Many smart folks seem to think that if you just get your metaphors and messages right, you'll win. That if you start describing what you favor as a 'moral value' - 'affordable health care is a moral value' etc., - then you'll appeal to red-state voters.
When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.
most Americans are in deep awe of things-as-they-are. Even with everything this obviously out of control, they still tell themselves that those in authority must know what they are doing, and must be describing our condition to us as it really is; they still take it for granted that somehow what is, what is done, must make sense, can't really be insane. These assumptions exercise a tyranny over their minds.
Representative Leo J. Ryan understood the manipulation phenomena people were describing to him and he lost his life in a Guyanese jungle investigating how Jim Jones "bent minds.
The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word 'renowned'... I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don't do it in describing an event in a narrative... Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International.
It struck me that Steve Jobs, known to be such a brilliant speaker, had a very difficult time explaining things when he was younger. He was describing technology that didn't exist. He had MIT engineers, and he was trying to tell them what he wanted; but there were no terms for what he wanted yet. I think a lot of his early frustration was trying to quickly get his vision to the finish line.
You see that who you are isn't moving in time. Time is describing the incarnations, the packing changes.
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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.
The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images; we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately.
I'm no good at describing my books. 'Holes' has been out now for seven years, and I still can't come up with a good answer when asked what that book is about.
It is important to distinguish the difficulty of describing and learning a piece of notation from the difficulty of mastering its implications. [...] Indeed, the very suggestiveness of a notation may make it seem harder to learn because of the many properties it suggests for exploration.
English is weak in describing emotional states or intensities of interpersonal relationships.
All photographs are about light. The great majority of photographs record light as a way of describing objects in space. A few photographs are less about objects and more about the space that contains them. Still fewer photographs are about light itself.
Describing beauty is almost impossible because we perceive it, rather than describe it. If you look at a Rembrandt painting and start to try and describe what the beauty is you see, your words sound absolutely pathetic.
Martina Navratilova is not a 'girl,' nor is Debi Thomas or Katarina Witt, and the women skaters weren't 'cute' in 1988. The problem with describing women as girls is that they never grow up and therefore can't take positions of authority in the world of sport. But the good news is that you can change language, so ultimately you can change the picture of women in sports.
Do you know how writers often say the characters take over... But that is more or less what it always feels like to me, too. Even though that's just a way of describing how your brain is working, it's still what you tend to feel.
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