Descriptive Writing Quotes

He's been spoiled 'til salt won't save him. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

I look at him and my body reacts in a way that it never has before, even in the throes of passion. I look at him and I start aching so deep inside it takes all I can to think, to breathe, to speak. He's like the brightest flame and it takes everything in me to resist its call.

I know that if I give in, I'll get burned so deeply, there might be nothing left once I come out the other side.

But, god, I want to step into that flame. ~ D.L. Hess

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

The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honest. ~ Terry Pratchett

When we arrived, the sun was setting, like a mango sorbet dripping over the horizon; the platinum rolls of the Mediterranean produced the soothing sound of waves thudding the cliff rocks below us. ~ Richard C. Morais

I was overjoyed two weeks later when I received 6 letter pages back from Alex. Three of which were devoted to memories of the times in Alex's childhood when he'd been intimidated by boys in sewage tunnels and of the violence that ensued. After the passage in which Alex detailed the anatomy of the human nose and how weak it is in comparison to a swiftly butted forehead, I asked him just exactly who I had become pen pals with…. ~ Trent Dalton

All I felt when I saw Vanessa was this weird sensation I used to get when I was a kid, like when you're at a friend's house and your mum comes to get you before you're ready. ~ Jojo Moyes

The leader gives me another hard stare. He's not very old, but he's going bald. His wispy pale hair looks like it's trying to get as far away as it can from his angry face. ~ Morris Gleitzman

His voice was soothing ans commanding all at once, like the crackle of flames devouring wood. Fierce and fatal, yet somehow steady and reassuring. The type of voice a girl could have been easily consumed by. ~ Stephanie Garber

She rested her head on Esther's shoulder and let the fuzzy warmth of her hug flow through her. It was the kind of warmth that clicked your bones back into place, smoothed out your muscles and made your blood sing a soft lullaby all the way around your body. ~ Joy Cowley

Slim spent a total of 36 years in Boggo Road.). ..He knows what a well-written letter means to a man inside. It means connection, humanity. It means waking up. He's been writing letters to Boggo Road inmates for years using false names on the envelopes because the screws would never pass a letter on from Arthur "Slim" Halliday, the man who knows how to escape their red brick wall fortress, better than anyone. … ~ Trent Dalton

The oak trees had shed their leaves, revealing the inky thumbprints of crows' nests in the crackle glaze of dark branches. ~ Kevin Ansbro

Hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I feel her wave of worry like a patio heater - faint and ineffective, but constant. ~ Neal Shusterman

When a robot dies, you don't have to write a letter to its mother, ~ P. W. Singer

There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful - the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel.

Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume - and no farther than to my first day's life - 'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it - on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back - ~ Laurence Sterne

She wrote sniffing back the tears that flowed over the version of things that her unconscious insisted on sicking up. ~ Helen Hodgman

If you want to write, you write. The only way to learn to write is by writing. ~ Stephen King

What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead. ~ Dana Gioia

Pantaenus was one of these and is said to have gone to India. It is reported that among persons there who knew of Christ, he found the Gospel according to Matthew, which had anticipated his own arrival. For Bartholomew, one of the apostles, had preached to them, and left with them the writing of Matthew in the Hebrew language, which they had preserved till that time. After many good deeds, Pantaenus finally became the head of the school at Alexandria, and expounded the treasures of divine doctrine both orally and in writing. ~ Eusebius

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages. ~ Anne Tyler

One danger, when you're writing lots of quick, opinionated blog items about the latest developments, is that you never get around to stating fully, in one place, what you think about a particular topic. ~ Mickey Kaus

It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it. ~ Edwidge Danticat

Why Dream?
Life is a difficult assignment. We are fragile creatures, expected to function at high rates of speed, and asked to accomplish great and small things each day. These daily activities take enormous amounts of energy. Most things are out of our control. We are surrounded by danger, frustration, grief, and insanity as well as love, hope, ecstasy, and wonder. Being fully human is an exercise in humility, suffering, grace, and great humor. Things and people all around us die, get broken, or are lost. There is no safety or guarantees.
The way to accomplish the assignment of truly living is to engage fully, richly, and deeply in the living of your dreams. We are made to dream and to live those dreams. ~ SARK

