Selected detail quotes

1. It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

2. I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

3. Should a person on returning from the city discover his house to be in flames, let him examine well the change which he has received from the chair-carrier before it is too late; for evil never travels alone.

4. I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

5. The thing that makes you know that Vernon Ward is a good painter is if you look at his ducks, you can see the eyes follow you around the room.

6. Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.

7. 'If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.'

8. The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.

9. 'The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass.'

10. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

11. Expression for me does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive; the place occupied by my figures, the empty space around them, the proportions, everything has its share. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter's command to express his feelings. In a picture every part will be visible and will play its appointed role, whether it be principal or secondary. Everything that is not useful in the picture is, it follows, harmful. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety: any superfluous detail would replace some other essential detail in the mind of the spectator.

12. Philologists, who chase A panting syllable through time and space, Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark.

13. Not a flower But shows some touch, in freckle, streak or stain, Of his unrivall'd pencil.

14. Looking as like...as one pea does like another.

15. I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks.

16. Le nez de Cleopatre, s'il eut ete plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait change.

17. I've lost my white mouse ('Revenge of the Creature', as the lab technician, his first line in a movie - 1955)

18. I like the juicy stem of grass that grows within the coarser leaf folded round, and the butteryellow glow in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

19. Interviewer: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism? Garcia Marquez: That's a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.

20. Seen from close, her eyes appeared larger than life, especially when she opened and shut her eyelids several times on awakening: black when looked at in the shadow, dark blue in bright light, they seemed to contain layer upon layer of color, thicker and cloudier beneath, lighter and more transparent toward the lustrous surface.

21. This hangnail expression . . .

22. God bless all the precious little examples and all their cascading implications; without these gems, these tiny acorns bearing the blueprints of oak trees, essayists would be out of business.

23. These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough. No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.

24. And on the wolfmother wallpaper, little beads of dew.

25. A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover.

26. Art, like love, has a fine detail to it. You need to know exactly what is going on.

27. To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit-General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess

28. How do you think those routines were accomplished? With mirrors?... Well, I thought I knew what concentrated work was before I met Fred, but he's the limit. Never satisified until every detail is right, and he will not compromise. No sir! What's more, if he thinks of something better after you've finished a routine, you do it over

29. Do nothing by halves Which can be done by quarters.

30. In politics, nothing is contemptible.

31. Son, only a pimp in a Louisiana whore house carries pearl handled revolvers, these are ivory.

32. Among American writers Thoreau was the pioneer of nature-study. Audubon had preceded him but he worked mainly with the brush; to multitudes Thoreau opened the gate to the secrets of our natural environment. The subtle delicacy of the grass-blade, the crystals of the snowflake, the icicle, the marvel of the weird lines traced by the flocks of wild geese athwart the heavens as they migrated, these he watched and recorded with loving accuracy and sensitive poetic feeling as no one in our land before had done. I have thrown a stone upon the cairn at Walden Pond which has now grown so high through the tributes of his grateful admirers. I shall throw still others in grateful admiration if the opportunity comes to me.

33. Jack: What kind of tiger is that - Siberian or Bengal?

34. General Kurt Student was a German of the almost obsessively meticulous order and was determined to ensure that every unit involved in the forthcoming operation was kept fully briefed.

35. All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: Breath and bloom, shade and shine, - wonder, wealth, and - how far above them -