Quotes About Description

In the great histories there are two topics of interest—the man as a type of the age in which he lives,—the events and manners of the age he is describing; very often almost all the interest is the contrast of the two.

They are finding females have better motor skills then men. This is a skill very much needed for snipers. They are also able to lie in one position for many hours a day. I have gone to military bases and fired the rifles so I have an idea what it requires. I put the descriptions in the book. Through Jessica people can understand it is not just falling on the ground, looking through a scope, and firing the rifle. It is actual a science that involves a lot of math and physics.

called nine-one-one," Howie was saying, "and then I heard something in the alleyway, so I went back there and" --Howie coughed-- "and valiantly attacked his knife with my guts, to no avail." "Did you get a good look at him? Could you describe him?" Howie smiled wanly. "Yeah. He was about yay long" --he held up his hands, four inches apart-- "thin, made of steel. Pointy. Sharp.

If Scripture were to describe the downfall of an empire in the style adopted by political historians, the common people would not be stirred.

Even with the approach that I take in Congress, which is to bring people together to get things done - many people describe that as 'reasonable' - I couldn't vote for John Boehner's re-elect.

Cliched characters are cliches because they're people being described by people who are on the outside. If you take two sentences from anybody and reduce them to just that, that's what you're going to get.

You know, people always ask me how I describe my music. First of all I tell them that's their job and then that also one day I hope to have things referred to as Martha Wainwright -esque.

All I can really say is it's bloodier than hell. In this one I'm going to be much more direct and honest in my description of the actual killings and the crime scene.

I'm an author. You want me to describe how creepy this is Harding, I've got you covered.

A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

Gordon watched them go. They were just by-products . The throw-outs of the money-god. All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description: creeping like unclean beetles to the grave.

Science has always tried to eliminate the subjective from its description of the world. But what if subjectivity itself is its subject?

She had long blond hair and bright blue eyes, and her skin was deeply tanned.

For delightfully quirky descriptions of bizarre neurological syndromes that teach us a lot about how the brain works, there is no match for Oliver Sacks.

I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Tolkien is as good as Dickens at sketching a scene.

his hand was warm, the fingers plump and bunchy and tight in their skin, like half-cooked sausages.

Hauerwas said it, "The sermon, therefore, is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus."39 Church, then, forms the context for the ethic of Jesus.

The top two lines on every prophet's job description look like this: Speak openly and clearly about what God is for. Speak openly and clearly about what God is against. The third and fourth lines look like this: I [God] am with you. Have courage. (But you may have to duck or die.)

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.

These descriptions do really state the truth- as nearly as the limitations of language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts-by help of the readers imagination, which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that.

Averroës, or Ibn-Rushd, the chief jurist in Córdoba and also the court physician," said Joël. "He was the first medical man to describe the symptoms of what we call Parkinson's disease

We've divided the world into us versus them—an ever-shrinking population of good people against bad ones. But it's not a dichotomy. People can be doers of good in many circumstances. And they can be doers of bad in others. It's true of all of us. We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.