Quotes About Distillation

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story," he said. "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Success comes in an emerging set of abstract concepts that makes sense of all the detail. This distillation is a rigorous expression of the particular knowledge that has been found most relevant.

Anything that can be put in a nutshell, should remain there.

Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.

Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore

Just as breathing exercises help integrate body and mind, writing is a kind of psycho-neural muscular activity which helps bridge and integrate the conscious and subconscious minds. Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought and helps break the whole into parts.

Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought and helps break the whole into parts.

The imitation and communication of the greatest, most memorable acts necessitates distillation and communication of the patterns of the deepest wisdom of mankind.

There's something of a painting of a woman that represents all women - and by extension, all of humanity - that I just find very exciting. It's a nice distillation, I think, of what it means to be alive.

Spinners take out the bad stuff, leave in the good. I've always thought how nice it would be to have spinners like this for human beings. Just toss them in and let the spinner do its work.

You can make a really good one minute trailer out of a really stinky two hour movie.

For me, a great joke is an idea expressed in extremely concentrated form.

I hadn't noticed the tiles in the regular-size house. They were painted to look like flowers. I saw the dollhouse better than I'd seen the real room. That was because it was small and concentrated. Gentleman Jack had told me about distillation, how you take a liquid and boil it so that at the end there's less liquid but it's purer. It's more truly its own self.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book—what everyone else does not say in a whole book.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

Just look what happens to poets," I used to tell my honors class on the first day of school. "Half the time they go mad. And you know why I think that happens? Too much truth distilled to its essence, all surrounding evidence ignored or discarded. And I'm not faulting them for that.

A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.

poetry distils event, and prose expands on it.

It's not daily increase but daily decrease—hack away the unessentials!

It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.

'Big' problems are overwhelming, but when we distil them down to their simplest forms, then the solutions become simple, too.

I am simplifying numbers here for clarity.