Quotes About Embellishment

But the building's identity resided in the ornament.

Ma wrote true stories; not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes. Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I'm not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn't matter: the story is the thing.

Exaggeration is my only reality.

covered with gold braid. Mary Lou saw

I want things plain. Or direct. When I read a book I'm suspicious of description. Too much embellishment or an excess of adjectives bothers me, as if the speaker or writer were attempting to overcome me, to finesse me like a bridge player. Or to seduce me.

So that we always see as young those we knew young and those whom we knew as old people we embellish retrospectively with the virtues of old age,

I tend to take [ to Bridget Jones Diaries] something that nearly happened, or might have happened, and then exaggerate it to make it funny and to make it tie into the themes.

Filmy Edgings . . . Adorn Pretty Undies with Handwork

a little exaggeration was always expected when describing weapons, victories, and body parts.

And as hearbes and trees are bettered and fortified by being transplanted, so formes of speach are embellished and graced by variation.... As in our ordinary language, we shall sometimes meete with excellent phrases, and quaint metaphors, whose blithnesse fadeth through age, and colour is tarnish by to common using them....

I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage; it was rather that I had a strangulating fear of that cataclysmic change in the atmosphere the instant the flow of a conversation flagged, and even when I knew that it would later turn to my disadvantage, I frequently felt obliged to add, almost inadvertently, my word of embellishment, out of a desire to please born of my usual desperate mania for service.

One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add to every situation -a quality which has made people call me at times a liar- but I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage;