31 Details 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.

Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones.

We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: 'The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.' We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters - except everything.

Any one detail, followed through to its source, will usually reveal the general state of readiness of the whole organization.

I sought in political reporting what Galsworthy in another context had called 'the significant trifle'- the bit of dialogue, the overlooked fact, the buried observation which illuminated the realities of the situation.

How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe.

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars; General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer: For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

Details are all that matters: God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.

At every date he goes out and sits in every section of the hall to listen to the sound. And if it isn't right, even in the last row, I hear about it and we make changes. I mean every date too.

You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected.

The man in charge must concern himself with details. If he does not consider them important, neither will his subordinates. Yet 'the devil is in the details.' It is hard and monotonous to pay attention to seemingly minor matters. In my work, I probably spend about ninety-nine percent of my time on what others may call petty details. Most managers would rather focus on lofty policy matters. But when the details are ignored, the project fails. No infusion of policy or lofty ideals can then correct the situation.

I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards. . . I saw the oblique shadow of some ferns on the floor of a hot-house; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; I saw all the ants in the world.

It has been said that a careful reading of Anna Karenina, if it teaches you nothing else, will teach you how to make strawberry jam.

PETE: Bloody Greta Garbo. Bloody Greta Garbo, stark naked save for a shortie nightie, hanging on to the window sill, and I could see her knuckles all white, saying 'Peter, Peter'. You know how those bloody Swedes go on.

'Particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.'

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

So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way. And something unspeakably holy-I don't know how else to say this-underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery.

I once received a letter from a mother ambitious for her daughter. It read: 'I have a perfectly beautiful daughter. She is seventeen years old, five feet three inches tall, and weighs eight stone. Do you think she might succeed in films?' I replied 'Madam, it would be impossible to say, as you did not state her width.'

It would have been a good dinner, if The soup had been as warm as the champagne or The beef had been as rare as the service or The brandy had been as old as the woman on his left or The woman on his right had been as Hansom as the cab he took home.

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

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

Small change can often be found under seat cushions.

Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. Yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince how much it has been used. How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate, whether we had better know them, - had better let their peddling-carts be driven, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the nearest shore of eternity! Have we no culture, no refinement, - but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil? - to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us? Shall our institutions be like those chestnut-burs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers?