Quotes About Concreteness

My way of thinking is very particular and concrete. It doesn't follow a continuous path.

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

A los escritores los hace tan felices la idea de llevar a cabo alguna tarea doméstica! Les gusta compensar sus vagabundeos nebulosos con un frenético interés por lo concreto.

Without a doubt the sense of beauty does not lie determined in the concreteness of an individual beautiful thing or person. Rather its purpose is much more the enchantment of the soul, for there is nothing physical that is not made with the intent of affecting the soul, and there is no soul that does not intend to dazzle everything physical with its sensations.

Broadly speaking, the thing you need to avoid is the general as contrasted with the particular (reptile creates a less vivid image than does rattler); the vague as contrasted with the definite (them guys is less meaningful than those three hoods who hang out at Sammy's poolroom); and the abstract as contrasted with the concrete (to say that something is red tells me less than to state that it's exactly the color of the local fire truck).

The novelist's job is to] make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible.

Third, the purpose is to be described as concretely as possible, not abstractly.

L'odio ha una sua concrezione strana, quando è definito e formulabile era già nato in noi, preesisteva in silenzio acquattato in una piega dell'animo

La realtà intorno a lui diventava così irreale, come lo è sempre nelle sue concrezioni più reali.

I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

We can't search or attain well being, wealth, studying, justice or kindness usually. Action is all the time particular, concrete, individualized, distinctive.

The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry.

The perfect is not simply the ideal, as a perfect marriage is not simply a storybook meeting of souls. It is rather the optimal incarnation of spirit, the point at which the presence achieves maximal concreteness and the actual lets the presence shine through most clearly. Perhaps that, too, is the meaning of the Cross.

Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images

El espectáculo en general, como inversión concreta de la vida, es el movimiento autónomo de lo no viviente

element of concreteness here, let us suggest that to be "large" in present-day terms a company should have $50 million of assets or do $50 million of business.* Again to be "prominent" a company should rank among the first quarter or first third in size within its industry group.

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

esta elaboración se apoya en la apertura hacia los objetos transicionales, en un principio tan concretos como el chupete y el osito y, con el tiempo, tan abstractos como la amistad, la música, y otros modos en que el individuo recupera la experiencia de ilusión.

Las costumbres, Andrée, son formas concretas del ritmo, son la cuota del ritmo que nos ayuda a vivir. No era tan terrible vomitar conejitos una vez que se había entrado en el ciclo invariable, en el método.

Ma le cose invisibili hanno bisogno di incarnarsi, le idee cadono a terra come colombe morte.

The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short--he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

Garrison explains why concreteness empowers illustrations and furthers understanding: "If I were to talk at length about my having been deeply moved by watching the setting of my son's broken arm, this would constitute a report of my feelings. But when I describe some factors that contributed to my mood, you are brought into the experience and feel with me. To re-create a moving situation is quite different from testifying to having been deeply moved.

Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're actually doing every day.