#Description Quotes

“Some report a sea-maid spawn'd him; some that he was begot between two stock-fishes. But it is certain that when he makes water his urine is congealed ice.”

“He was met even now As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud; Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.”

“This sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of flesh!”

“A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage; and, as I think, his age some fifty, or, by'r Lady, inclining to threescore; and now I remember me, his name is Falstaff.”

“My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind; So flew'd, so sanded; their heads are hung with ears that sweep away the morning dew.”

“I'll say she looks as clear as morning roses newly washed with dew.”

“Like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring: when a' was naked, he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife.”

“The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burnt on the water.”

“What a house - nothin' but rooms!”

“He is like a female llama surprised in her bath.”

“What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fishlike smell; a kind of not of the newest poor-John. A strange fish!”

“A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.”

“But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.”

“The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.”

“It is the duty of the writer to describe.”

“We shall not attempt to give the reader an idea of that tetrahedron nose-that horse-shoe mouth-that small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow, while the right eye disappeared entirely under an enormous wart-of those straggling teeth with breaches here and there like the battlements of a fortress-of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth projected like the tusk of an elephant-of that forked chin-and, above all, of the expression diffused over the whole-that mixture of malice, astonishment, and melancholy. Let the reader, if he can, figure to himself this combination.”

“Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.”

“In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.”

“Like strange mechanical grotesques,Making fantastic arabesques,The shadows raced across the blind.”

“The wolf is the arch type of ravin, the beast of waste and desolation.”

“Water is a commodity not by any means to be found everywhere...When found, it is more than likely to be bad, being either from a bitter alkaline pool, or from a hole in a creek, so muddy that it can only be called liquid by courtesy.”

“And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.”

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”

“The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.”

“After nightfall the face of the country seems to alter marvelously, and the clear moonlight only intensifies the change. The river gleams like running quicksilver, and the moonbeams play over the grassy stretches of the plateaus...The Bad Lands seem to be stranger and wilder than ever, the silvery rays turning the country into a kind of grim fairyland.”

“Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is THERE, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate. The logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses.”

“one pale woman all alone,The daylight kissing her wan hair,Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare,With lips of flame and heart of stone.”

“Nature is a wet place where large numbers of ducks fly overhead uncooked.”

“St. Paul'sLoomed like a bubble o'er the town.”

“Chrysanthemums from gilded argosyUnload their gaudy senseless merchandise.”

““A living poem” had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.”

“Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.”

“The country is an archipelago of lakes,--the lake-country of New England.”

“And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.”

“If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms.”

“Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.”

“If you want to know what cram is, I can only say that I don’t know the recipe; but it is biscuitish, keeps good indefinitely, is supposed to be sustaining, and is certainly not entertaining, being in fact very uninteresting except as a chewing exercise.”

“Their horses were of great stature, strong and clean-limbed; their gray coats glistened, their long tails flowed in the wind, their manes were braided on their proud necks.”

“Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.”

“Richard Strauss--Old Home Week in Gomorrah”

“So fair, so cold; like a morning of pale spring still clinging to winter's chill.”

“Puccini - silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.”

“There was a fire in the wide hearth before them, and it was burning with a sweet smell, as if it were built of apple-wood.”

“It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself up out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

“Dachshund: A half-a-dog high and a dog-and-a-half long.”

“A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor”

“Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.”

“A woman whose face looked as if it had been made of sugar and someone had licked it.”

“A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.”

“There was nowhere to sit except the bunk, which was covered with rotting food, and a wooden stool, upon which sat a large fur-covered lump—an old cheese, perhaps, or a dead cat.”