Describing Quotes

Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love. ~ Jess Walter

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire. ~ Anna Godbersen

The guy snarled out a string of profanity describing his night with Conn's mother.

"Sounds about right," Conn said, but Matt didn't miss the glint in Conn's eye. "She's been dead for twenty years, but dead's probably the only way you get laid. ~ Anne Calhoun

So if you hear something in this book that sounds like advocacy of a particular political point of view, please reject the notion. My interest in issues is merely to point out how badly we're doing, not to suggest a way we might do better.
Don't confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing how things are, I have no interest in how they ought to be. And I certainly have no interest in fixing them. I sincerely believe that if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem.
My motto: Fuck Hope.
P.S. In case you're wondering, personally I'm a joyful individual, I had a long happy marriage and a close and loving family, my career has turned out better than I ever dreamed, and it continues to expand. I'm a personal optimist, but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger, is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don't confuse my point of view with cynicism–the real cynics are the ones who tell you everything's gonna be all right.
And P.P.S., by the way, if by some chance you folks do manage to straighten things out and make everything better, I still don't wish to be included. ~ George Carlin

Truth be known, President Obama has never been particularly driven by principle. Right after his election, I wrote a column in a few days warning people that even though I voted for Obama, he was not what people were describing him to be. I saw him in the Senate. I saw him in Chicago. ~ Jonathan Turley

She was a great and insatiable reader, surprisingly well acquainted with the classics of literature, and unexpectedly lavish in the purchase of books. Her neighbours never forgot to mention, in describing her, the awe-inspiring fact that she 'took in the English Times and the Saturday Review, and read every word of them,' but it was hinted that the bookshelves that her own capable hands had put up in her bedroom held a large proportion of works of fiction of a startlingly advanced kind, 'and,' it was generally added in tones of mystery, 'many of them French. ~ Edith Somerville

You can't explain what it is about the sound of Sinatra's voice," Feinstein says. "I mean, you can try, and you can get very poetic in describing it. But there is something there that is transcendent, that simply exists in his instrument. He developed it, he honed it, he understood it himself, he knew what he could do, and he used it to his best advantage. That was something that people responded to. ~ James Kaplan

I believe I was raised with feminist values, but I don't think I ever heard my Mom call herself a feminist. Before I identified as a feminist myself, I thought of feminism as more of a historical term describing the women's movement in the '70s but didn't know much about what they had done and didn't think it applied to my life at all. ~ Julie Zeilinger

What makes a good leader? I ask myself this every day, and then as I begin to list off characteristics I realize I'm describing myself. Am I the ideal leader? Let's just say that if I were running for political office, I know who I'd vote for - twice. ~ Jarod Kintz

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing. ~ Guy De Maupassant

Afterward, describing his division's accomplishments to Washington, Lafayette commended "Colonel Hamilton, whose well known talents and gallantry were on this occasion most conspicuous and serviceable." He wrote, "Our obligations to him, to Colonel Gimat, to Colonel Laurens, and to each and all the officers and men, are above expression. Not one gun was fired . . . and, owing to the conduct of the commanders and the bravery of the men, the redoubt was stormed with uncommon rapidity. ~ Sarah Vowell

Did you see him? I know the photo was grainy, but he looks like one of those death metal goth heads, or whatever they're called. All dressed in black with long hair
I took umbrage at my mother describing my boyfriend this way. John was the Lord of the Underworld. How else was he supposed to dress? ~ Meg Cabot

Later, in describing its narrow escape, the creature credited doubly good luck in having mimicked the shape of a harmless doll and the fact that the paranormal investigators had been looking for a hump-free boggart. 3. ~ Giovanni Valentino

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter. ~ Tom Waits

I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin. ~ Anne Tyler

There's a passage in John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" that does a pretty good job describing California's rainfall patterns:

The water came in a 30-year cycle. There would be five to six wet and wonderful years when there might be 19 to 25 inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of 12 to 16 inches of rain. And then the dry years would come ... ~ John Steinbeck

I used to believe authenticity could be achieved solely by describing, in our own words, one's own fragment of experience. This was of course predicated on the complete intellectual and aesthetic independence of the "I". One eventually realizes such intellectual isolationism promotes style, ego, awards. But not change. ~ Miguel Syjuco

PROVIDENTIAL, adj. Unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Several recent authors have written of "the imposter phenomenon," describing the feeling of many apparently successful people that their success is undeserved and that one day people will unmask them for the frauds they are. ~ Harold S. Kushner

