98 Description Quotes

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.

[An article about Cho] started out, 'Funny, sexy, zaftig Margaret Cho...' What is 'zaftig?' Isn't that German for 'big fat pig?' I guess I was lucky; 'zaftig' is kind of a nice word. It could have been, 'Funny, sexy, OBESE Margaret Cho.'

[H]owever well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction. --Austin, Papers 195.

Ahhh, just smell that rosemary, I... Oh. I'm sorry. You can't. That was mean.

'Out came Ms. Hilton in a Juicy track suit, chattering away like a Gibbon on her jewel encrusted cell phone. It was like magic, if magic were like a extra-strength laxative.'

One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir.

People have told me it's like Touched by an Angel on acid. I think that's a good description.

He's tough, ma'am,-tough is J. B.; tough and devilish sly.

Mr. Chadband is a large yellow man, with a fat smile, and a general appearance of having a good deal of train oil in his system.

My own room is next the bath room said Bernard it is decerated dark red as I have somber tastes. The bath room has got a tip up bason and a hose thing for washing your head.

It sounds like typewriters eating tinfoil, being kicked down some stairs.

Her tall figure, swathed in black, looking like some strange eccentric bird... she seemed like an ageing princess come home from exile.

Kaltenbrunner was a giant in stature, heavy in his movements -a real lumberjack. It was his square, heavy chin which expressed the character of the man. The thick neck, forming a straight line with the back of his head, increased the impression of rough-hewn coarseness. His small, penetrating, brown eyes were unpleasant; they looked at one fixedly, like the eyes of a viper seeking to petrify his prey. When one expected Kaltenbrunner to say something, his angular, wooden face would remain quite inexpressive; then, after several seconds of oppressive silence, he would bang the table and begin to speak. I always had the feeling that I was looking at the hands of an old gorilla. They were much too small, and the fingers were brown and discolored, for Kaltenbrunner smoked up to one hundred cigarettes a day.

An immensely tall, angular figure ... His gown hung round him in long folds like the wings of a bat, and his wig was perched slightly askew over a lantern jawed face with a blue chin, soulful spaniel-brown eyes and a turned-down mouth like a slit. But for his garb, you would have said that he was a dyspeptic undertaker in a town where nobody ever died.

Presently, however, we came to a small clearing and there, squatting at the mouth of its burrow was the musician responsible for the ringing, flute-like cry - a fat ground squirrel, wearing a tasteful suit of rust-red and grey fur. He sat as upright as a guardsman at the entrance to his home and his ribcage pumped in and out as he gave his musical warning cry. His big, liquid eyes stared at us with that intense, slightly inane expression that most squirrels wear, and his little paws trembled with his vocal efforts.

Grue: man, ocular bat, the unusual hoon.

Gid: hybrid of man, gargoyle, whorl, leaping insect.

The glory of the day was in her face, The beauty of the night was in her eyes. And over all her loveliness, the grace Of Morning blushing in the early skies.

Joachim von Ribbentrop is like a man of wood.

'..for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho.'

Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls. (p. 65)

History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single nation, appears impossible.

And both were young, and one was beautiful.

Rene Levesque looks like a distressed seminarian.

Her descriptions of food can be a tangle of adjectives.

Skorzeny was a giant of a man with a chalk-line scar scribbled from the left temple to the corner of his mouth, above a massive chin.

With hue like that when some great painter dips His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad serves up] a triple scoop of crazy, sprinkled with crazy, and topped off with warm crazy sauce.

To call it weird would be a cowardly evasion. It is creepy, eccentric, eerie, flaky, freaky, funky, grotesque, inscrutable, kinky, kooky, magical, oddball, spooky, uncanny, uncouth and unearthly. Especially uncouth. What I did was, I typed the word 'weird' and when that wholly failed to evoke the feelings the film stirred in me, I turned to the thesaurus and it suggested the above substitutes - and none of them do the trick, either.

I never saw a more beautiful woman, enormous eyes, skin the color of Devonshire cream.

'Twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o' place.

Rochester: You mean that shiny one with the three points on it?

The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

Seven feet of English ground, or as much more as he may be taller than other men.

We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature...

Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.

Bradbury Fisher shuddered from head to foot, and his legs wobbled like asparagus stalks.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say `When!'

She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season.

In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.

'The fellow with a face rather like a walnut.'

Even at normal times Aunt Dahlia's map tended a little towards the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill.

[of Spode] He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breath-taking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment.

He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into mud.

There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.

The stationmaster's whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass.

As is so often the case with butlers, there was a good deal of Beach. Julius Caesar, who liked to have men about him who were fat, would have taken to him at once. He was a man who had made two chins grow where only one had been before, and his waistcoat swelled like the sail of a racing yacht.

She snorted with a sudden violence which twenty-four hours earlier would have unmanned me completely. Even in my present tolerably robust condition, it affected me like one of those gas explosions which slay six.

The Duke's moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb-tide.

The proprietor had hair so red that pigmentation had flowed out into every visible inch of his skin and even into the pinks of his eyes, as the colour of flowering cherry trees stains their leaves.

The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.

Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.

He didn't curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in.

She opened her mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn't hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.

When I shook his hand, it felt like sticking my hand in a catcher's mitt. When he hugged me, he had to bend over. His size made me feel like a little boy.

The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight; New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil.

A hypnotist's crystal... sparkled with diamonds.

J'invente une langue qui doit necessairement jaillir d'une poetique tres nouvelle, que je pourrais definir en ces deux mots: Peindre, non la chose, mais l'effet qu'elle produit.

There was no death row at Cold Mountain, only E Block, set apart from the other four and about a quarter their size, brick instead of wood, with a horrible bare metal roof that glared in the summer sun like a delirious eyeball.

The female in question was a sloppy pest

...crazy as a couple of waltzing mice.

During the Famous 'Beer Truck' Episode of Raw before w:Wrestlemania XV, March 1999

He is honey.

Liver lips