Top 55 Descriptions Quotes

I just love the days when you come out of the archives with half a dozen excellent descriptions or poignant accounts of personal experiences.

If I showed you scripts from my first few movies, the descriptions of my characters all said ‘the ugly girl’.

The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force.

In fantasy and science fiction, world-building is an essential part of the story. But as a reader, I don’t just want descriptions of food, clothing, and places. I want to understand the world to its core, through the eyes of those who live in it.

After a summer trip to Switzerland, which was rich in experiences, I started writing. In the beginning, I aimed at descriptions of nature and folk life until, as the years passed, the description of man became my chief interest.

One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.

Inflated descriptions by the pen or exaggerated illustrations by the pencil.

I think my lack of ‘Pokemon’ knowledge and complete confusion at the descriptions makes people think I’m adorable, like a lost baby duckling or your grandmother trying to use an iPad.

Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.

When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.

While there are corporal descriptions of what the afterlife is like in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, what’s going on there is the finite trying to describe the infinite. If God knows everything, started everything and is the only one who knows how it’s going to end, how can any human know what God wants?

Estimates are that in 2012, more than 32 million books were available – the explosion, thanks to the ease of self-publishing; 2013 could see even more titles grace our virtual bookstores! That means we are going to be awash in covers and titles, plot descriptions and characters.

I’ve seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You’ll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.

I’m quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I’m a failed scientist, and because I’m interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

One thing an exceptional employee never says is, ‘That’s not in my job description.’ Exceptional employees work outside the boundaries of job descriptions.

You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

If I had to write long-form stuff with descriptions of rooms, it would be so boring for me. I like writing dialogue and jokes and situational stuff.

My grandmother was a psychiatrist and had shelves full of medical books – I was constantly sneaking looks at some of those. I was fascinated by the descriptions of illnesses and diseases.

There seems to be no end of books about the British empire, and the fascination it holds for historians of all descriptions is inexhaustible.

Nancy Drew was always changing her outfits. I despised girls’ clothing, I couldn’t wait to get home from school and get out of it. The last thing I wanted to read was minute descriptions of Nancy’s frocks.

For delightfully quirky descriptions of bizarre neurological syndromes that teach us a lot about how the brain works, there is no match for Oliver Sacks.

With Dick Smith there, and the words of Peter Shaffer… they’ve got to be the most beautiful descriptions in music ever written on film or in literature. And we could hear the music accompanying the words… What more can you ask for?

Middle-class Americans really don’t want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs – except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them.

I am now in the full maturity of my age and vigor of my mind. Persons of various descriptions have repeatedly solicited me to turn my mind to dramatical composition. It was, indeed, the first amusement of my thoughts in my school-boy cell.

Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.

I think I’m good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn’t come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.

Alternative descriptions of the same reality evoke different emotions and different associations.

Descriptions of my work depress me. They make me feel pinned down.

Let’s say I find a lot of current American fiction too overwritten for my tastes, too self-conscious; I like something that’s simpler and more direct. The story is what matters to me. I hope to make it seem real to readers, as if it happened just like this – so I don’t want fancy descriptions getting in the way.

One of the fascinating things about researching Heaven and Hell is, of course, the fact that there are so few descriptions of Heaven, because most people can’t really explain what it would be like beyond a couple of sentences, whereas Hell is quite often personal.

I find it an absolute pleasure to read travel guides, especially the Michelin guides, and their description of places I know I’ll probably never visit. I spend a large part of my life reading descriptions of restaurants.

Perhaps one day we will have machines that can cope with approximate task descriptions, but in the meantime, we have to be very prissy about how we tell computers to do things.

At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.

I’ve always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers.

I was brought up to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

I like snappy dialogue and short descriptions and lots of action.

In fact, one of the descriptions of the character in the book is that ‘IT’ was not very good at replicating human emotions. And that’s something that is overlooked in general.

I write scripts in storyboard fashion using stick figures, and thought balloons and word balloons and captions. Then I’ll write descriptions of what scenes should look like and turn it over to the artist.

You look at the descriptions of Whitey by law enforcement during his early years, and they sum him up pretty well. He was the same guy 40 years later; he just had $40 million more, and had committed 40 more murders.

Euphemism in the workplace does not end with job descriptions. It reaches a pusillanimous peak at the other end of the work process – in dismissal.

I remember when I started modelling and being the only non-white girl in the fashion show. I was grateful to be there, but at the casting, there had been many beautiful women of different descriptions, and I was wondering why they were not being represented.

It’s no longer possible to simply build English country houses out of words, because they’ve already been so thoroughly described that all the applicable words have been used up, and one is forced to build them instead out of words recycled and scavenged from other descriptions of other country houses.

Most descriptions make Beijing sound overbuilt: not a blade of grass left.

Our culture has created two almost irreconcilable descriptions of a ‘good woman.’ The first is the individual achiever; the second, the self-sacrificing domestic goddess.

The grandmother, the mother, the worker, the student, the intellectual, the professional, the unemployed, everybody identified with the songs because they were descriptions of life in the city.

I loved reading Roald Dahl when I was young but I had forgotten a lot about the books. I read the ‘BFG’ on the iPad the other day and it was so interesting to see his descriptions of clothes and places.

Measurements, observations, descriptions can only be considered scientific when they are independently confirmed by other people.

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.

One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.