Describing Quotes

1. "Psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term ["biophilia"] in 1964 as a way of describing the innate attraction to processes of life and growth."
Author: Adam Leith Gollner

2. "I have trouble describing my own style, since it's sort of like describing my own eye color or something."
Author: Aimee Bender

3. "Our best theory of describing space at a fundamental level is probably string theory."
Author: Alan Guth

4. "I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption."
Author: Aleksandar Hemon

5. "When describing children with Down's Syndrome, he called a child 'heart spontaneous'."
Author: Andrew Solomon

6. "She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire."
Author: Anna Godbersen

7. "Even harder was describing his sense that Shroom's death might have ruined him for anything else, because when he died? when I felt his soul pass through me? I loved him so much right then, I don't think I can ever have that kind of love for anybody again. So what was the point of getting married, having kids, raising a family if you knew you couldn't give them your very best love?"
Author: Ben Fountain

8. "At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space - abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms."
Author: Benjamin Whorf

9. "There's no other word that comes close to describing how you make me feel. Nothing."
Author: Carrie Jones

10. "Trying to explain or define grace is like catching the wind in a cardboard box or describing the color green."
Author: Cathleen Falsani

11. "I do not at all have the mind of a bully... in my mind bullies are intolerant of contrary opinion, domineering and rather cowardly. I would hope that none of those terms could be fairly used in describing me."
Author: Conrad Black

12. "Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star."
Author: Dana Carvey

13. "Describing Woodstock as the 'big bang,' I think that's a great way to describe it, because the important thing about it wasn't how many people were there or that it was a lot of truly wonderful music that got played."
Author: David Crosby

14. "So often, environmentalists and others working to slow the destruction are capable of plainly describing the problems (Who wouldn't be? The problems are neither subtle nor cognitively challenging), yet when faced with the emotionally daunting task of fashioning a response to these clear and clearly insoluble problems, we generally suffer a failure of nerve and imagination. Gandhi wrote a letter to Hitler asking him to stop committing atrocities, and was mystified that it didn't work. I continue to write letters to the editor pointing out untruths, and continue to be surprised each time the newspaper publishes its next absurdity. At least I've stopped writing to politicians."
Author: Derrick Jensen

15. "Tell me about this Wizard Howl of yours.""He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly, and you can't pin him down to anything.""Indeed? Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies.""What do you mean, vices? I was just describing Howl. He comes from another world entirely, you know, called Wales, and I refuse to believe he's dead!"
Author: Diana Wynne Jones

16. "The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings."
Author: Edward Gibbon

17. "Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle."
Author: Edward Witten

18. "I left that church with rich and royal hatred of the priest as a person, and a loathing for the church as an institution, and I vowed that I would never go inside a church again.[Eugene V. Debs, describing his teenage reaction to a hellfire lecture by a priest]"
Author: Eugene V. Debs

19. "When we recognize that legal rules are simply formulae describing uniformities of judicial decision, that legal concepts likewise are patterns or functions of judicial decisions, that decisions themselves are not products of logical parthenogenesis born of pre-existing legal principles but are social events with social causes and consequences, then we are ready for the serious business of appraising law and legal institutions in terms of some standard of human values."Felix Cohen, Columbia Law Review, 1935"
Author: Felix S. Cohen

20. "England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase."
Author: George Orwell

21. "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)"
Author: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

22. "He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato."
Author: Grant Morrison

23. "Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings. Some shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket. ‘My Word,' said Bouvard, ‘look at those worlds disappearing.' Pecuchet replied: ‘If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.' ‘What is the point of it all?' ‘Perhaps there isn't a point.' ‘Yet…' and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

24. "I'm really bad at describing my own life."
Author: Helmut Lang

25. "Describing Robert Bunsen:As an investigator he was great, as a teacher he was greater, as a man and friend he was greatest."
Author: Henry Enfield Roscoe

26. "You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth."
Author: Humphrey Carpenter

27. "But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have?"
Author: Ian McEwan

28. "Our generation, unfortunately, is stuck to our phones - and, like, Twitter - constantly, which I have no problem with. I'd say we're not describing the children of America or anything like that, but there is something to take from it: It is kind of sad how we can't go thirty minutes without checking our phone."
Author: Israel Broussard

29. "You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Out myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

30. "I think, describing Elvis for me would be a very generous king. He was the king of rock and roll, will always be. He's whats made it possible for everyone to be performers and to do the things they do now."
Author: Jackie DeShannon

31. "Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing-- in my collection and others-- in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music--vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison--room as brain-- is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look."
Author: Jonathan Lethem

32. "I looked at Judith. "This sounds strange, but I don't suppose you saw three mad women with a cauldron of boiling tea pass by this way?""No," she replied. The polite voice of reasonable people scared of exciting the madman."Flash of light? Puff of smoke? Erm..." I tried to find a polite way of describing the symptoms of spontaneous teleportation without using the dreaded "teleportation" word. I failed. I slumped back into the sand. What kind of mystic kept a spatial vortex at the bottom of their cauldrons of tea anyway?"
Author: Kate Griffin

33. "Nick turned out to be a shy boy, uncertain in groups and in new situations, but also very brave, determined to overcome his fear." - Will, as a parent describing his son"
Author: Lisa Goldstein

34. "So you actually need spectacles," Leo finally said."Of course I do," Marks said crossly. "Why would I wear spectacles if I didn't need them?""I thought they might be part of your disguise.""My disguise?""Yes, Marks, disguise. A noun describing a means of concealing someone's identity. Often used by clowns and spies. And now apparently governesses. Good God, can anything be ordinary for my family?"
Author: Lisa Kleypas

35. "There wasn't an anhydrous lacrimal gland in the house, writes the author in all seriousness describing a memorial service for a medical school's cadavers."
Author: Mary Roach

36. "But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number."
Author: Michael Ondaatje

37. "I'll continue on the path I've been taking, feet on the ground, describing people's lives, describing people's emotions, writing from the standpoint of the ordinary people."
Author: Mo Yan

38. "For the writer under Actually Existing Socialism describing sex is a simple matter: he simply does not do it (the describing, I mean, not the sex)."
Author: Philip Sington

39. "I've found out so much about electricity that I've reached the point where I understand nothing and can explain nothing.[Describing his experiments with the Leyden jar.]"
Author: Pieter Van Musschenbroek

40. "From the baking aisle to the post office line to the wrapping paper bin in the attic, women populate every dark corner of Christmas. Who got up at 4 a.m. to put the ham in the oven? A woman. . . . Who sent the Christmas card describing her eighteen-year-old son's incarceration as 'a short break before college?' A woman. Who remembered to include batteries at the bottom of each stocking? A woman. And who gets credit for pulling it all off?Santa.That's right. A man."
Author: Rachel Held Evans

41. "Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor's New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations."
Author: Roger Penrose

42. "The trick is to maintain a kind of naïve amazement at each instant of experience - but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look inside yourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm."
Author: Sarah Bakewell

43. "I'm not a wife, or a mother, or a pillar of the ton," she waved her unharmed arm as though the life she was describing was just beyond the room. "I'm invisible. So, why not stop being such a craven wallflower and start trying all the things that I've always dreamed of doing? Why not go to taverns adn drink scotch and fence? I confess, those things have been much more interesting than all the loathsome teas and balls and needlepoint with which I have traditionally occupied my time." She met his gaze again. "Does this make sense?"He nodded seriously. "It does. You're trying to find Callie."
Author: Sarah MacLean

44. "It's just..." She scrubbed a hand across her face. "I keep looking for someone to share life with, someone patient. Not afraid of a mop or use the stove. Even-tempered, understanding, not allergic to emotion." She closed her eyes momentarily. "Someone sweet."Hunter stifled a grimace. She was describing a female with a penis."
Author: Shayla Black

45. "Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it."
Author: Stendhal

46. "I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario."
Author: Stephen Malkmus

47. "Describing the person I am would best be through music. When I'm up on stage and I'm singing my heart out, I am always reminded of life's best things."
Author: Thia Megia

48. "Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles."
Author: Tracy Chevalier

49. "And this song," Doug said as the CD advanced to the next track, "Makes me think about how Stephen's love completes my soul." Rapid-fire drumming led into lyrics describing the satisfaction one felt when pointing a Glock at a filthy puta."
Author: Valerie Z. Lewis

50. "In describing the honourable mission I charged him with, M. Pernety informed me that he made my name known to you. This leads me to confess that I am not as completely unknown to you as you might believe, but that fearing the ridicule attached to a female scientist, I have previously taken the name of M. LeBlanc in communicating to you those notes that, no doubt, do not deserve the indulgence with which you have responded.{Explaining her use of a male pseudonym in a letter to Carl Friedrich Gauss, 1807}"
Author: You

Describing Quotes Pictures