What would you like your greatest legacy to be for your child? What will you do to ensure that your child attains that legacy? Write a letter to yourself describing your hopes and dreams for your child---the legacy you would like to leave. Reread your letter often. ~ Michele Borba

Not in the least," I said. "I understand everything you've said. But - oh, Simon, I feel so resentful! Why should father make things so difficult? Why can't he say what he means plainly?" "Because there's so much that just can't be said plainly. Try describing what beauty is - plainly - and you'll see what I mean." Then he said that art could state very little - that its whole business was to evoke responses. And that without innovations and experiments - such as father's - all art would stagnate. "That's why one ought not to let oneself resent them - though I believe it's a normal instinct, probably due to subconscious fear of what we don't understand. ~ Dodie Smith

It makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, even though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it's there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself you'd have to add the equivalent describing word and that's how you'd know. The black girl ran across the park. ~ Ali Smith

Be sure you don't stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator. ~ Sol Stein

Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture. ~ Tom Robbins

impossible is an extremely limiting word in describing what is clearly taking place in front of one's eyes. ~ Fritz

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

That was Genus Homo, species Whowantstofuckus, subspecies Headup Hisassia. Let us move on to the cages with the interesting animals.
Jacob to Ben describing JT ~ Z.A. Maxfield

I study life by being close to it, this "native life" about which so little is known, and which is so disfigured by the descriptions of those who, not knowing it, insist on describing it anyway. ~ Isabelle Eberhardt

HENRY:
Leave me out of it. They don't count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn't. I don't know. It doesn't count. He's a lout with language. I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Act II, Scene 5, HENRY and ANNIE ~ Tom Stoppard

We mute the realization of malevolence- which is too threatening to bear - by turning offenders into victims themselves and by describing their behavior as the result of forces beyond their control. ~ Anna C. Salter

All photographs are about light. The great majority of photographs record light as a way of describing objects in space. A few photographs are less about objects and more about the space that contains them. Still fewer photographs are about light itself. ~ John Paul Caponigro

When describing me, Tracy often refers to a well-known concept of physics: 'inertia.' As Newton avers in his first law: 'An object that is not moving will not move until a force acts upon it. An object that is moving will not change its velocity until a net force acts upon it.' In other words, depending on what's happening in my life at any given moment, I can either be the laziest human being on the planet, or the busiest. I'm perfectly content to do absolutely nothing until I'm catalyzed by some person or project, and then I go nonstop until some countervailing force acts upon me, and I revert back to static mode. ~ Michael J. Fox

I'm not promoting myself as the next great American driver, as some people are describing me. If that's what people want to call me, fine. But I've got more important things to focus on. ~ Buddy Rice

The majority of my UFO diet consists of reports describing suspected encounters. This is not surprising, as there are thousands of sightings annually. The emailer has seen something unusual in the sky that he interprets as probable evidence of alien presence. ~ Seth Shostak

In describing the ways that religious and other types of communities appropriate and understand their histories, among both fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, the sociologist Anthony Giddens utilizes the term "reflexivity" and states that it is the characteristic of "all human action." Reflexivity takes place when individuals and/or communities utilize their perceptions of their histories as a way of guiding their present and future actions. For Giddens, tradition is a means of "handling time and space, which asserts any particular activity or experience with the community of past, present, and future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social practices." In light of this, tradition is a set of entities which religious communities and cultures continually reconstruct within certain parameters. Religions are not completely static in that almost every new generation reinvents the religious and cultural inheritance from the generations that preceded it. ~ Jon Armajani

I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like. ~ Steven Amsterdam

Whatever happens to a baby contributes to the emotional and perceptual map of the world that its developing brain creates. As my colleague Bruce Perry explains it, the brain is formed in a "use-dependent manner."5 This is another way of describing neuroplasticity, the relatively recent discovery that neurons that "fire together, wire together." When a circuit fires repeatedly, it can become a default setting - the response most likely to occur. If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment. As infants and ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,' and I thought I'd better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn't belong to, 'want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that's what they want. That's the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.'
'Bollocks,' said Ronnie.
'That, of course, is the other main difference. ~ Hugh Laurie

I like you when you're algebraic," said Ulf--and immediately regretted it. It was a flirtatious remark--describing somebody as algebraic was undoubtedly to cross a line. You would not normally describe an ordinary friend as algebraic, and then say that you liked her that way. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. ~ George Orwell

The notion that someone who does not hold your views holds the reciprocal of them, or simply hasn't got any, has, whatever its comforts for those afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe very hard in it, not conduced to much in the way of clarity in the anti-relativist discussion, but merely to far too many people spending far too much time describing at length what it is they do not maintain than seems in any way profitable. ~ Clifford Geertz

When I see a movie, the music often gets in the way for me. It's something that, say, for myself and Claire, we never, ever speak about. We never speak about describing emotion. I think it's about color and movement. And I think it's important to let the images be the melody, as well, a lot of the time - to create a kind of a backing for that, to let it sing. ~ Stuart A. Staples

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112)
They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity? ~ Gilles Deleuze

A basic theme for the anarch is how man, left to his own devices, can defy superior forces – whether state, society, or the elements – by making use of their rules without submitting to them.

'It is strange,' Sir William Parry wrote when describing the igloos on Winter Island, 'it is strange to think that all these measure are taken against the cold – and in houses of ice. ~ Ernst Junger

I think that without sushi there would be no David Hasselhoff, because sushi is like the perfect way of describing the insides of David Hasselhoff. He is like a protein, clean and easy. That's how I feel about myself. ~ David Hasselhoff

Being 'at the mercy of legislative majorities' is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy. ~ Robert Bork

The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. ~ Sigmund Freud

A man whose identity flows out of deep validation doesn't wilt under criticism. He enjoys applause when it comes but frankly isn't desperate for it. He can walk away from work at five o'clock; he doesn't measure his success by how much money he makes. We grow into this man, to be sure; I'm not setting a new standard of perfection. But what I am describing ~ John Eldredge

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness. ~ Mark Strand

...when President Clinton, on the anniversary of his election, spoke in the church in Tennessee where Martin Luther King, Jr., had delivered his last sermon. Inspired by the place and the occasion, he made one of the most eloquent speeches of his presidency. What would King have said, he asked, had he lived to see this day?

"He would say, I did not live and die to see the American family destroyed. I did not live and die to see thirteen-year-old boys get automatic weapons and gun down nine-year-olds just for the kick of it. I did not live and die to see young people destroy their lives with drugs and then build fortunes destroying the lives of others. This is not what I came here to do.

I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandon; not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children walk away from them and abandon them as if they don't amount to anything. I fought for people to have the right to work, but not have whole communities and people abandoned. This is not what I lived and died for."

After describing what his administration was doing to curb drugs and violence, the President concluded that the government alone could not do the job. The problem was caused by "the breakdown of the family, the community and the disappearance of jobs," and unless we "reach deep inside to the values, the spirit, the soul and the truth of human nature, none of the ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb

We think of enterprise architecture as the process we use for fully describing and mapping business functionality and business requirements and relating them to information systems requirements. ~ Tony Scott

Spectrums (...) One of the reasons Im so fond of spectrums is because I believe, with fearce tenacity, that *nothing* in this world is black and white.
Spectrums embrace gray spaces, ambiguity, and fluidity. Since these are all concepts which are integral to the human experience, I find spectrums particularly helpfull in understanding and describing identity.
(...) as we learn about various identities, it's important we recognize they are not "all or nothing" concepts. Many identities can exist in various degrees and come in a range of possibilities. Remembering this is incredibly crucial as we progress. ~ Ashley Mardell

Anxiety can make anybody act nasty, big or small. You will be tested for your strength, and if you are seen as too weak, you will sometimes be treated abusively, discarded and avoided. I'm not saying that this should happen. I'm simply describing human beings as they are. ~ Cory Duchesne

Even harder was describing his sense that Shroom's death might have ruined him for anything else, because when he died? when I felt his soul pass through me? I loved him so much right then, I don't think I can ever have that kind of love for anybody again. So what was the point of getting married, having kids, raising a family if you knew you couldn't give them your very best love? ~ Ben Fountain

Mo'Nique is so full of love. I've been describing her as the tree in 'Pocahontas.' She's so wise and loving. She is just everything. ~ Gabourey Sidibe

Although Erc was bitterly disappointed, there was another route to prestige. He possessed gifts of the mind sufficient to gain admittance to the order of Druids, the intellectual class of Celtic society. Members of the order were not practitioners of a specific religion, nor were they priests in the Christian sense of the word. The Greeks were more nearly correct by describing Druids as poet-philosophers. ~ Morgan Llywelyn

Technology, as it becomes more sophisticated and mature, eventually gets displaced by newer or more effective technology," Raffaelli told me, describing the traditional path of creative destruction. "But there are these odd circumstances where there's an alternative path, where these dead technologies get repositioned for new life. ~ David Sax

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming. ~ Jonathan Franzen

I didn't want to go there, to those places he was describing, but I didn't want to be where he wasn't. ~ Heather Demetrios

If you read a book about school - someone else's book - you always translate it into your own school experiences. It's describing the student: he's bewildered and lost in a large crowd in a university classroom. You'll visualize that from your own experiences. So, everything you know is what you're really writing. ~ James Salter

I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives, as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead. When something is lost, redirect energy, follow the derivé, the chance and flow of what life tosses us, and make something new instead.

Remember that I'm often struck by certain passages of descriptive writing, writing that is not about driving home a point but about providing detail, background, setting the scene (it's tempting to call this the stadium of writing). It has a "something from nothing" quality: a pleasurable experience has been had, and no one has paid a price. Remember that writing does not have to be torture (107). ~ Moyra Davey

Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana's campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing "good sex." "Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm," Herbenick said. "Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men."

The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it's become disproportionately common in porn - and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List - it's also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it's up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old - and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is? - found that it was mainly boys ~ Peggy Orenstein

Dan would entertain Owen and me by describing Mr. Tubulari's pentathlon, his "winterthon." "The first event," Dan Needham said, "is something wholesome, like splitting a cord of wood - points off, if you break your ax. Then you have to run ten miles in deep snow, or snowshoe for thirty. Then you chop a hole in the ice, and - carrying your ax - swim a mile under a frozen lake, chopping your way out at the opposite shore. Then you build an igloo - to get warm. Then comes the dogsledding. You have to mush a team of dogs - from Anchorage to Chicago. Then you build another igloo - to rest." "THAT'S SIX EVENTS," Owen said. "A PENTATHLON IS ONLY FIVE." "So forget the second igloo," Dan Needham said. "I WONDER WHAT MISTER TUBULARI DOES FOR NEW YEAR'S EVE," Owen said. "Carrot juice," Dan said, fixing himself another whiskey. "Mister Tubulari makes his own carrot juice. ~ John Irving

Describing Robert Bunsen:
As an investigator he was great, as a teacher he was greater, as a man and friend he was greatest. ~ Henry Enfield Roscoe

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother! ~ Tess Gerritsen

Think of the many articles one can find every year in the Wall Street Journal describing some entrepreneur or businessman as being a "pioneer" or a "maverick" or a "cowboy." Think of the many times these ambitious modern men are described as "staking their claim" or boldly pushing themselves "beyond the frontier" or even "riding into the sunset." We still use this nineteenth-century lexicon to describe our boldest citizens, but it's really a code now, because these guys aren't actually pioneers; they are talented computer programmers, biogenetic researchers, politicians, or media monguls making a big splash in a fast modern economy.

But when Eustace Conway talks about staking a claim, the guy is literally staking a goddamn claim. Other frontier expressions that the rest of us use as metaphors, Eustace uses literally. He does sit tall in the saddle; he does keep his powder dry; he is carving out a homestead. When he talks about reining in horses or calling off the dogs or mending fences, you can be sure that there are real horses, real dogs or real fences in the picture. And when Eustace goes in for the kill, he's not talking about a hostile takeover of a rival company; he's talking about really killing something. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries. ~ Eugene Delacroix

I think of the hundreds of lights dancing across the night sky. "I knew you were watching. I know it sounds stupid, but I felt you with me, and then when you sent that letter describing that night ... " I drop off, unable to find the right words to explain the emotion. ~ Katie McGarry

After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn't afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is you thing, in which case- knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can't. Won't people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder. ~ David Sedaris

Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing
in my collection and others
in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music
vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison
room as brain
is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Ll subjects are forms of discourse and that, therefore, almost all education is a form of language education. Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject. Biology, after all, is not plants and animals; it is a special language employed to speak about plants and animals. History is not events that once occurred; it is a language describing and interpreting events, according to rules established by historians. Astronomy is not planets and stars but a special way of talking about planets and stars, quite different from the language poets use to talk about them. ~ Neil Postman

In the end, I'm convinced we will all benefit if suspicion is replaced by discussion, innuendo by dialogue; if the emphasis in our debate turns from a search for talismanic criteria and neat but simplistic answers to an honest - more intelligent - attempt at describing the role religion has in our public affairs, and the limits placed on that role. ~ Mario Cuomo

Don't turn around," she said, "but there's a gentleman who keeps stealing glances at you from across the room. I've never seen him before. I wonder if he's your Mr. Ravenel?"
"Good heavens, please don't call him my Mr. Ravenel. What does he look like?"
"Dark-haired, clean-shaven and quite sun-browned. Tall, with shoulders as broad as a plowman's. At the moment he's talking with a group of gentlemen, and- oh, my. He has a smile like a hot summer day."
"That would be Mr. Ravenel," Phoebe muttered.
"Well, I recall Henry describing him as pale and stout." Merritt's brows lifted slightly as she peeked over Phoebe's shoulder once more. "Someone had a growth spurt."
"Looks are irrelevant. It's the inner man that counts."
Laughter threaded through Merritt's voice. "I suppose you're right. But the inner Mr. Ravenel happens to be quite beautifully packaged. ~ Lisa Kleypas

People are already describing it [Skyfall] as the best Bond flick ever, and I really think it will be. ~ Naomie Harris

From time to time I think of describing the "German", or defining his "typical" existence. Probably that isn't possible. Even when I sense the presence of such a thing, I am unable to define it. What can I do, apart from writing about individuals I meet by chance, setting down what greets my eyes and ears, and selecting from them as I see fit? The describing of singularities within this profusion may be the least deceptive; the chance thing, plucked from a tangle of others, may most easily make for order. I have seen this and that; I have tried to write about what stuck in my senses and my memory. ~ Joseph Roth

I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names. ~ Penelope Lively

Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity-known among lawyers as the Hicklin decision- evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women's confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional. ~ Gay Talese

Mimbrates are the bravest people in the world
probably because they don't have brains enough to be afraid of anything. Garion's friend Mandorallen is totally convinced that he's invincible."
"He is," Ce'Nedra said in automatic defense of her knight. "I saw him kill a lion once with his bare hands."
" ... I heard him suggest to Barak and Hettar once that the three of them attack an entire Tolnedran legion."
"Perhaps he was joking."
"Mimbrate knights don't know how to joke," Silk told him.
"I will not sit here and listen to you people insult my knight," Ce'Nedra said hotly.
"We'renot insulting hi, Ce'Nedra," Silk told her. "We're describing him. He's so noble he makes my hair hurt."
"Nobility is an alien concept to a Drasnian, I suppose," she noted.
"Not alien, Ce'Nedra. Incomprehensible. ~ David Eddings

Boxer, feeling that his attentions were due to the family in general, and must be impartially distributed, dashed in and out with bewildering inconstancy; now, describing a circle of short barks round the horse, where he was being rubbed down at the stable-door; now feigning to make savage rushes at his mistress, and facetiously bringing himself to sudden stops; now, eliciting a shriek from Tilly Slowboy, in the low nursing-chair near the fire, by the unexpected application of his moist nose to her countenance; now, exhibiting an obtrusive interest in the baby; now, going round and round upon the hearth, and lying down as if he had established himself for the night; now, getting up again, and taking that nothing of a fag-end of a tail of his, out into the weather, as if he had just remembered an appointment, and was off, at a round trot, to keep it. ~ Charles Dickens

Design is based upon resolving how someone is going to use something. Great design is describing the very best experience for them, then moving towards that ideal. ~ Alan Moore

A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as robust. ~ George Orwell

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way. ~ Dana Spiotta

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.' And an experimental psychologist adds that 'a sense of time can only exist where there is submission to reality.' To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane. Literature and history, as we know them, are not like that; they must submit, be repressed. It is characteristic of the stage we are now at, I think, that the question of how far this submission ought to go--or, to put it the other way, how far one may cultivate fictional patterns or paradigms--is one which is debated, under various forms, by existentialist philosophers, by novelists and anti-novelists, by all who condemn the myths of historiography. It is a debate of fundamental interest, I think, and I shall discuss it in my fifth talk.

