Quotes about description

Gansey clucked at his bedraggled reflection in the dark-framed mirror hanging in the front hallway. Chainsaw eyed herself briefly before hiding on the other side of Ronan's neck; Adam did the same, but without the hiding-in-Ronan's-neck bit. Even Blue looked less fanciful that usual, the lighting rendering her lampshade dress and spiky hair as a melancholy Pierrot.

He's the navigator, he could probably find you a route to Hawaii underwater.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a

A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

She had always wanted to do every thing, and had made more progress in both drawing and music than many might have done with so little labour as she ever would submit to... She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.

Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary, as if tenderized by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flash of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.

To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe.

The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.

While the bible is GOD because the word of GOD is GOD, please understand that GOD cannot be contained in the bible. To believe otherwise is to make an infinite GOD finite.

Naming can satisfy a need, it can shorten a conversation that otherwise might go on for hours.

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond.

A solitary finger of light fell upon it, illuminating motes of golden dust floating in the air.

The desert at night was black and a strange madder-tinted silver; the sky was black, and the great contorted cliffs, and the vast expanses of sand that stretched out in all directions. But the red moon cast a pale crimson-tinged luminescence over everything, and far above the stars were glittering points of silver.

His voice gave out and he made several wavy motions with his hand, indicative of the shape of a woman who would probably be unable to keep her balance.

The 'Wild West' is a good description of law enforcement in the desert southwest USA.

He went farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with the 'water' of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they ar

She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.

Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race.

But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.

Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.

She told him that he had the most beautiful voice she'd ever heard, that it sounded like whiskey and wood smoke.

Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him.

The nature of atheism merits clarification on two further points which involve less common ideas about theism. The first involves the idea of 'God' which is metaphorical — for example, a theist who believes in 'God' as a principle of conscience or morality. This 'God' exists in a person’s mind and it is not something which atheists will dispute. Atheists agree that gods exist as ideas in people’s minds; the disagreement lies over whether any gods actually exist independently of human beliefs. Th

A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!

The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.

Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.

... the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive...

There is no moon. The stars have risen and fallen and given way to a new spread, to the smeared heart of our Milky Way.

Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be draw

Through my sudden tears, the train lights smeared like shooting stars. Lying before the rippling blue window, below the slurred lights of the world above, it was as if we were underwater.

At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. ‘I cannot swim. You know it?” In the dark she saw the flash of his smile. ‘Trust me.’ And he drew her with a strong hand until the green phosphorescence beaded her ankles, and deeper, and deeper, until the thick milk-warm water, almost unfelt, was up to her waist. She heard him swear feelingly to himself as the salt water

... it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct...

Lady Moon rose an' gazed o'er my busted'n'beautsome Valleys with silv'ry'n'sorryin' eyes, an' the dingos mourned for the died uns.

And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion.

String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.

Even the kids, behind the slice of streetscape floating in the glass, had mastered the art of pretending not to see.

It was a chilly morning after the night's rain, and the sun hung in the sky like a pale coin lost by someone high up in the clouds.

The sun was deaf'nin' so high up, yay, it roared an' time streamed from it.

Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?

But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so, when she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for her defence, unconfident of success, she was inclined to weep from sheer exhaustion, as children weep sometimes when they have not slept. She knew, also, that her lie, as a rule, was doing a serious injury to the man to

Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated, and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude.

The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

She gave a shiver, and suddenly clutched her arms about her body. She spoke, Gascoigne thought, with an exhilarated fatigue, the kind that comes after the first blush of love, when the self has lost its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide. But addiction was not love; it could not be love. Gascoigne could not romanticize the purple shadows underneath her eyes, her wasted limbs, the dreamy disorientation with which she spoke; but even so, he thought, it was uncanny that opium's

Is it the smoke?' the boy said, shivering slightly. 'I've never touched the stuff, myself, but how it claws at one...like a thorn in every one of your fingers, and a string around your heart...and one fees it always. Nagging. Nagging.

I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.

His eyes reflected the open grey of the autumnal sky.

Zachariah, Zachariah,' whispers Rachel, casting a practised eye over the back of his head and down the length of him, from the shoulder blades where his wings once grew, epochs ago, in some other guise: angel—guardian, avenging—or great vagrant bird—Daurian Jackdaw, Chimney Swift, Pacific Loon!

Nippers was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers — ambition and indigestion.

Salander was an information junkie with a delinquent child's take on morals and ethics.

A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be...

Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence...

...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.

Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.

Outside the windows, everything is getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night.

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air

Night was fading over the fields as if the rain had washed the darkness out of the hem of its garment.

Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.

He had the beginning of wrinkles and the easy manner of one who has already made his mistakes.

She had short curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.

At last he said, "Did you come out of the big mountains?"Gitano shook his head slowly. "No, I walked down the Salinas Valley."The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. "Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?"The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano's head.

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way. It rained and little puddles of water shone under the street lamps on Main Street. In the woods in the darkness beyond the Fair Ground water dripped from the black trees.

The sky is grey, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it's been freeze-framed.

She was strong and stubborn but loving. She was an untouchable angel with a devil’s mark. She was beautiful.

Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.

Under the glass porte-cochère of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became grey and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxicabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome Nov

The king who stepped into the ballroom wearing a green velvet robe and bejeweled crown was none other that the tiger-man who'd prowled through my nightmares and nearly every waking moment for the past two days. Chorda.

I stumble across the sea of tarmac, finding pavement, concealment and a brick wall. Palms brace against the scrubby surface. My stomach churns and then bubbles over, burning my throat as acrid yellow acid spills from my lips in frothy discomposure. It splatters the pavement like a spray of blood.

To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers.

When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.

On the floor beside the spare pillow that had tumbled from the bed in her sleep was a single yellow flower. Five heart-shaped petals. As fresh and as pure as if it were in full bloom in a summer meadow.Drowsy and mind-fogged, she crept downstairs to look for a book on Irish wildflowers. It took her a while to find anything that resembled the yellow flower, but eventually she found an image and description that matched: "Cinquefoil, a flower renowned for its healing properties and a flower also s

Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or even as much as

... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.

Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the

The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding air;...

It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.

He wasn't that good looking, he had the social skills of a wet cat and the patience of a caffeinated hummingbird

This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

... the cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin.

She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds.

A vast field opened like a blossoming tulip, flowers blooming in the rippling airs of spring. High and frothy trees hugged air and sun as they gallantly cast a shade over the earth. On the horizon a florid vessel of mountains trailed to the never-ending, blue as memories distant, poised as statues embroidered into time’s eternal drift.

... it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

Meantime the clang of the bows and the shouts of the combatants mixed fearfully with the sound of the trumpets, and drowned the groans of those who fell, and lay rolling defenceless beneath the feet of the horses. The splendid armour of the combatants was now defaced with dust and blood, and gave way at every stroke of the sword and battle-axe. The gay plumage, shorn from the crests, drifted upon the breeze like snowflakes. All that was beautiful in the martial array had disappeared, and what wa

Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice - a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.

Since its sudden birth the city had expanded, swallowing up acre upon acre of the surrounding grasslands and drawing thousands into its domain. Hardly built on the most advantageous ground, miles from the open waters, decades from the mines at the mountain summits, it yet remained the only settlement of note on the isle. This sprawling mass of a city, once a compact kingdom, was now the keystone of the Castilian Empire.

Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of thi

Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.


He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which was not often in these difficult days, into a smile of amused friendliness and pleasure which aroused feelings of warmth, and something more, in many women.

The bowler approached the wicket at a lope, a trot, and then a run. He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.

He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.

It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.

The castle grounds were gleaming in the sunlight as though freshly painted; the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake, the satin-green lawns rippled occasionally in a gentle breeze: June had arrived.

In describing a protein it is now common to distinguish the primary, secondary and tertiary structures. The primary structure is simply the order, or sequence, of the amino-acid residues along the polypeptide chains. This was first determined by [Frederick] Sanger using chemical techniques for the protein insulin, and has since been elucidated for a number of peptides and, in part, for one or two other small proteins. The secondary structure is the type of folding, coiling or puckering adopted b

He had a prince's looks but a pirate's eyes.