Quotes About Description

There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

Her friends' lips were red, their teeth white, and their tongues and gums were pink. Pink, too, were the tips of their breasts. Their eyes were aquamarine blue, cherry-black, hazel and maroon.

A stone, a figure, a sign, a word reaching us isolated from its context is only that stone, figure, sign, or word: we can try to define them, to describe them as they are, and no more than that; whether, beside the face they show us, they also have a hidden face, is not for us to know. The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.

A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.

Sire, désormais je t'ai parlé de toutes les villes que je connais. — Il en reste une dont tu ne parles jamais. Marco Polo baissa la tête. — Venise, dit le Khan. Marco sourit. — Chaque fois que je fais la description d'une ville, je dis quelque chose de Venise. — Quand je t'interroge sur d'autres villes, je veux t'entendre parler d'elles. Et de Venise, quand je t'interroge sur Venise.

The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.

The world we live in is a mess. It does no good to deny it. And it does no good to deny that G. K. Chesterton prophetically described the mess we are in. But he also described why it has happened, and he proposed solutions for cleaning it up.

The most significant events, Bishop seems to argue, are destined to remain outside the scope of description. It is perhaps their very status as excessive or fugitive that makes them, in the end, significant. A poet who believes such things will not arrive uncomplicatedly at self-description.

Trying to find Delacroix here based on Schnapp's description would be like searching a beehive for a male with a striped belly.

identifying, categorizing, interpreting, describing, and thinking about works of art.

The other reason mathematicians were blind to chaos was that they had no computers, and were left with the kind of vague description that Poincaré gave, which other mathematicians failed to understand.

You have no compelling moral intuitions to guide you in solving that problem. Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself.

To be painted a villain, you have to do something, I guess, evil or something heinous, and I don't know if I fit that description.

Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence.

Beauvoir reported first between bites of a ham sandwich, made with thick-sliced ham carved from what must have been a maple-cured roast, with honey-mustard sauce and slabs of aged cheddar on a fresh croissant.

La novità è invece nella larga esemplificazione da testi scritti, garanzia di una descrizione fondata sull'uso

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it…. It leaves everything as it is.

Only describe, don't explain.

He had a moustache-and-beard combination that looked like a skinny white caterpillar taking a lap around his mouth.

He tells a story, and that's what I like. Does this fella tell a story? He doesn't spend twenty pages describing the colour of the sky?' 'He hasn't so far.' 'Good. Jeffrey Archer never talks about the colour of the sky and I like that in a writer. I'd say Jeffrey Archer has never even looked up at the sky his entire life.' 'Especially now that he's in prison,' I suggested.

The novel remains for me one of the few forms...where we can describe, step by step, minute by minute, our not altogether unpleasant struggle to put ourselves into a viable and devout relationship to our beloved and mistaken world.

I always start out saying exactly what everybody looks like. I don't know why.

In her diary she described Tuzinka as a giant bundle, the largest baby animal she'd ever seen, weighing in at 242 pounds

he talked quite naturally while we ate — about the difficulty of finding words to describe the luminous mist, and why one has the desire to describe beauty. Perhaps it's an attempt to possess it, I said. Or be possessed by it; perhaps that's the same thing, really. I suppose it's the complete identification with beauty one's seeking. The mist grew brighter and brighter.