A chair's function is not just to provide a place to sit; it is to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself. That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves use...
Imagine you saw a colour in your dream, which you have never seen before. It doesn't consist of any colours or shades that you know. Trying to describe that colour would be as difficult as trying to belive that there is enough love & compassion in th...
In terms of a narrative nonfiction book, when you're describing scenes that you have multiple sources for, and that you have differing sources for, and you decide to choose a path that puts all that information together, well yeah, there's definitely...
I have been described by one of my colleagues as a 'militant agnostic' with my tagline, 'I don't know, and neither do you!' I take this hard-line, fence-sitting position because it is the only position consistent with both my scientific ethos and my ...
I cannot assume emotions I do not feel, and must describe Jerusalem as I found it. Since being here, I have read the accounts of several travellers, and in many cases the devotional rhapsodies - the ecstacies of awe and reverence - in which they indu...
I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into thei...
If only i could get that under control then i feel like i could stay here a long time, watching the days leaking into the nights, swilling over the buildings, bleeding back again. I could lie and not think of anything but ways to describe the sky, th...
Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know on...
This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view...
Taking the one seat describes two related aspects of spiritual work. Outwardly, it means selecting one practice and teacher among all the possibilities, and inwardly, it means having the determination to stick with that practice through whatever diff...
[describing a telegram from her father] Sally: Ten words exactly. After ten it's extra. You see, Daddy thinks of these things. If I had leprosy, there'd be a cable: "Gee, kid, tough. Sincerely hope nose doesn't fall off. Love."
[Jet describes the Nano-Machines] Jet: The message mentions bone marrow so they must know about the Nano-Machines. Faye: And so? Jet: That's all I have. Faye: So ends yet another episode of 'Wasting Time with Jet'
[after hearing Jeannie describe her problems... ] Boy in Police Station: There's someone you should talk to. Jeannie: If you say Ferris Bueller, you lose a testicle. Boy in Police Station: Oh, you know him?
Jack Crabb: [after the sergeant shoots Shadow] There was no describing how I felt: an enemy had saved my life from the violent murder of one of my best friends... The world was too ridiculous to even bother to live in.
Lindy: Eddie, I know how it's going. I'm your... I was your girlfriend. Eddie Morra: That word doesn't even begin to describe what you are to me. Lindy: Partner? Squeeze? Eddie Morra: Paramour. Inamorata. Lindy: Cleaning lady. Bank. [pays for meal]
Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation interferes is regular and falls within a limited range of poss...
It's not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can't live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you n...
We wanted to describe society from our Left point of view. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-...
I was 13 years old at music school talking to my teacher. I can't quite remember what it was I was trying to describe, but I do remember my music teacher saying to me, 'Do you have synesthesia?' In hindsight, it seems a little presumptuous of her to ...
We have this interesting problem with black holes. What is a black hole? It is a region of space where you have mass that's confined to zero volume, which means that the density is infinitely large, which means we have no way of describing, really, w...
Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most tr...
