Quotes About Vividness

Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an 'Airedale,' not just a 'dog.' A taste should not be merely 'good' but 'creamy and sweet' or 'sharply salty' or 'buttery on the tongue.'

También es vívido el contraste de los estilos. El estilo arcaizante de Menard —extranjero al fin— adolece de alguna afectación. No así el del precursor, que maneja con desenfado el español corriente de su época.

There's something to be said for being sleepy-eyed. I love sleepy eyes - that sort of vulnerability of being slightly discombobulated because you don't know where you are. But I like that vulnerability. It's sexy to me.

I lived for four years in the 1930s with these individuals and the only time that I wasn't thinking about dealing with physical suffering is when I was working on this book. I've never been more alive as when I worked on this book.

Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping.

The essential gaudiness of poetry.

A poem should stimulate the sense of living and of being alive.

Jive undertakes to remedy that situation with language that makes up for the dullness of mere existence.

The things that we preceive as beautiful may be different, but the actual characteristics we ascribe to beautiful objects are similar. Think about it. When something strikes us as beautiful, it displays more presence and sharpness of shape and vividness of color, doesn't it? It stands out. It shines. It seems almost iridescent compared to the dullness of other objects less attractive.

Effortless doesn't mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright. My teacher used to call this "effortless effort." We each need to find out for ourselves what this means. Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy. Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness.

You come into the natural state by letting go of control by letting go of effort and resting in a state of vividness. It's very simple. It couldn't be simpler. Sit down; let everything be as it already is.

If the characters are not alive to me, it doesn't matter how good the sentences are. It just becomes all cake and no frosting.

In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren't quite themselves and open onto the impossible.

The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.

Annie colors me in, makes me real.

Hacer el amor adentro de nuestro abrazo significó una luz negra: la oscuridad se puso a brillar. Era la luz reencontrada, doblemente apagada pero de algún modo más viva que mil soles.

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

Yet he saw and felt but one life, and that one life was more than a sleep, a dream; life was all he had

The intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power.

Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past. In its day, the literature of the past was an adventure. Aischylus, Sophocles, Euripides were adventurers in the world of thought. To read their plays without any sense of new ways of understanding the world and of savouring its emotions is to miss the vividness which constitutes their whole value. But adventures are to the adventurous. Thus a passive knowledge of the past loses the whole value of its message.

To quote Gurdjieff again, Life is real then only when I am. If normal (mechanical) consciousness consists largely of uncritical inferences, projections, glandular-emotional reactions etc. then what it perceives, in art or in life, will have many traits of dream, will it not? If consciousness is intentional (Husserl), then making an effort to perceive will make both oneself and the surround more vivid, more meaningful, more real, perhaps?

Don't go into great detail describing places and things… You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

Life without a phone is riskier, lonelier, more vivid.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a G-d, but never without belief in a devil. Usually, the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.