Description Quotes - Page 26

• Ethnography literally means 'a portrait of a people.' An ethnography is a written description of a particular culture - the customs, beliefs, and behavior - based on information collected through fieldwork.

  Marvin Harris

  Mean, People, Portraits

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• In descriptions of nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture.

  Anton Chekhov

  Writing, Eye, Details

  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1987). “The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings”

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• There is no description, no image in any book that is capable of replacing the sight of real trees, and all of the life to be found around them in a real forest.

  Maria Montessori

  Real, Book, Sight

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• There's something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need to do nothing more. It's alive in a way that's greater than any description of it.

  Mark Helprin

  Rushing, Water, Watches

  Mark Helprin (2012). “In Sunlight and in Shadow”, p.27, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers, and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race, and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul . . . because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.

  Ronald Rolheiser

  Country, Children, Hypocrite

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• When we have this description, of what a sketch is, itsattributes, we can then start inventing new things thatshare those attributes, and therefore improve our currenttechnics by inventing new and better tools that help ussketch.

  Bill Buxton

  Tools, Helping, Attributes

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• Temptation is impossible for me to resist Come on. This is Hollywood. It's in the job description.

  Tom Sizemore

  Jobs, Temptation, Hollywood

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Suicide, Confusion, Levels

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2011). “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”, p.24, Vintage

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• Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff didn't like the word 'horror'. They, like I, went for the French description: 'the theatre of the fantastique'.

  Christopher Lee

  Theatre, Horror

  Biography/Person Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• It is immature and lazy to imagine we know everything there is to know about someone before we know that someone. We don't know their stories, their histories, their real live human feelings. We don't know their favorite movies and best memories and what makes them afraid. It is unfair to take one fact, one thing they've said or we heard they said, or one thing they wrote, or someone else's experience, or a group they identify with and make a character sketch. If people did that to us, the picture would be so woefully incomplete, we wouldn't even recognize our own description.

  Jen Hatmaker

  Memories, Real, Character

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• I knew words were like chains, they held me back . . . the act of description taints the description.

  John Fowles

  Chains

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

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• Most words evolved as a description of the outside world, hence their inadequacy to describe what is going on inside me.

  Hugh Prather

  World, Outside World, Inadequacy

  Hugh Prather, James Baldwin (1983). “Notes to Myself”

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• For nine miles along a submerged ridge, the corals rise in lumpy hillocks that spread out 100 yards or more, resembling heaped scoops of rainbow sherbet and Neapolitan ice cream. The mounds, some 100 feet tall, sprout delicate treelike gorgonians that sift currents for a plankton meal. Fish, worms and other creatures dart or crawl in every crevice. This description could apply to thousands of coral reefs in shallow, sun-streaked tropical waters from Australia to the Bahamas. But this is the Sula Ridge, 1,000 feet down in frigid darkness on the continental shelf 100 miles off Norway's coast.

  James Dwight Dana

  Nature, Ice, Feet

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• There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the 'end of time,' or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it.

  Thomas Paine

  Country, Men, Age

  "Rights of Man, Part I". Book by Thomas Paine, en.wikisource.org. 1791.

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• State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress. ... Inspection laws, quarantine laws, health laws of every description, as well as laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c., are component parts of this mass. No direct general power over these objects is granted to Congress, and, consequently, they remain subject to State legislation.

  John Marshall

  Health, Law, Quarantine

  John Marshall, Joseph Potter Cotton (2000). “The Constitutional Decisions of John Marshall”, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

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• The description of right lines and circles, upon which geometry is founded, belongs to mechanics. Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn.

  Isaac Newton

  Math, Circles, Doe

  Isaac Newton (1966). “Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World: The motion of bodies”, p.17, Univ of California Press

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• What makes screenplays difficult are the things that require the most discipline and care and are just not seen by most people. I'm talking about movement - screenwriting is related to math and music, and if you zig here, you know you have to zag there. It's like the descriptions for a piece of music - you go fast or slow or with feeling. It's the same.

  Robert Towne

  Math, Talking, Discipline

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• We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.

  Robert Cormier

  Writing, School, Unique

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• The online musical universe has become Balkanized, with many sites focusing on minute niches. That works well for reaching very specific demographics, which is wonderful for advertising, but it flies in the face of the common wisdom that people's tastes have become more diverse as music of any description has become a mouse-click away.

  Michael Azerrad

  Wisdom, People, Musical

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• One of the most important things about the geology on the moon is your descriptions of what you see, comparing them to things that you've seen on Earth so that the geologists and the scientists on the ground would know what you're talking about; and then take pictures of them.

  Gene Cernan

  Moon, Talking, Important

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• In the description of night in Macbeth, the beetle and the bat detract from the general idea of darkness - inspissated gloom.

  Samuel Johnson

  Night, Ideas, Darkness

  In James Boswell 'The Life of Samuel Johnson' (1791) vol. 2, p. 90 (16 October 1769)

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• One who is caught in thought loses one's original nature. All he knows are words and descriptions. When he sees the actual thing, he fails to perceive it.

  Dalai Lama

  Failing, Caught, Perceive

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• In painting one must search rather for suggestion than for description, as is done in music.

  Paul Gauguin

  Suggestions, Done, Painting

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• A picture is never anything but its own plural description.

  Roland Barthes

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• We live in a description of reality.

  Jean Houston

  Reality

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