Lyric Description Quotes

On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down, the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it. Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains
like the lamp engraved up the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new heavens and waking new desires in men. ~ Willa Cather

Refuting a merely contentious argument - a description which applies to the arguments both of Melissus and of Parmenides: their premisses are false and their conclusions do not follow. ~ Aristotle.

The feminist in me, who is small and sleeps a lot but can be scrappy when provoked, took umbrage at this description. ~ Mary Roach

A lot of people they don't know that Africans even named the stars, that different peoples, different so-called native peoples, have their own names for the stars, and have star charts just as accurate as the Chinese star charts, which are more ancient than the European star charts or even the Arabic ones or the star charts of the New World civilizations. Everybody's got their own cosmology. Everybody's got their own description of the universe. ~ Gayl Jones

You can never appreciate the scent of a flower by another's description. Some things are left to experience. Journey of self. ~ Truth Devour

You look sad, and tired.'
...
'Of course I do, kid, I'm a teenager, it's in my job description. When I get home from school today I'll teach you how to have an existential crisis. ~ Cara Delevingne

To get a clearer idea of the other half, allow me to paint a picture for you. Imagine, if you will, nothing. Now imagine that it's endless. Now triple that. This is a perfect description of the United States between the Denver International Airport and approximately Wrigley Field. ~ Doug DeMuro

A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be ... ~ Marcel Proust

She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke. ~ A.S. Byatt

It seems to me a purely lyric poet gives himself, right down to his sex, to his mood, utterly and abandonedly, whirls himself roundtill he spontaneously combusts into verse. He has nothing that goes on, no passion, only a few intense moods, separate like odd stars, and when each has burned away, he must die. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The way I teach people to sing ... I have them talk the lyric out until it sounds like something they really believe, like an actor with a monologue. ~ Margaret Whiting

The description of a new species of crayfish may detail every bristle on every segment of its many appendages and never be read by anyone save its author until a related new species is discovered that needs to be compared and documented. And then the scientist expects to have the book containing the first description readily at hand. ~ Storrs L. Olson

I touched my lips to hers again, and this time, it was a very different sort of kiss. It was six years' worth of kissing, her lips coming to life under mine, tasting of orange and of desire. Her fingers ran through my sideburns and into my hair before linking around my neck, alive and cool on my warm skin. I was wild and tame and pulled into shreds and crushed into being all at once. For once in my human life, my mind didn't wander to compose a song lyric or store the moment for later reflection. For once in my life, I was here and nowhere else. -Sam ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I look around at the beach where I grew up. This is where everything changed for me. I was just a girl who happened to witness the arrival of a strange race of people from under the sea. One of them was the most beautiful person I ever met. He walked out of the ocean and changed my life forever. - Lyric ~ Michael Buckley

The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling which they overburden the inferior number is a shilling saved to their own pockets. ~ James Madison

What's a buckle-bunny?"
She grinned. "It used to be a description of the girls who hung around rodeo cowboys looking to hook up. Now it means any Texas gold digger who's looking for a sugar daddy."
"I'm not a gold digger."
"No, you advise them in your column. You tell them to support themselves and get their priorities straight."
"Everyone should listen to me," I said, and Haven laughed, lifting her glass.
-Ella & Haven ~ Lisa Kleypas

Inside plum trees stood in a row, flowers lifted their pale throats to the moon and stars, a magnolia held its tight-closed buds like white candles in its green hands. ~ Marisa De Los Santos

A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens, from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so will it be the latest, of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest. ~ Thomas Jefferson

There is that difference between being kicked in the teeth and reading a description of being kicked in the teeth. Some call it existential. ~ Gita Mehta

There's something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need to do nothing more. It's alive in a way that's greater than any description of it ... ~ Mark Helprin

Gilbert stretched himself out on the ferns beside the Bubble and looked
approvingly at Anne. If Gilbert had been asked to describe his ideal
woman the description would have answered point for point to Anne, even
to those seven tiny freckles whose obnoxious presence still continued to
vex her soul. Gilbert was as yet little more than a boy; but a boy has
his dreams as have others, and in Gilbert's future there was always a
girl with big, limpid gray eyes, and a face as fine and delicate as a
flower. ~ L.M. Montgomery

