Marlon James

Over the last three centuries our historical reception of folk and fairy tales has been so negatively twisted by aesthetic norms, educational standards and market conditions that we can no longer distinguish folk tales from fairy tales nor recognize that the impact of these narratives stems from their imaginative grasp and symbolic depiction of social realities. Folk and fairy tales are generally confused with one another and taken as make-believe stories with no direct reference to a particular community or historical tradition. Their own specific ideology and aesthetics are rarely seen in the light of a diachronic historical development which has great bearing on our cultural self-understanding. ~ Jack D. Zipes

Depictions or expressions of sex, violence, crime are all permitted virtually without limit; but religion, it seems, never.No wonder many in America seem to believe that the court has become one more inclined to protect pornography than to protect religious expression. ~ John Cornyn

We must go back again and again to the Gospel of Christ crucified, so that our hearts are more deeply gripped by the reality of what He did and who we are in Him. ~ Timothy Keller

What is the matter with her?" Lillian asked Daisy, bewildered by her mother's docile manner. It was nice not to have to scrap and spar with Mercedes, but at the same time, now was when Lillian would have expected Mercedes to mow her over like a charging horse brigade.
Daisy shrugged and replied puckishly, "One can only assume that since you've done the opposite of everything she has advised, and you seem to have brought Lord Westcliff up to scratch, Mother has decided to leave the matter in your hands. I predict that she will turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to anything you do, so long as you manage to keep the earl's interest."
"Then… if I steal away to Lord Westcliff's room later this evening, she won't object?"
Daisy gave a low laugh. "She would probably help you to sneak up there, if you asked." She gave Lillian an arch glance. "Just what are you going to do with Lord Westcliff, alone in his room?"
Lillian felt herself flush. "Negotiate."
"Oh. Is that what you call it?"
Biting back a smile, Lillian narrowed her eyes. "Don't be saucy, or I won't tell you the lurid details later."
"I don't need to hear them from you," Daisy said airily. "I've been reading the novels that Lady Olivia recommended… and now I daresay I know more than you and Annabelle put together."
Lillian couldn't help laughing. "Dear, I'm not certain that those novels are entirely accurate in their depiction of men, or of… of that."
Daisy frowned. "In what ~ Lisa Kleypas

Having racially diverse casts on television is a more accurate depiction of the demographic of the world we live in. ~ Grace Gealey

The media and intelligentsia were partly complicit in Trump's depiction of the world as a dystopia headed for even greater disaster. 'Charge the cockpit or you die!' cried the pro-Trump intellectual right. 'I'd rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,' said the pro-Trump left. When people believe that the world is heading off a cliff, they are receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: 'What do you have to lose?'

But if the media and intellectuals put events into statistical and historical context, rather than constantly crying 'crisis,' they would make it clearer what the answer to that question is. Revolutionary regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when a charismatic leader forces a radical personal vision on a society. A modern liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it's better to solve problems than to start a conflagration and hope for the best. ~ Steven Pinker

The man was watching the nearby fish tank, which stood beneath a depiction of Tindwyl, Mother of Terris, perched on the walls during her last stand against the darkness. In the tank, tiny octopuses moved across the glass. ~ Brandon Sanderson

I think it's sinful to give the audience material it knows already, whether the material is about race relations or the car culture or the depiction and placement of a candy bar. ~ Manny Farber

Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one's shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, tightboots and naked blades.
Words like 'full', 'round' and even 'pert' creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.
Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn't about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer.
Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling's Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword.
All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black. ~ Terry Pratchett

On the publicity tour of 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding,' I was asked over and over again, if, as the writer, I felt it was a fair depiction of real life to have someone of my er, below average looks, hook up with hottie John Corbett. ~ Nia Vardalos

One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict. ~ Walter Dean Myers

As always, just the sight of him gave her a quick inner jolt. His face was like a painting, a depiction in perfect oils of some fallen angel. The sheer beauty of it, framed by all that rich black hair, was forever a surprise to her. ~ J.D. Robb

Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story. ~ Amy Harmon

Ron Swanson is more than the MVP of the 'Parks and Recreation' squad, more than just the funniest character on TV - he's the perfect depiction of aggrieved American manhood at the twilight of the empire. ~ Rob Sheffield

A lot of teenagers today are influenced by the media's depiction of perfection. I want readers to understand they don't have to follow the unofficial laws society creates, to be liked by others. ~ Erica Sehyun Song

I have always identified with Joan Didion's depiction of Los Angeles and Southern California, ever since reading 'Play It As It Lays,' 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and 'The White Album.' ~ Henry Rollins

Certainly, the history of my life and the works of art which have especially enriched it is precisely that: the depiction or incantation of a handful of metaphors whose spendour rests upon their intonation. ~ Michael Ayrton

Here's a handy list of warning signs of the worst people on the road. Some are tuned-out menaces, others are just assholes. Be alert, and if you see this on a vehicle close to you, get away now. STICK FIGURE FAMILY: I hereby decree that you are allowed to accelerate to ramming speed every time you see a minivan with a silhouette of the family and their names on the rear window. We get it, you didn't pull out. Is that information you really think I'm interested in? I know you're a parent. You're driving a Plymouth Voyager with two hundred thousand miles on it; do you imagine I'm behind you thinking, "Who is that gay entrepreneur?" Even worse is the theme family. Oh, you're into snowboarding? Oh, you've got cats? Oh, they've all got Mickey ears, they must really love Disney. You know what I love? Driving more than fifty-three miles an hour. How about a stick figure depiction of your family moving the fuck over and letting me get to work on time? ~ Adam Carolla

The literary depiction of life and its moral dilemmas compel us to use our conscience, to make those infallible distinctions between right and wrong. ~ F. Sionil Jose

My writing legacy would be my true depiction of life; exploring the entire colorful spectrum of people, both good and bad, capturing it in words and exposing it to all cultures in a respectful manner - In a way that would stand the test of time. ~ Diane Martin

Contrary to John Anthony West's assertion (in his book, Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt) that there are no other possible interpretations of the mummy figure looking at the stars on the depiction in the tomb of Tutankhamen beyond being a matter of consciousness, many proofs point to ancient Egypt's aspiration to be among the stars and it is an essential part of its theology. It is after all evident that [the Pyramid Texts describe early conceptions of an afterlife in terms of eternal travelling with the sun god amongst the stars]. Staying loyal to the Upper Heavens' authority or breaking away from it, made ancient Egypt yearn to such a high position beyond Earth's physical realm where the Sun's shadow (i.e., snake) of the Lower Heavens' authority cannot fly. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim