Vivid Descriptions Quotes

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Better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it. Is that your logic?
R. Gerry Fabian (Just Out Of Reach)
Why don’t you put up a stand by the road.” I blurted out.
R. Gerry Fabian (Just Out Of Reach)
By incorporating vivid and descriptive imagery, I strive to enable readers to 'see' and 'feel' the world I have created, aiming to make the message more tangible and relatable.
Suman Pokhrel
You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an ax entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they'll never read you again. What the hell? Penises entering vaginas bring a lot more joy into the world than axes entering skulls.
George R.R. Martin
Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)
Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)
I love words.  I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail.  I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum.  I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over.   In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.
Richelle E. Goodrich
found out I really hated dancing with strangers who were trying to get up in my business, so I filled in the silence with vivid descriptions of how we’d have at least ten kids and that I knew a spell that would allow us to get pregnant so we could take turns just popping out the ass babies. I’m pretty sure a couple of them all but ran by the time we’d finished. I waved after them.
T.J. Klune (The Lightning-Struck Heart (Tales From Verania, #1))
Why does Homer give us descriptions so much more vivid than all the poets. Because he sees so much more around him. We speak about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be poor poets. The aesthetic phenomenon is fundamentally simple: if someone simply possesses the capacity to see a living game going on continually and to live all the time surrounded by hordes of ghosts, then the man is a poet; if someone simply feels the urge to change himself and to speak out from other bodies and souls, then that person is a dramatist.
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy)
As Ramses did the same for his mother, he saw that her eyes were fixed on him. She had been unusually silent. She had not needed his father's tactless comment to understand the full implications of Farouk's death. As he met her unblinking gaze he was reminded of one of Nefret's more vivid descriptions. 'When she's angry, her eyes look like polished steel balls.' That's done it, he thought. She's made up her mind to get David and me out of this if she has to take on every German and Turkish agent in the Middle East.
Elizabeth Peters (He Shall Thunder in the Sky (Amelia Peabody, #12))
What we glean from travellers' vivid descriptions has a special charm; whatever is far off and suggestive excites our imagination; such pleasures tempt us far more than anything we may daily experience in the narrow circle of sedentary life.
Alexander von Humboldt
The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description. Novelist William Styron, however, in recounting his struggle with suicidal depression, captures vividly the heavy, inescapable pain that can lead to suicide: What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.
Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)
Some other memories of the funeral have stuck in my mind. The old boy’s face, for instance, when he caught up with us for the last time, just outside the village. His eyes were streaming with tears, of exhaustion or distress, or both together. But because of the wrinkles they couldn’t flow down. They spread out, crisscrossed, and formed a smooth gloss on the old, worn face.
Albert Camus (The Stranger)
She got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky.
Jonathan Tropper (How to Talk to a Widower)
A vivid - if somewhat melodramatic - firsthand description of what deliberate practice can feel like comes from dancer Martha Graham: 'Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration. There are daily small deaths.
Angela Duckworth (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance)
The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I’m not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ’s so I’m constantly aware of, and respect that. I have a tendency to give my readers vivid descriptions of panoramic viewpoints, soft breezes, and the late evening as it scrapes against the emerging night and present this step by suspenseful step. Once I get them to the threshold of that unseen cliff, I shove them off and say, take it from there.
Carl Henegan (Darkness Left Undone)
When my sister starts dating someone, I expect a full report. Vivid descriptions, photos, videos, oil paintings—I don’t care. Even those dick pics I mentioned, which you never sent.” “Isabel.” I lowered my voice. “Shut up. He will hear you.” We were only a few feet away from the group. She cocked an eyebrow and then tilted her head slowly. Dammit. “He is dating you. What’s the big deal with him hearing you talk about it with your sister? You’ve seen his penis. We are allowed to discuss it.” She rolled her eyes. “Actually, I think we are expected to do that. I’m sure he’s talked to his friends about your bubbies.
Elena Armas (The Spanish Love Deception (Spanish Love Deception, #1))
You want a vivid description of what’s going through my brain as I’m cutting through a liver and all these larvae are spilling out all over me and juice pops out of the intestines?” I kind of did, but I kept quiet. He went on: “I don’t really focus on that. I try to focus on the value of the work. It takes the edge off the grotesqueness.
Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed.
Iris Murdoch (The Black Prince)
She left her keys in the teeth of the lock where they would dangle all day.
Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles)
Telling is like giving readers a secondhand report afterward. Showing lets readers experience the events firsthand, through the five senses of the character.
Sandra Gerth (Show, Don't Tell: How to write vivid descriptions, handle backstory, and describe your characters’ emotions)
The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless--a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer.
William Faulkner (The Hamlet (The Snopes Trilogy, #1))
Then Royce's parry came a beat too late. The pale sword bit through the ringmail beneath his arm. The young Lord cried out in pain. Blood welled between the rings. It seemed red as fire where they touched the snow.
George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
Era vestito completamente di nero e con una eleganza che non era abituale fra i filibustieri del grande Golfo del Messico, uomini che si accontentavano di un paio di calzoni e d'una camicia, e che curavano più le loro armi che gli indumenti. [...] Anche l'aspetto di quell'uomo aveva, come il vestito, qualcosa di funebre, con quel volto pallido, quasi marmoreo, che spiccava stranamente fra le nere trine del colletto e le larghe tese del cappello, adorno d'una barba corta, nera, tagliata alla nazzarena un po' arricciata. Aveva però i lineamenti bellissimi: un naso regolare, due labbra piccole e rosse come il corallo, una fronte ampia solcata da una leggera ruga che dava a quel volto un non so che di malinconico, due occhi poi neri come carbonchi, d'un taglio perfetto, dalle ciglia lunghe, vivide e animate da un lampo tale che in certi momenti doveva sgomentare anche i più intrepidi filibustieri di tutto il golfo. La sua statura alta, slanciata, il suo portamento elegante, le sue mani aristocratiche, lo facevano conoscere, anche a prima vista, per un uomo d'alta condizione sociale e soprattutto per un uomo abituato al comando.
Emilio Salgari (Il Corsaro Nero)
Later, I almost convinced myself it had not happened, that it had been a vivid dream, drawn from his descriptions and too much imagination. But that is not the truth.
Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
A shrieking battle cry echoed on the wind, a spine-tingling scream that sounded like the baying of the wolves closing in on their prey.
Raymond E. Feist (Honored Enemy (Legends of the Riftwar, #1))
how impossibly clean-cut, with its twin sets of twelve, neat as walnut shells.
Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles)
A world of hot wind and bursting stars
J.Y. Yang (The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories)
Of course Paula had revealed her trouble to no one. She preserved it in her private heart like the awful bloody arcana of a mystical religion.
Iris Murdoch (The Nice and the Good)
The flowers in Tibet were always taller, more fragrant and vivid. Her descriptions, imprecise but unchanging from year to year lead me to an inevitable acceptance that her past was unequaled by our present lives. She would tell me of knee-deep fields of purple, red and white- plants never named or pointed out to during our years in India and Nepal- that over time served to create an idea of her fatherland, phayul, as a riotous garden. I pictured her wilderness paradise by comparing them not to the marigolds, daises or bluebells I crushed with my fingers, but to the shape of household artefacts around me: lollipop, broom, bottle. Disparate objects that surrendered to and influenced the idea, space and hope of a more abundant and happy place.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa (A Home in Tibet)
For a vivid and entertaining description of the lack of protection for the individual against incursion of his liberty by his “protectors,” see H.L. Mencken, “The Nature of Liberty,” in Prejudices: A Selection (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), pp. 138–43.
Murray N. Rothbard (The Anatomy of the State (LvMI))
One day the thought hit me—could the whole story of the Jews in Egypt have simply been a poem? More or less like Homer describing magical cattle, and ravenous women and so on? Ancient peoples saw no difference between a vivid description of marvels and what we call reality—for them the description itself was the reality. In short, the Jews may never have been literally enslaved in Egypt; or perhaps some had been, but the story as we know it may have been largely fictional, an overwhelmingly powerful act of imagination.
Arthur Miller (Resurrection Blues: A Prologue and Two Acts)
Even those who saw only a part of the country witnessed so much that was new to them—the vast deltas, the astonishingly eroded limestone peaks, the sand-dune coastal forests, the forest mosaics and savannalike grassland. Many wrote home with vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna, the countless species they had never seen before. Many commented on the sheer luster of the place, of the seemingly infinite number of shades of green, in the rice paddies, the grasses, the palms, the rubber trees with their green oval leaves, the pine trees on faraway hills.
Fredrik Logevall (Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam)
Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.
Lev Grossman (The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3))
What? Subjugation? Alliances? Militarism? These are supposed to be European traits! Maybe that’s why Zinn skips this page, on which Nash also notes that “the Iroquois on the eve of European arrival were feared and sometimes hated by their neighbors for their skill and cruelty in warfare.” Furthermore, “[t]heir belief in the superiority of their culture was as pronounced as that of the arriving Europeans.”55 Nash’s book—which, alas, has been updated and imposed upon innocent students in American classrooms—skims over Indian acts of cruelty while providing vivid descriptions of those by Puritans.
Mary Grabar (Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America)
In the passenger seat, Nahil is all questions. Was Kabul safe? How was the food? Did he [Idris] get sick? Did he take pictures and videos of everything? He does his best. He describes for her the shell-blasted schools, the squatters living in roofless buildings, the beggars, the mud, the fickle electricity, but it's like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. Kabul's vivid, arresting details--the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, for instance, a painting of Schwarzenegger on the window. Such details escape him now, and his descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story.
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
He remembered how his father had told him that when it snowed even humans could see the wind, and it was so. He watched as gusty eddies danced and flickered, a single flake pausing for a moment to hover before his eyes, a twirling crystal of light, the exhale of his warm breath causing it to dance away even as it melted.
Raymond E. Feist (Honored Enemy (Legends of the Riftwar, #1))
There have been moments when writing this book has made me hopeful, but almost always I’ve felt rage or despair. You’ve been stealing those pleasures. Hope? Yes, but also rage and despair. Stealing? Not giving anything in return. Rage and despair are pleasures? The guiltiest. Why do you think New York magazine’s doomsday article about global warming went viral? People were suddenly ravenous for climate science? No, we were ravenous for a vivid description of our apocalypse. We’re drawn to it the same way we’re drawn to horror movies, car accidents, and the chaos of the current administration. And don’t pretend that the bleakest scenarios aren’t your favorite parts to write. I’m not pretending.
Jonathan Safran Foer (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast)
And now it’s really over. I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know I can write. A few of my stories are good, my descriptions of the Secret Annex are humorous, much of my diary is vivid and alive, but … it remains to be seen whether I really have talent. “Eva’s Dream” is my best fairy tale, and the odd thing is that I don’t have the faintest idea where it came from. Parts of “Cady’s Life” are also good, but as a whole it’s nothing special. I’m my best and harshest critic. I know what’s good and what isn’t. Unless you write yourself, you can’t know how wonderful it is; I always used to bemoan the fact that I couldn’t draw, but now I’m overjoyed that at least I can write. And if I don’t have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can’t imagine having to live like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me! When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that’s a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer? I hope so, oh, I hope so very much, because writing allows me to record everything, all my thoughts, ideals and fantasies. I haven’t worked on “Cady’s Life” for ages. In my mind I’ve worked out exactly what happens next, but the story doesn’t seem to be coming along very well. I might never finish it, and it’ll wind up in the wastepaper basket or the stove. That’s a horrible thought, but then I say to myself, “At the age of fourteen and with so little experience, you can’t write about philosophy.” So onward and upward, with renewed spirits. It’ll all work out, because I’m determined to write!
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
Descriptions of a killer global flood that inundated the inhabited lands of the world turn up everywhere amongst the myths of antiquity. In many cases these myths clearly hint that the deluge swept away an advanced civilization that had somehow angered the gods, sparing 'none but the unlettered and the uncultured' and obliging the survivors to 'begin again like children in complete ignorance of what happened ... in early times'. Such stories turn up in Vedic India, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in ancient Egypt. They were told by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Arabs and the Jews. They were repeated in China and south-east Asia, in prehistoric northern Europe and across the Pacific. Almost universally, where truly ancient traditions have been preserved, even amongst mountain peoples and desert nomads, vivid descriptions have been passed down of global floods in which the majority of mankind perished.
Graham Hancock (Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization)
Tale succeeded to tale, and the nurse pursued her narrative with such ardour and vividness and attractiveness of description that at times her breath choked in her throat. For she too half-believed the legends which she related; so that, during the telling of them, her eyes would shoot fire, her head shake with excitement, and her voice attain an unwonted pitch, while the child, overcome with mysterious horror, would press closer and closer to her side, and have tears in his eyes.
Ivan Goncharov (Oblomov)
Ye examined Feng. The kerosene lamp was a wonderful artist and created a classical painting with dignified colors and bright strokes: Feng had her coat draped over her shoulders, exposing her red belly-band, and a strong, graceful arm. The glow from the kerosene lamp painted her figure with vivid, warm colors, while the rest of the room dissolved into a gentle darkness. Close attention revealed a dim red glow, which didn't come from the kerosene lamp, but the heating charcoal on the ground. The cold air outside sculpted beautiful ice patterns on the windowpanes with the room's warm, humid air.
Liu Cixin
What, may I ask, does your one truck contain if not gowns?” Inspiration struck, and Elizabeth smiled radiantly. “Something of great value. Priceless value,” she confided. All faces at the table watched her with alert fascination-particularly the greedy Sir Francis. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense, love. What’s in it?” “The mortal remains of Saint Jacob.” Lady Eloise and Lady Mortand screamed in unison, Sir William choked on his wine, and Sir Francis gaped at her in horror, but Elizabeth wasn’t quite finished. She saved the coup de grace until the meal was over. As soon as everyone arose she insisted they sit back down so a proper prayer of gratitude could be said. Raising her hands heavenward, Elizabeth turned a simple grace into a stinging tirade against the sins of lust and promiscuity that rose to crescendo as she called down the vengeance of doomsday on all transgressors and culminated in a terrifyingly lurid description of the terrors that awaited all who strayed down the path of lechery-terrors that combined dragon lore with mythology, a smattering of religion, and a liberal dash of her own vivid imagination. When it was done Elizabeth dropped her eyes, praying in earnest that tonight would loose her from her predicament. There was no more she could do; she’d played out her hand with all her might; she’d given it her all. It was enough. After supper Sir Francis escorted her to her chamber and, with a poor attempt at regret, announced that he greatly feared they wouldn’t suit. Not at all. Elizabeth and Berta departed at dawn the following morning, an hour before Sir Francis’s servants stirred themselves. Clad in a dressing robe, Sir Francis watched from his bedchamber window as Elizabeth’s coachman helped her into her conveyance. He was about to turn away when a sudden gust of wind caught Elizabeth’s black gown, exposing a long and exceptionally shapely leg to Sir Francis’s riveted gaze. He was still staring at the coach as it circled the drive; through its open window he saw Elizabeth laugh and reach up, unpinning her hair. Clouds of golden tresses whipped about the open window, obscuring her face, and Sir Francis thoughtfully wet his lips.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
If we’re not careful, the automation of mental labor, by changing the nature and focus of intellectual endeavor, may end up eroding one of the foundations of culture itself: our desire to understand the world. Predictive algorithms may be supernaturally skilled at discovering correlations, but they’re indifferent to the underlying causes of traits and phenomena. Yet it’s the deciphering of causation—the meticulous untangling of how and why things work the way they do—that extends the reach of human understanding and ultimately gives meaning to our search for knowledge. If we come to see automated calculations of probability as sufficient for our professional and social purposes, we risk losing or at least weakening our desire and motivation to seek explanations, to venture down the circuitous paths that lead toward wisdom and wonder. Why bother, if a computer can spit out “the answer” in a millisecond or two? In his 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics,” the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott provided a vivid description of the modern rationalist: “His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void.” The rationalist has no concern for culture or history; he neither cultivates nor displays a personal perspective. His thinking is notable only for “the rapidity with which he reduces the tangle and variety of experience” into “a formula.”54 Oakeshott’s words also provide us with a perfect description of computer intelligence: eminently practical and productive and entirely lacking in curiosity,
Nicholas Carr (The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us)
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls. Tennyson’s figures of speech—the wrinkled sea crawling and the falling thunderbolt—appeal to my senses, bringing the imagined picture into sharp focus. They clarify, rather than blur, the picture. His metaphors and simile, rather than calling attention to themselves as figures of speech, illuminate the scene, bringing it vividly to the eye of my imagination. Tennyson’s metaphors and similes are not only concrete and sensory; they are also precise. Not literally precise, of course. Figurative language, by definition, deviates from the literal. Literally speaking, waves are not wrinkles, and the sea has no knees on which to crawl. But within the world Tennyson creates, the figures of speech are accurate; they follow natural laws. In contrast, a phrase like “her tears gushed like a geyser” is inaccurate. Tears might trickle, drip, even flow, but they cannot gush like a geyser, and saying that they do distracts the reader from the sense impression you’re trying to create—unless you’re intentionally employing hyperbole to accomplish some literary purpose. Figurative
Rebecca McClanahan (Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively)
On the other side of the mountain, Drizzt Do'Urden opened his eyes from his daytime slumber. Emerging from the cave into the growing gloom, he found Wulfgar in the customary spot, poised meditatively on a high stone, staring out over the plain. "You long for your home?" the drow asked rhetorically. Wulfgar shrugged his huge shoulders and answered absently, "Perhaps." The barbarian had come to ask many disturbing questions of himself about his people and their way of life since he had learned respect for Drizzt. The Drow was an enigma to him, a confusing combination of fighting brilliance and absolute control. Drizzt seemed able to weigh every move he ever made in the scales of high adventure and indisputable morals. Wulfgar turned a questioning gaze on the drow. "Why are you here?" he asked suddenly. Now it was Drizzt who stared reflectively into the openness before them. The first stars of the evening had appeared, their reflections sparkling distinctively in the dark pools of the elf's eyes. But Drizzt was not seeing them; his mind was viewing long past images of the lightless cities of the drow in their immense cavern complexes far beneath the ground. "I remember," Drizzt recalled vividly, as terrible memories are often vivid, "'the first time I ever viewed this surface world. I was a much younger elf then, a member of a large raiding party. We slipped out from a secret cave and descended upon a small elven village." The drow flinched at the images as they flashed again in his mind. "My companions slaughtered every member of the wood elf clan. Every female. Every child." Wulfgar listened with growing horror. The raid that Drizzt was describing might well have been one perpetrated by the ferocious Tribe of the Elk. "My people kill," Drizzt went on grimly. "They kill without mercy." He locked his stare onto Wulfgar to make sure that the barbarian heard him well. "They kill without passion." He paused for a moment to let the barbarian absorb the full weight of his words. The simple yet definitive description of the cold killers had confused Wulfgar. He had been raised and nurtured among passionate warriors, fighters whose entire purpose in life was the pursuit of battle-glory - fighting in praise of Tempos. The young barbarian simply could not understand such emotionless cruelty. A subtle difference, though, Wulfgar had to admit. Drow or barbarian, the results of the raids were much the same. "The demon goddess they serve leaves no room for the other races," Drizzt explained. "Particularly the other races of elves." "But you will never come to be accepted in this world," said Wulfgar. "Surely you must know that the humans will ever shun you." Drizzt nodded. "Most," he agreed. "I have few that I can call friends, yet I am content. You see, barbarian, I have my own respect, without guilt, without shame." He rose from his crouch and started away into the darkness. "Come," he instructed. "Let us fight well this night, for I am satisfied with the improvement of your skills, and this part of your lessons nears its end." Wulfgar sat a moment longer in contemplation. The drow lived a hard and materially empty existence, yet he was richer than any man Wulfgar had ever known. Drizzt had clung to his principles against overwhelming circumstances, leaving the familiar world of his own people by choice to remain in a world where he would never be accepted or appreciated. He looked at the departing elf, now a mere shadow in the gloom. "Perhaps we two are not so different," he mumbled under his breath.
R.A. Salvatore (The Crystal Shard (Forgotten Realms: The Icewind Dale, #1; Legend of Drizzt, #4))
The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.
Herman Melville
I took up the pestle as she left, and pounded and ground automatically, paying little heed to the results. The shut window blocked the sound both of the rain and the crowd below; the two blended in a soft, pattering susurrus of menace. Like any schoolchild, I had read Dickens. And earlier authors, as well, with their descriptions of the pitiless justice of these times, meted out to all illdoers, regardless of age or circumstance. But to read, from a cozy distance of one or two hundred years, accounts of child hangings and judicial mutilation, was a far different thing than to sit quietly pounding herbs a few feet above such an occurrence. Could I bring myself to interfere directly, if the sentence went against the boy? I moved to the window, carrying the mortar with me, and peered out. The crowd had increased, as merchants and housewives, attracted by the gathering, wandered down the High Street to investigate. Newcomers leaned close as the standees excitedly relayed the details, then merged into the body of the crowd, more faces turned expectantly to the door of the house. Looking down on the assembly, standing patiently in the drizzle awaiting a verdict, I suddenly had a vivid understanding of something. Like so many, I had heard, appalled, the reports that trickled out of postwar Germany; the stories of deportations and mass murder, of concentration camps and burnings. And like so many others had done, and would do, for years to come, I had asked myself, “How could the people have let it happen? They must have known, must have seen the trucks, the coming and going, the fences and smoke. How could they stand by and do nothing?” Well, now I knew. The stakes were not even life or death in this case. And Colum’s patronage would likely prevent any physical attack on me. But my hands grew clammy around the porcelain bowl as I thought of myself stepping out, alone and powerless, to confront that mob of solid and virtuous citizens, avid for the excitement of punishment and blood to alleviate the tedium of existence. People are gregarious by necessity. Since the days of the first cave dwellers, humans—hairless, weak, and helpless save for cunning—have survived by joining together in groups; knowing, as so many other edible creatures have found, that there is protection in numbers. And that knowledge, bred in the bone, is what lies behind mob rule. Because to step outside the group, let alone to stand against it, was for uncounted thousands of years death to the creature who dared it. To stand against a crowd would take something more than ordinary courage; something that went beyond human instinct. And I feared I did not have it, and fearing, was ashamed.
Diana Gabaldon (Outlander (Outlander, #1))
Book Descriptions: Amazon Rainforest Magic: The Adventures of Namowë, a Yanomami Boy, Volume 1 The magic of the Amazon rainforest enchanted artist Barbara Crane Navarro as she spent the winter months with the Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil over a period of twelve years and inspired her to write her children's book series. The vividly illustrated stories in this series evoke daily life in the rainforest and the magical quality of the Yanomami's relation to the plants and animals around them. The first book, "Amazon Rainforest Magic: The Adventures of Namowë, a Yanomami Boy", recounts the journey of Namowë, a thirteen year old Yanomami boy living in the rainforest, as he seeks a cure for his baby sister. Amazon Rainforest Magic: The Adventures of Meromi, a Yanomami Girl, Volume 2 The second volume recounts the surprising voyage of Meromi, a 9 year old Yanomami girl who is swept into an unexpected adventure in the rivers and jungles of the Amazon. With the help of improvised allies, she seeks a way to discourage intruders and make them leave the forest. Aspects of traditional Yanomami life in the Rainforest are woven into the fanciful story. The author’s enchanting illustrations transform readers into fellow travelers on Meromi’s magical quest.
Barbara Crane Navarro (Amazon Rainforest Magic: The adventures of Namowë, a Yanomami boy)
Jewell Stewark smiled at me from a billboard, the rain giving her face tears.
Eric Jerome Dickey (Dying for Revenge)
When we read or listen deeply - it should be as a movie playing in our mind. That's why speed can be an important consideration for someone with an important message, although it may be possible for the observer to adapt and ease into tempo (a warmup). Perhaos most important - subjective insight, not what the message means to me but what the message means to the author. To make matters worse - each languages is more or less visually descriptive than others and even if a word translates, the true meaning can differ gradiently. The complexity of the movie depends on our minds ability to grasp geometry and dimensions beyond two. Colour is not as important as contrast. Each word should paint a vivid image, otherwise we need to learn more about the word itself or the way in which we structure our minds. //Easy is a tree, challenging is analysis.
Monaristw
When we read or listen deeply - it should be as a movie playing in our mind. That's why speed can be an important consideration for someone with an important message, although it may be possible for the observer to adapt and ease into tempo (a warmup). Perhaps most important - subjective insight, not what the message means to me but what the message means to the author. To make matters worse - each languages is more or less visually descriptive and even if a word translates - true meaning can differ gradiently. The complexity of the movie depends on our minds ability to grasp geometry and dimensions beyond two. Colour is not as important as contrast. Each word should paint a vivid image, otherwise we need to learn more about the word itself or the way in which we structure our minds. Touchable or not.
Monaristw
He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least a momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was literally like a woman’s, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture. From within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape. This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky seemed small.
G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)
5.0 out of 5 starsA great story! Enjoy reading it! By JMF on March 14, 2013 Format: Paperback Verified Purchase I enjoyed very much reading this book. I could not put this interesting family saga down! Amy Kwei's imagination brilliantly makes the characters come to life. She calls it a novel, yet it is obviously the story of her family. I learned much that I did not know about Chinese culture and tradition as well as life in the 1930s to the beginning of World War II. The facts were well researched. This is a most moving account of the tragic binding of women's feet and its consequences on one woman - the grandmother. I never understood why a country so highly civilized and refined in art and poetry could afflict such cruelty on the women in its upper class. How the grandmother as a child yearned to have fun running around with her brother, but was prevented to do so by her crippled feet. The description of the war and hardshiops of the Japanese occupation is vividly narrated and the upheaval war brought upon China. Yet the humanity of some Japanese-Americans is also beautifully described. Despite all these tragic happenings, the author keeps a positive and hopeful attitude. The novel is full of suspense and I hope the author is already working on a sequel and will not disappoint her readers, who are anxious to know how her family fared in the future. This book is a treasure!
Amy S. Kwei
The Mantle of Science For a decade or so, A.A. grew modestly. But, lacking scientific confirmation, it remained a relatively small sectarian movement, occasionally receiving a boost in popular magazines. The great surge in the popularity of the A.A. disease concept came when it received what seemed to be impeccable scientific support. Two landmark articles by E. M. Jellinek, published in 1946 and 1952, proposed a scientific understanding of alcoholism that seemed to confirm major elements of the A.A. view.12 Jellinek, then a research professor in applied physiology at Yale University, was a distinguished biostatistician and one of the early leaders in the field of alcohol studies. In his first paper he presented some eighty pages of elaborately detailed description, statistics, and charts that depicted what he considered to be a typical or average alcoholic career. Jellinek cautioned his readers about the limited nature of his data, and he explicitly acknowledged differences among individual drinkers. But from the data's "suggestive" value, he proceeded to develop a vividly detailed hypothesis.
Herbert Fingarette (Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease)
My Everest story would be incomplete if I didn’t give final credit to the Sherpas who had risked their lives alongside us every day. Pasang and Ang-Sering still climb together as best friends, under the direction of their Sirdar boss--Kami. The Khumba Icefall specialist, Nima, still carries out his brave task in the jumbled ice maze at the foot of the mountain: repairing and fixing the route through. Babu Chiri, who so bravely helped Mick when he ran out of oxygen under the South Summit, was tragically killed in a crevasse in the Western Cwm several years later. He was a Sherpa of many years’ Everest experience, and was truly one of the mountain’s greats. It was a huge loss to the mountaineering fraternity. But if you play the odds long enough you will eventually lose. That is the harsh reality of high-altitude mountaineering. You can’t keep on top of the world forever. Geoffrey returned to the army, and Neil to his business. His toes never regained their feeling, but he avoided having them amputated. But as they say, Everest always charges some sort of a price, and in his own words--he got lucky. As for Mick, he describes his time on Everest well: “In the three months I was away, I was both happier than ever before, and more scared than I ever hope to be again.” Ha. That’s also high-altitude mountaineering for you. Thengba, my friend, with whom I spent so much time alone at camp two, was finally given a hearing aid by Henry. Now, for the first time, he can hear properly. Despite our different worlds, we shared a common bond with these wonderful Sherpa men--a friendship that was forged by an extraordinary mountain. Once, when the climber Julius Kugy was asked what sort of person a mountaineer should be, he replied: “Truthful, distinguished, and modest.” All these Sherpas epitomize this. I made the top with them, and because of their help, I owe them more than I can say. The great Everest writer Walt Unsworth, in his book Everest: The Mountaineering History, gives a vivid description of the characters of the men and women who pit their all on the mountain. I think it is bang on the money: But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have. Determination and faith are their strongest weapons. At best such men are regarded as eccentric; at worst, mad… Three things they all had in common: faith in themselves, great determination, and endurance. If I had to sum up what happened on that journey for me, from the hospital bed to the summit of the world, I tend to think of it as a stumbling journey. Of losing my confidence and my strength--then refinding it. Of seeing my hope and my faith slip away--and then having them rekindled. Ultimately, if I had to pass on one message to my children it would be this: Fortune favors the brave. Most of the time.
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
The idea of the absolutely First must be entirely separated from all conception of or reference to anything else; for what involves a second is itself a second to that second. The First must therefore be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It must be fresh and new, for if old it is second to its former state. It must be initiative, original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation; it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown! What the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own existence—that is first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it.
Jeff Carreira (Radical Inclusivity: Expanding Our Minds Beyond Dualistic Thinking (Shifts in Consciousness))
little stories—together making one—has been written. I have tried to preserve the pure outlines of the sacred record from the vivid description and the suggestive supposition that are sometimes introduced to add charm to the story, and in all quoted speech I have used the exact words of the authorized version
Mary A. Lathbury (Child's Story of the Bible)
Academics identified by their peers as stylish writers for other reasons—their intelligence, humor, personal voice, or descriptive power—are invariably sticklers for well-crafted prose. Their sentences may vary in length, subject matter, and style; however, their writing is nearly always governed by three key principles that any writer can learn. First, they employ plenty of concrete nouns and vivid verbs, especially when discussing abstract concepts. Second, they keep nouns and verbs close together, so that readers can easily identify “who’s kicking whom.” Third, they avoid weighing down their sentences with extraneous words and phrases, or “clutter.
Helen Sword (Stylish Academic Writing)
vivid descriptions of the grim sights and sounds and smells
Jennifer Chiaverini (The Union Quilters (Elm Creek Quilts #17))
There were four or five illustrated manuscripts written by old monastic writers, giving vivid descriptions of the use of Greek Fire. Sometimes they called it Flying Fire, sometimes the devil’s tears, fire from the dragon’s mouth, Dark Fire: I puzzled over that last name. How could fire be dark?
C.J. Sansom (Dark Fire (Matthew Shardlake, #2))
In March 1810 Louis Simond gave a vivid description of the more normal winter smog: It is difficult to form an idea of the kind of winter days in London; the smoke of fossil coals forms an atmosphere, perceivable for many miles, like a great round cloud attached to the earth. In the town itself, when the weather is cloudy and foggy, which is frequently the case in winter, this smoke increases the general dingy hue, and terminates the length of every street with a fixed grey mist, receding as you advance. But when some rays of sun happens to fall on this artificial atmosphere, its impure mass assumes immediately a pale orange tint…loaded with small flakes of soot…so light as to float without falling. This black snow sticks to your clothes and linen, or lights on your face. You just feel something on your nose, or your cheek,—the finger is applied mechanically, and fixes it into a black patch! 66
Roy A. Adkins (Jane Austen's England: Daily Life in the Georgian and Regency Periods)
The Zionist chapter proper in the country’s history began in 1882, after the outbreak of large-scale pogroms in the Russian Empire (although the term was only invented a few years later). The first settlers called themselves Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion), a network of groups which aspired to forge a Jewish national life in Palestine and, in a significant novelty, to use the reviving Hebrew language rather than Yiddish. In August that year a two-hundred-strong group from the Romanian town of Galatz landed at Jaffa, where they were locked up for weeks before enough cash could be raised to bribe the Turkish police to release them.6 Their goal was a plot of stony land that had been purchased south of Haifa. Laurence Oliphant, an eccentric British traveller and enthusiastic philo-Semite, described the scene shortly afterwards at Zamarin, a malaria-infested hamlet on the southern spur of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean. It is a remarkably vivid portrayal of two very different sorts of people who were warily making each other’s acquaintance as future neighbours – and enemies: It would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly incongruous than the spectacle thus presented – the stalwart fellahin [peasants], with their wild, shaggy, black beards, the brass hilts of their pistols projecting from their waistbands, their tasselled kufeihahs [keffiyeh headdresses] drawn tightly over their heads and girdled with coarse black cords, their loose, flowing abbas [cloaks], and sturdy bare legs and feet; and the ringleted, effeminate-looking Jews, in caftans reaching almost to their ankles, as oily as their red or sandy locks, or the expression of their countenances – the former inured to hard labour on the burning hillsides of Palestine, the latter fresh from the Ghetto of some Roumanian town, unaccustomed to any other description of exercise than that of their wits, but already quite convinced that they knew more about agriculture than the people of the country, full of suspicion of all advice tendered to them, and animated by a pleasing self-confidence which I fear the first practical experience will rudely belie. In strange contrast with these Roumanian Jews was the Arab Jew who acted as interpreter – a stout, handsome man, in Oriental garb, as unlike his European coreligionists as the fellahin themselves.
Ian Black (Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017)
He also tellingly refers to “our earthly dwelling” as a tent. It is important to appreciate that, as a tent maker (Acts 18:3), Paul knew firsthand that “tent” is an apt metaphor for human existence as nomadic, precarious, and always on the move—thereby evoking the notion of pilgrimage.[4] The tent metaphor calls to mind Isaiah’s vivid description of human life being “struck down and borne away” (Isa 38:12; see 2 Pet 1:13–14). Indeed, Paul acknowledges that when we die our bodies—our “earthly dwelling” or “tent”—will be destroyed. Nevertheless, he does not despair, because we have a building from God. That is, God is preparing for us a glorious resurrection body that is not subject to death and decay, as indicated by the image of a building, which is much more substantial and permanent than a tent.
Thomas D. Stegman (Second Corinthians (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture): (A Catholic Bible Commentary on the New Testament by Trusted Catholic Biblical Scholars - CCSS))
When we read or listen deeply - it should be as a movie playing in our mind. That's why speed can be an important consideration for someone with an important message, although it may be possible for the observer to adapt and ease into tempo (a warmup). Perhaps most important - subjective insight, not what the message means to me but what the message means to the author. To make matters worse - each languages is more or less visually descriptive and even if a word translates - true meaning can differ gradiently. The complexity of the movie depends on our minds ability to grasp geometry and dimensions beyond two. Colour is not as important as contrast. Each word should paint a vivid image, otherwise we need to learn more about the word itself or the way in which we structure our minds. //Easy is a tree, challenging is analysis.
Monaristw
Show, don’t tell” is probably the single piece of writing advice that beginning writers hear most often from editors and writing coaches.
Sandra Gerth (Show, Don't Tell: How to write vivid descriptions, handle backstory, and describe your characters’ emotions)
When we are actually faced with teens telling us just how very uneasy they are, we need to remember that their descriptions of their emotional pain—which may be vivid and dire-sounding—don’t add to their emotional distress, but usually reduce it. It’s critical to remember that by the time teens are telling us that they feel anxious or angry or sad or any other emotion they choose to put into words, they’re already using an effective strategy for helping themselves cope with
Lisa Damour (The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents)
vivid description of the flyer
Peter Luce (Getting Castaneda: Understanding Carlos Castaneda)
A memoir in which the author shares his impressive journey of emigrating to the United States to escape a difficult life in an impoverished Nigerian village. Born into an extremely poor family in Nigeria, ‘Deji Ayoade had early memories of wanting to come to America to do better for himself. For years, he dreamed about having a bright future in the United States. At seven, he promised his mother that one day he would be a doctor in America and take her and his siblings away from their dangerous and impoverished existence. By the age of thirty-three, ‘Deji had been in the United States for five years and was living his dream. He had earned a master’s degree, married and had a child, been recruited into the Navy, and become a US citizen. He makes good on the promise to his mother and brings her, his sister, and his sister’s baby to the United States. UNDERGROUND: A Memoir of Hope, Faith, and the American Dream is a well-structured, compelling memoir written by a determined man with big dreams, ambitious goals, and the strength to never lose sight of where he is headed. Commitment, intelligence, and drive contribute to his fulfilling what he deems to be his purpose in life. His accomplishments in the armed services are nothing short of admirable. Ayoade draws readers into the 1980s culture of the poorer regions of Nigeria with vivid descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of areas in which they lived. His credible recreation of scenes reveals insight into the civilization that had considerable influence on him. Family dynamics also play a significant role in Ayoade’s life. His recollection of his father’s contradictory behaviors both confuse and enlighten him. His fond memories of his grandmother—the family member he trusted the most—are heartfelt and touching. While coming to the United States offers many positive experiences for Ayoade, it doesn’t come without problems, and one that the author talks about with deep emotion and candidness is racism. Thoughtful in the way he acknowledges possible differences of perspectives, he describes how it feels to be looked at differently. One scene in particular demonstrates just how prejudiced and insensitive people can be when it comes to racial biases. Ayoade writes from the heart with emotion and honesty that demonstrate his passion for what he does in life. His ability to weave together a cohesive story from so many disparate fragments is remarkable. His religious faith and commitment to never-ending improvement for himself are inspiring and a basis for being a role model for others. UNDERGROUND: A Memoir of Hope, Faith, and the American Dream–author ‘Deji Ayoade’s reflections on overcoming enormous obstacles and emigrating from Nigeria to the United States–is candid, heartwarming, and inspirational.
IndieReader
News of Japan’s existence had spread. Marco Polo, writing in the thirteenth century after visiting China, had called Japan ‘Cipangu, the land of gold’. Although Polo never himself set foot in Japan, his vivid descriptions of its monumental wealth stirred many an adventurer, including Columbus.
Naoko Abe (The Sakura Obsession: The Incredible Story of the Plant Hunter Who Saved Japan's Cherry Blossoms)
Stendahl syndrome” was the name for this, he would eventually learn. Dizziness, confusion, even fainting, usually by foreign visitors in the act of viewing great art. It was called that because the French writer had given its first and best description: I was in a sort of ecstasy … Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul … Life was drained from me … He thanked them, of course, but mostly he hoped they would go away, so he could look at it in peace, and eventually they did.
Jean Hanff Korelitz (The Latecomer)
Anderson’s depth of research, paired with a natural proclivity for vivid descriptive detail, yielded a work of historical fiction, in 39 chapters, that’s hard to put down.
Monterey Herald
Major depression also appears to have become unusually widespread in the late Renaissance. This disorder is diagnosed when a person shows a severely depressed mood, a loss of interest and motivation, and withdraws from usual activities. In Elizabethan Malady, Lawrence Babb analyzes references to melancholy in diverse literary works, finding that while they are almost nonexistent in the early Renaissance, by the 1600s they are a principal theme in prose, drama, and biography. Babb concludes that the late Renaissance was characterized by “an epidemic of melancholy.” The poet John Donne, who offered sonnets to the “Holy Sadness of the Soul,” provided a vivid description of this malady, which he himself knew well: “God has seen fit to give us the dregs of misery, an extraordinary sadness, a predominant melancholy, a faintness of heart, a cheerlessness, a joylessness of spirit.
Ian Osborn (Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?: A Psychiatrist Explores the Role of Faith in Treatment)
also quite likely the most vivid description of Aunt Sarah’s miserliness (“That old dame is about as open-handed as 12 o’clock”).
Clair Schulz (FIBBER McGEE & MOLLY ON THE AIR, 1935-1959 (REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION))
Centuries of readership, revision and editing have shaped the Baillie that has been transmitted to us in the form of Laing's Letters and Journals. Neither a hero nor a villain, then, Baillie quietly vanished from the records he had painstakingly gathered, only to be replaced by a caricature - the dutiful letter-writer, the virulent critic, the unashamed time-server and the embarrassing vacillator. The myths that emerged to explain this period in Scottish history of regrettable violent extremism and intemperate religious belief had no place for a character like Baillie. As interest in the Covenanters declined early in the twentieth century, Baillie likewise was consigned to a place of relative neglect and those few commentators relied on recycled facts and hagiographic narratives to fill out his biography. We read, then, of Baillie's comments on a riot in Edinburgh or Baillie's description of the Solemn League and Covenant without any acknowledgement of the role that he took in the events that he had described. Through contingencies related to textual transmission and shifting historiographical trends, Baillie's life, his biography, that he so clearly and vividly detailed, has largely been forgotten. In its place, we have become accustomed to reading about the period in which Baillie lived, described by a man consigned to a footnote.
Alexander D. Campbell (The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602 - 1662): Politics, Religion and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars)
Comments: Surprisingly Marlin Hurt’s first appearance as a woman speaking in dialect does not get as much of a reaction from the audience as it will in weeks to come. Alice’s weekly rent has apparently increased from $12 in November to $15 in January. Molly delivers one of the most vivid descriptions of boogie woogie: “The kind of piano playing that sounds like rain on the roof with the left hand and somebody playing the flute in the attic with the right hand.
Clair Schulz (FIBBER McGEE & MOLLY ON THE AIR, 1935-1959 (REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION))
Ted, my husband, asked me to introduce his story because I am the one who heard it first. We had been married for two years when his “gift” was given to us. It was about 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. We were both asleep in our home in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, when he sat up in bed and said, “I know how I died!” I awoke to those words, astonished as he began to tell the end of his life in a different-sounding voice and using words and a dialect I had not heard before. After a few moments of an intense outpouring of emotional facts, places, names, and events, I knew I had to write “his story” down on paper. I climbed out of bed in the dark, found a legal-size yellow pad and pencil and began writing as fast as I could. He did not slow down to help me catch up; the tale just kept flowing from his mouth. The hairs on my arms stood on end and chills continued as he told in detail events that happened over one hundred years ago. My fingers began to cramp as I kept trying to keep up with him. The descriptions were so vivid that I could visualize what he was saying like a movie playing before my eyes. Eventually we hurried to the living room after I found a small tape recorder in our dresser drawer. Ted continued to talk in this unusual voice, causing me to laugh and cry as this true-to-life saga of the 1870s began to unravel. He told me how he died at about the age of sixty. Then he went to the beginning, when Tom Summers, who was sixteen years old, left home to join the Union Army. He lied about his age and was able to join the army and fight in the Civil War. The journey takes you into the war, on into Indian Territory and westward. Every day for Tom was an adventure, and Ted will share it with you. Anyone who meets Ted is drawn to him instantly. His manner is one of confidence: of a very genuine, honest, loveable guy. He will win you over with his “Just one more story” or a big bear hug if you are not careful. We met at a teen hop in the 1950s, when I was fifteen and he was seventeen. We dated in rural America for about a year. He was then leaving the farm to go to Oklahoma State University, and he asked me to marry him. We both married other people and raised our children. Forty-one years later, we discovered each other again. This time, I said, “Yes.” Join us on our fascinating journey into the Old West as seen through Tom Summers’s “beautiful blue eyes.
Linda Riddle (A True-To-Life Western Story: No Lookin' Back)
Just start writing. Much experience is not needed to write and you don't need to have read hundreds of books. Mind you, reading is quite an important part of writing; into the stories, the writer must be immersed in. Read lovely stories and learn to write those vivid descriptions. You simply need a pen, some paper or even typewriters and computers, and a wild imagination to write. The writer is not obliged to have an entire story ready, for a simple idea can form into a magical and endearing story. Let go of the fear and doubt, which is the enemy to creative writing. Live the stories as you write them and plunge yourself into those words and worlds. There is nothing to lose in writing a story or even sending it to someone. Writing is a gift and an art in itself. Write with love and passion and dump all your thoughts even if they seem to be trash because they will soon be such beauty.
Millie Florence
Great second book in Arthur Nakai Mystery Series. Love Mark Edward Langley's writing style. Vivid descriptions of people and places in the story help the reader understand the American Southwest and the harsh life on the Indian Reservations in New Mexico. The story line was very interesting and touched on issues effecting the people on the reservations and returning Marines dealing with life after combat. If you haven't read his first book, I highly recommend reading it first. You will enjoy his latest that much more. Highly recommend this series. So happy to see there will be a third book.
Luanne Gawron on Amazon
Told you.” His voice is soft admiration. “Heart of gold.” “What did you say to him?” I ask, intrigued by the smug look on her face. “I gave him a vivid description of what it would feel like to have his balls meet my coffee grinder.” I stare at Jesús and shake my head. “Oh yeah, she’s a real saint.
Amelia Kingston (So Not My Type (So Far, So Good #4))
He writes great books. Word meaning and feeling are impressive. His plots and characters are outstanding. Descriptions are vivid making you think you really are there.
Steve Presley
He felt as if his flesh had been neatly filleted and packed with salt, each organ stuffed with burning coals, his bones drilled open and filled with molten lead.
Ted Dekker (Renegade (The Lost Books, #3))
Vainly I strive against it. My foot slips. My life is still a poet’s existence. What could be more unhappy? I am predestined; fate laughs at me when it suddenly shows me how everything I do to resist, becomes a moment in such an existence. I can describe hope so vividly that every hoping individual will acknowledge my description; and yet it is a deception, for while I picture hope, I think of memory.
Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or: A Fragment of Life)
While Bashō was lingering in Ōsaka and its vicinity, he fell victim to what seems to have been an attack of dysentery. Here is a vivid description of his condition four days before his death by one of his disciples.26
Matsuo Bashō (The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Classics))
### A Journey Through Famous Books: Discovering the Treasures of Kannada Literature Kannada literature boasts a rich legacy, spanning over centuries and marked by diverse narratives, styles, and themes. As we delve into the world of famous books in Kannada, we find a melting pot of cultural insights, emotional depth, and intellectual vigor. A platform like Veeraloka Books, which not only highlights these treasures but also encourages a new generation of readers to connect with their roots, is at the forefront of this literary exploration. One of the most renowned classics in Kannada literature is "Mookajjiya Kanasugalu," written by the legendary author K. Krishnam Karanth This novel tells the poignant story of an elderly woman, Mookajji, who is gifted with the ability to dream profoundly. Through her dreams, readers are transported into a narrative that unfolds the struggles and joys of rural life in India. Karanth’s vivid characterizations and rich descriptions make this an essential read, encapsulating the spirit of Kannadiga culture and social realities. The works of well-known authors like S, in addition to timeless classics, significantly enrich the contemporary literary landscape. L. Bhyrappa and Kuvempu. S. L. In his novels, Bhyrappa frequently delves into profound philosophical topics like identity, existence, and social issues. His storytelling prowess and narrative style make his books not just stories, but explorations of human consciousness. Among his remarkable works, "Aavarana" stands out, dissecting historical narratives while inviting readers to reflect on perspective and belief. Kuvempu, on the other hand, is revered for his poetic prowess alongside his contributions to novels and essays. His work embodies the essence of nature, humanity, and spirituality, reflecting a deep reverence for life. His celebrated poem, "Sri Ramakrishna Hegde," is an excellent representation of his ability to express complex emotions and thoughts in simple yet profound terms. Kuvempu was an advocate for Kannada literature and the language, making him a role model for writers and readers alike. Da. Ra. Bendre, another gem in the Kannada literary crown, made his mark through poetry that resonates across generations. His lyricality and ability to depict the beauty of nature and the essence of human experiences truly set his work apart. Bendre's poetry evokes imagery that transports readers to the very heart of his themes, making his words linger long after they've been read. Veeraloka Books is more than just a bookstore; it is also a doorway into the extensive literature of Kannada. Its collection spans from the literary giants of the past to contemporary authors who are redefining storytelling today. This platform serves as a valuable resource for readers seeking to immerse themselves in Kannada literature, fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation of regional narratives and voices. In conclusion, the exploration of famous books in Kannada—from the timeless classics of Karanth to the modern narratives of Bhyrappa, Kuvempu, and Bendre—offers a glimpse into the cultural and intellectual fabric of Karnataka. It's essential to recognize and celebrate these literary masterpieces that reflect the diversity and vibrancy of the Kannada language. Engaging with these works on platforms like Veeraloka Books promises an enriching journey into the world of Kannada writing, whether you've been reading literature all your life or are just starting out.
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