I won't sacrifice my characters morals/intentions/motives for the sake of what I believe is right or wrong. If the action fits the character it will be written. That's that. ~ James DeSantis

Shaw ... has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?"
"Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it. ~ Lisa Kleypas

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets
dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion. ~ Janet Frame

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul ~ Socrates

A person shouldn't talk too much, Ella realised. With writing, you could construct a whole world, but talking too much could demolish it. ~ Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

I need to meet people to be able to write. ~ Vikas Swarup

I had another reason for seeking Him, for trying to espy His face, a professional one. God and literature are conflated in my mind. Why this is, I'm not sure. Perhaps because great books seem heavensent. Perhaps because I know that each nove is a puny but very valiant attempt at godlike behavior. Perhaps because there is no difference between the finest poetry and most transcendent mysticism. Perhaps because writers like Thomas Merton, who are able to enter the realm of the spirit and come away with fine, lucid prose. Perhaps because of more secular writers, like John Steinbeck, whose every passage, it seems to me, peals with religiousity and faith. It once occured to me that literature - all art really - is either talking to people about God, or talking to God about people. ~ Paul Quarrington

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose. ~ Meg Wolitzer

I learned early on that I could get a lot of attention by singing and writing little songs, so it was like throwing nuts to a monkey ... I just couldn't get enough. ~ Dolly Parton

You need to understand that a skilled professional songwriter can accelerate your success as an already talented musician. These people are writing every single day, so their craft is really sharp, and it's the best songwriters who consistently get on the radio. ~ Kara DioGuardi

Until you begin to write, then you see wonders. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Be the best you. ~ A.D. Posey

Poets write for an audience. And when the audience is soulful and sensitive to understand the nuances and subtleties of poetry then writing and reading the lines of your poetry becomes a pleasure! ~ Avijeet Das

One night, Tim stumbled across a documentary called Manufacturing Consent. After viewing it, he found some writing online by its subject, Noam Chomsky, and as a result began to feel that there wasn't really a point to anything, that free will was an illusion, and that the things most people invested time and energy in were systems of control designed by those who sought to manipulate the general populace ~ Chad Kultgen

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write. ~ Philip Larkin

Beware the faces that bare the most smiles.
For they are the ones who hide the most sadness - . ~ A.R. Von

I'm into song-writing; I'm into melodies that break your heart a little bit. That's the thing that got me into music; that's what I look for in music for the most part. ~ Danger Mouse

I decided that what I really wanted to do was go off and paint. ~ Jim Henson

You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it. ~ Doris Lessing

When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote begin with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere. Even when I know something to be true I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real. ~ Ocean Vuong

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings. ~ Jack Kerouac

I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers. ~ Rick Riordan

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take ... a kind of demonic joy in writing. ~ Paul Auster

Poems are invisible flowers on my skin. ~ Sanober Khan

From activist stage, I just spoke and said whatever I had to say. When the writing started, I would just read it. Then I had the interest into going into musical aspects. When that happened in '86, I liked the result of work we did in the studio. ~ John Trudell

In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words. ~ Ted Hughes

Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self. ~ Jayne Anne Phillips

Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible. ~ Ray Bradbury

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away! ~ Phyllis Bottome

[Charlotte Bronte] had thought of every maneuver for circumventing those stony obstructions of wives who would not remove themselves. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It's not very funny, but it's sincere. My commitment is to sincerity. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

It's hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn't start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college. ~ Sara Zarr

Disgrace is a subtle, multi-layered story, as much concerned with politics as it is with the itch of male flesh. Coetzee's prose is chaste and lyrical without being self- conscious: it is a relief to encounter writing as quietly stylish as this. I was not totally convinced by Lurie's musical abilities, with regard to his proposed opera, but that is my sole complaint. ~ Paul Bailey