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

Descriptive geometry has two objects: the first is to establish methods to represent on drawing paper which has only two dimensions,-namely, length and width,-all solids of nature which have three dimensions,-length, width, and depth,-provided, however, that these solids are capable of rigorous definition.
The second object is to furnish means to recognize accordingly an exact description of the forms of solids and to derive thereby all truths which result from their forms and their respective positions. ~ Gaspard Monge

Keep any description of trouble or sickness or error minimal, for there is something inside which is listening, and it says, 'Oh! You like this! I will make you a lot more of it.' ~ Ervin Seale

I love creating. I am addicted to the drug of creation and creating things. I get a little depressed when I am struggling to find what I know is locked inside. If it's a lyric or something that is challenging me, I can be very depressed, but when it's like heaven opens up and it gives you a song, it's amazing. There's nothing else that I enjoy more probably. ~ Mat Kearney

The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes. ~ Herman Melville

Until that morning most of the journey had been made in silence, our stops to eat and change horses--again, Renselaeus beneficence: all we had to do was mention their name, and the horses were instantly available--too brief for much converse. When we did stop, we were both too tired to talk. But that day the roads were too muddy for fast travel, and Branaric suddenly turned to me and asked for my story, so I gave him a detailed description of my adventures.
I had just reached the episode at the fountain with Debegri, and was grinning at the fluency and point of Bran's curses, when we became aware of horses behind us.
Traffic had been nonexistent all day, which we had expected. No traders had been permitted to go up into Tlanth, well away from Vesingrui, the fortress that the Renselaeus forces supposedly held, so we didn't expect any military traffic, either.
"Sounds like at least one riding," I said, remembering that pattern well. Danger prickled along my nerves, and I wished I had a weapon.
"Something must have happened." Bran sounded unconcerned. "They must need to tell us--"
"Who? What?"
Bran shrugged. "Escort. Shevraeth sent it along to keep us safe. Knew you would refuse, so they've been behind us the whole way."
I was peering through the trees, anger and apprehension warring inside me. Annoyed as I was to be thus circumvented--and to have my reactions so accurately predicted--I realized I'd be well satisfied to find out that the approa ~ Sherwood Smith

In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous. ~ Hans Arp

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

I did not mean to be a Christian. I have been very clear about that. My first words upon encountering the presence of Jesus for the first time 12 years ago, were, I swear to God, "I would rather die." I really would have rather died at that point than to have my wonderful brilliant left-wing non-believer friends know that I had begun to love Jesus. I think they would have been less appalled if I had developed a close personal friendship with Strom Thurmond. At least there is some reason to believe that Strom Thurmond is a real person. You know, more or less.

But I never felt like I had much choice with Jesus; he was relentless. I didn't experience him so much as the hound of heaven, as the old description has it, as the alley cat of heaven, who seemed to believe that if it just keeps showing up , mewling outside your door, you'd eventually open up and give him a bowl of milk. Of course, as soon as you do, you are fucked, and the next thing you know, he's sleeping on your bed every night, and stepping on your chest at dawn to play a little push-push.

I resisted as long as I could, like Sam-I-Am in "Green Eggs and Ham" - I would not, could not in a boat! I could not would not with a goat! I do not want to follow Jesus, I just want expensive cheeses. Or something. Anyway, he wore me out. He won.

I was tired and vulnerable and he won. I let him in. This is what I said at the moment of my conversion: I said, "Fuck it. Come in. I quit." He started ~ Anne Lamott

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

It may be possible to do without dancing entirely. Instances have been known of young people passing many, many months successively, without being at any ball of any description, and no material injury accrue either to body or mind;
but when a beginning is made
when the felicities of rapid motion have once been, though slightly, felt
it must be a very heavy set that does not ask for more. ~ Jane Austen

Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else's blood on his shirt. You could trust him to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to watch your back. You couldn't trust his eyes though. He had kind eyes, and you couldn't trust them. ~ Mark Lawrence