Details Quotes - Page 17

• Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

  Tana French

  Tiny, Wonder, Inconvenience

  4 Copy quote

• This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.

  Alice Munro

  Travel, Long, Way

  Alice Munro (2015). “A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994”, p.429, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Simple, Thinking, Looks

  Ursula K. LeGuin (2014). “The Unreal and the Real Volume 2: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin: Outer Space & Inner Lands”, p.147, Hachette UK

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Eye, Wrinkles, Hair

  Chuck Palahniuk (2003). “Diary: A Novel”, Doubleday Books

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Reality, Magic, Doe

  Jorge Luis Borges (1964). “Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings”, p.89, New Directions Publishing

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

  Oscar Wilde

  Past, Remember, Should

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (with an Essay by Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly)”, p.65, Mondial

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Writing, Finished, Ifs

  12 Copy quote

• The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.

  Ian Mcewan

  Littles, Return, Cost

  Ian McEwan (2010). “Atonement”, p.76, Random House

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.

  Laurie R. King

  Daughter, Distance, Eye

  4 Copy quote

• Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Morning, Giving, Lasts

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Barbara L. Packer, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson (2003). “The Conduct of Life”, p.90, Harvard University Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

  Dean Koontz

  Perseverance, War, Fall

  Dean Koontz (2014). “The Odd Thomas Series 7-Book Bundle: Odd Thomas, Forever Odd, Brother Odd, Odd Hours, Odd Apocalypse, Odd Interlude, Deeply Odd”, p.294, Bantam

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: The horror! The horror!

  Joseph Conrad

  Struggle, Pride, Expression

  Heart of Darkness ch. 3 (1902)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

  Charles Darwin

  Struggle, Science, Survival

  On the Origin of Species ch. 3 (1859) See Malthus 2

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Seventeen, eh!" said Hagrid as he accepted a bucket-sized glass of wine from Fred. "Six years to the day we met, Harry, d’yeh remember it?" "Vaguely," said Harry, grinning up at him. "Didn’t you smash down the front door, give Dudley a pig’s tail, and tell me I was a wizard?" "I forge’ the details," Hagrid chortled.

  J. K. Rowling

  Wine, Glasses, Pigs

  8 Copy quote

• Suddenly, details seemed extremely important. Details were something to grab on to, a way to insert myself into the story.

  Mitch Albom

  Important, Stories, Way

  4 Copy quote

• Mister Cameron - I have read the unexpurgated Ovid, the love poems of Sappho, the Decameron in the original, and a great many texts in Greek and Latin histories that were not though fit for proper gentlemen to read, much less proper ladies. I know in precise detail what Caligula did to, and with, his sisters, and I can quote it to you in Latin or in my own translation if you wish. I am interested in historical truth, and truth in history is often unpleasant and distasteful to those of fine sensibility. I frankly doubt that you will produce anything to shock me.

  Mercedes Lackey

  Latin, Historical, Greek

  8 Copy quote

• Life, it turns out, goes on. There is no cosmic rule that grants you immunity from the details just because you have come face-to-face with a catastrophe. The garbage can still overflow, the bills arrive in the mail, telemarketers, interrupt dinner.

  Jodi Picoult

  Garbage Cans, Goes On, Dinner

  4 Copy quote

• The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

  Tennessee Williams

  Memories, Heart, Emotional

  Tennessee Williams (1990). “The Theatre of Tennessee Williams”, p.143, New Directions Publishing

  39 Copy quote

  Show source

• Pleasured equally In seeking as in finding, Each detail minding, Old Walt went seeking And finding.

  Langston Hughes

  Walt, Findings, Seeking

  Langston Hughes (2011). “Selected Poems of Langston Hughes”, p.100, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• First rule of bodyguard detail: know where your 'body' is at all times.

  Ilona Andrews

  Body, Firsts, All Time

  Ilona Andrews (2010). “Magic Bleeds”, p.145, Penguin

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.

  Angela Carter

  Dolls, Language, Speak

  Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.

  Anne Lamott

  Baseball, Animal, Giving

  7 Copy quote

• That the sum of a man's life was not where he wound up but in the details that brought him there. That we made mistakes. I closed my eyes, sick of the riddles, and to my surprise all I could see were dandelions-as if they had been painted on the fields of my imagination, a hundred thousand suns. And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

  Jodi Picoult

  Mistake, Eye, Men

  Jodi Picoult (2012). “The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules”, p.107, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Distance, Eye

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of T. Jefferson”, p.437

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The best way to waste your life, is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Looks, Way, Waste

  "Lullaby". Book by Chuck Palahniuk, September 17, 2002.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source