Description Quotes

The desert at night was black and a strange madder-tinted silver; the sky was black, and the great contorted cliffs, and the vast expanses of sand that stretched out in all directions. But the red moon cast a pale crimson-tinged luminescence over everything, and far above the stars were glittering points of silver.

~ Rachel Neumeier

To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.

~ J.g. Ballard

While the bible is GOD because the word of GOD is GOD, please understand that GOD cannot be contained in the bible. To believe otherwise is to make an infinite GOD finite.

~ Temitope Ibrahim

Naming can satisfy a need, it can shorten a conversation that otherwise might go on for hours.

~ Nihad Sirees

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond.

~ Lauren Slater

He's the navigator, he could probably find you a route to Hawaii underwater.

~ Jocelyn White

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.

~ Edith Wharton

A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

~ Marcel Proust

She had always wanted to do every thing, and had made more progress in both drawing and music than many might have done with so little labour as she ever would submit to... She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.

~ Jane Austen

Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary, as if tenderized by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flash of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.

~ Dezső Kosztolányi

She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

He went farther; agonised by the reflection, at the moment when it passed by him, so near and yet so infinitely remote, that, while it was addressed to their ears, it knew them not, he would regret, almost, that it had a meaning of its own, an intrinsic and unalterable beauty, foreign to themselves, just as in the jewels given to us, or even in the letters written to us by a woman with whom we are in love, we find fault with the 'water' of a stone, or with the words of a sentence because they are not fashioned exclusively from the spirit of a fleeting intimacy and of a 'lass unaparalleled.

~ Marcel Proust

His voice gave out and he made several wavy motions with his hand, indicative of the shape of a woman who would probably be unable to keep her balance.

~ Terry Pratchett

The 'Wild West' is a good description of law enforcement in the desert southwest USA.

~ Steven Magee

Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.

~ Orson Scott Card

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Eloquence is painted thought, and thus those who, after having painted it, add somewhat more, make a picture, not a portrait.

~ Blaise Pascal

Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon.

~ Margaret Mahy

There is no moon. The stars have risen and fallen and given way to a new spread, to the smeared heart of our Milky Way.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

... the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive...

~ Marcel Proust

Gansey clucked at his bedraggled reflection in the dark-framed mirror hanging in the front hallway. Chainsaw eyed herself briefly before hiding on the other side of Ronan's neck; Adam did the same, but without the hiding-in-Ronan's-neck bit. Even Blue looked less fanciful that usual, the lighting rendering her lampshade dress and spiky hair as a melancholy Pierrot.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

...only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.

~ Alison Croggon

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

He had the beginning of wrinkles and the easy manner of one who has already made his mistakes.

~ Donald Kingsbury

She had short curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.

~ L.m. Boston

At last he said, Did you come out of the big mountains?Gitano shook his head slowly. No, I walked down the Salinas Valley.The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were living in Gitano's head.

~ John Steinbeck

Night would settle in like slow blindness, sucking the color from the trees and the low sky and the rocks and the frozen grass and the frost white hydrangeas until there was nothing left in the window but her own reflection.

~ Anita Shreve

Outside the windows, everything is getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night.

~ Alexandra Kleeman

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.

~ Ken Kesey

Night was fading over the fields as if the rain had washed the darkness out of the hem of its garment.

~ Cornelia Funke

Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.

~ J.p. Delaney

Nippers was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers — ambition and indigestion.

~ Herman Melville

Salander was an information junkie with a delinquent child's take on morals and ethics.

~ Stieg Larsson

A 'sadist' of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be...

~ Marcel Proust

Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence...

~ Marcel Proust

Zachariah, Zachariah,' whispers Rachel, casting a practised eye over the back of his head and down the length of him, from the shoulder blades where his wings once grew, epochs ago, in some other guise: angel—guardian, avenging—or great vagrant bird—Daurian Jackdaw, Chimney Swift, Pacific Loon!

~ Emma Richler

I should've known the eyes. Wide, bright blue, and something about the delicate arc of the lids: a cat's slant, a pale jeweled girl in an old painting, a secret.

~ Tana French

His eyes reflected the open grey of the autumnal sky.

~ Juliet Marillier