Certainly, it seems, there must, even when we have achieved a modern degree of clerical scepticism, be some submission to the fictive patterns. For one thing, a systematic submission of this kind is almost another way of describing what we call 'form.' 'An inter-connexion of parts all mutually implied'; a duration (rather than a space) organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death. That is a way of speaking in temporal terms of literary f ~ Frank Kermode

Mathilde returned and strolled past the drawing-room windows; she saw him busily engaged in describing to Madame de Fervaques the old ruined castles that crown the steep banks of the Rhine and give them so distinctive a character. He was beginning to acquit himself none too badly in the use of the sentimental and picturesque language which is called wit in certain drawing-rooms. ~ Stendhal

Notwithstanding the extravagance of some of their characters, these nineteenth-century novelists describe a world in which inequality was to a certain extent necessary: if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything other than survival. This view of inequality deserves credit for not describing itself as meritocratic, if nothing else. In a sense, a minority was chosen to live on behalf of everyone else, but no one tried to pretend that this minority was more meritorious or virtuous than the rest. … Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the ground of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom. ~ Thomas Piketty

You are describing the world and by describing it you are creating it ~ Stevens

Hence when a person is in great pain, the cause of which he cannot remove, he sets his teeth firmly together, or bites some substance between them with great vehemence, as another mode of violent exertion to produce a temporary relief. Thus we have the proverb where no help can be has in pain, 'to grin and abide;' and the tortures of hell are said to be attended with 'gnashing of teeth.'Describing a suggestion of the origin of the grin in the present form of a proverb, 'to grin and bear it. ~ Erasmus Darwin

And all the books you've read have been read by other people. And all the songs you've loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that's pretty to you is pretty to other people. and that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing 'unity. ~ Stephen Chbosky

Responded with a presidential note describing how Washington defined a "base." Work on the new facility was halted, ~ Walter Isaacson

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.) ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Granny used to describing giving your life as "ultimate sacrifice", but I don't know about that. Dying is definitely the LAST sacrifice you can make, but sometimes, it's your first one that sets the tone for everything that follows. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

The Biblical account describing God as an eagle teaching his eaglets to fly is exactly the process readers go through as they work through the chapters of this book. "Like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions." Deut. 32:11 ~ Beth Willis Miller

A 5'5", 182-pound, 43-year-old man wearing khaki shorts and a UCLA sweatshirt runs to Nicolas Cage in a manner he will spend the rest of the night describing to his slightly bored but equally boring date as "ambushing." No one else is on the street and Nicolas Cage is unable to avoid the man, who wants a picture with his "brand new Droid." As the man, who actually seems to be vibrating and hovering in an almost hummingbird-like way, adjusts his stance for the third attempt at a picture his crotch lightly brushes Nicolas Cage's upper thigh, causing his face to shift from "bemused resignation" to, strangely, "serene bliss," for what will become the man's inaugural Facebook profile picture. ~ Megan Boyle

Women, when describing their roles in their organizations, usually referred to themselves as being in the middle of things. Not at the top, but in the center; not reaching down, but reaching out. ~ Sally Helgesen

As we walked past a quad bike chained to a farm gate, he remarked "It's such a pity how times have changed. You can't leave a piece of machinery out on the road any more." He seemed to have forgotten that he had just been describing a time when you couldn't leave you cattle out. ~ Rory Stewart

The language we use is extremely powerful. It is the frame through which we perceive and describe ourselves and our picture of the world. ~ Iben Dissing Sandahl

It is impossible to describe a landscape so validly as to exclude all other descriptions, for no one can see the landscape in all its aspects at the same time, and no single view can prevent the existence and validity of other equally possible views. ~ Frithjof Schuon

She was such a surprising mix of gentle and brash, of focused and flighty. It was almost as if I could see the little girl in her battling with the responsible woman, figuring out which would lead the way. ~ Christina Lauren

Here is Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, describing the way scientists react when their pet theories are unraveling: "What scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies," Kuhn wrote, " ... . [is] renounce the paradigm that led them into crisis." Instead, he concluded, "A scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place." That is, scientific theories very seldom collapse under the weight of their own inadequacy. They topple only when a new and seemingly better belief turns up to replace it. ~ Kathryn Schulz

Kvothe looked at Bast for a long moment. "Oh Bast," he said softly to his student. His smile was gentle and sad. "I know what sort of story I'm telling. This is no comedy."
"This is the end of the story, Bast. We all know that." Kvothe's voice was matter-of-fact, as casual as if he were describing yesterday's weather. "I have led an interesting life, and this reminiscence has a certain sweetness to it. But ... "
Kvothe drew a deep breath and let it out gently. " ... but this is not a dashing romance. This is no fable where folk come back from the dead. It's not a rousing epic meant to stir the blood. No.
We all know what kind of story this is. ~ Patrick Rothfuss