Quotes About Description

Or consider why economics is sometimes called "the dismal science." It's a derogatory description thought up by Thomas Carlyle in the 1800s, coined to draw a contrast with the "gay science" of music and poetry: "Not a 'gay science,' I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary, desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.

The relationships (Maxwell's equations) are the epitome of mathematical consieness, compact enough to fit on a T-shirt yet powerful enough to describe all manner of electromagnetism.

there are a few acts more aggressive than describing someone else

Good description is fast, spare, specific, and showing. Weak description is slow, wordy, vague, abstract, and telling.

stood and looked at them—a band of ruddy, high-boned Scots in a silky brown Indian sea. Jock's mother was the pinkest of all, like a flamingo in bright silk. She

The key point is that these labels are incomplete and unnecessarily shaming descriptions of what the survivor is actually afflicted with.

Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman's erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.

Cagayn police have issued an all-officer dispatch for vans of that description to be pulled over and checked." "The boss would have loved that one: proper police work.

To describe the world is always to simplify its texture, to coarsen the weave: to lose the particular in general.

After day seven, the next verse in Genesis says, "When no plant of the field was yet in the earth...then the Lord God formed man of dust" (Gen. 2:5-7). That's a description of the sixth day, when God formed "man" ... Genesis 2 is not a description of something that happened after the seventh day, but before...