'In the bad old days reference to Blacks/women/Jews/others were in negative language which perpetuated poor treatment/ abuse/ exploitation of these people. Animals have suffered more from negative language stereotyping than all the others, and demeans them so constantly that they created an environment that allows all sorts of cruelties, many too horrendous to describe! An animal is 'it' instead of 'he' or 'she', this perpetuates our view of them as 'things' rather than individuals and is a major first step towards cutting them up for meat and leather, testing drugs/cosmetics/ household products on their bodies, and tearing off their coats for furs!!! Those who have pets are referred to as 'owners' rather than guardians/care givers/companions, reinforcing the idea that they are property much as slaves were considered property. Let's avoid these references: Dirty rat; filthy pig; acting like an ass; dirty dog; she's a bitch; ugly duckling; there's more than one way to skin a cat; behaving like an animal; making a monkey out of someone; killing 2 birds with one stone; working like a horse, you're chicken ... There are many more! Please think before uttering them and tell others. Thank you!'
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If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
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The thought pattern characteristic of the right brain lends itself to the formation of original ideas, insights, discoveries. We might describe it as the kind of thought prevalent in early childhood, when everything is new and everything has meaning. If you have ever walked along a beach and suddenly stopped to pick up a piece of driftwood because it looked to you like a leaping impala or a troll, you know the feeling of pleasure that comes from the sudden recognition of a form. Your Design mind (right brain) has perceived connections and had made a pattern of meaning. It takes logical, rational acts and facts of the world you know, the snippets of your experience, the bits and pieces of your language capabilities, and perceives connections, patterns, and relationships in them.
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Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!
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By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.
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'Exactly,' he said, while he leant forward excitedly, for all the world like a Jack-in-the-box let loose. 'Precisely; and you are a journalist - call yourself one, at least - and it should be part of your business to notice and describe people. I don't mean only the wonderful personage with the clear Saxon features, the fine blue eyes, the noble brow and classic face, but the ordinary person - the person who represents ninety out of every hundred of his own kind - the average Englishman, say, of the middle classes, who is neither very tall nor very short, who wears a moustache which is neither fair nor dark, but which masks his mouth, and a top hat which hides the shape of his head and brow, a man, in fact, who dresses like hundreds of his fellow-creatures, moves like them, speaks like them, has no peculiarity.'
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Lawrence had done it in a way, and Joyce. But I think it's an important thing to do now and then, to describe the sex act as our descent, or adventure, into a primordial or strange world, having very little to do with how we look in suits or what our educations have been. It's a well of darkness, as it were, that leaves you refreshed.
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To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.
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I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse.
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When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident... or any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.
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O Krishna, the stillness of divine union which you describe is beyond my comprehension. How can the mind, which is so restless, attain lasting peace? Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, powerful, violent; trying to control it is like trying to tame the wind.
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It is difficult to describe in short the enthusiasm and devotion provoked by and given to my research. We lived almost in poverty. I used pencils, two for a nickel, and could not buy a fountain pen, when I lost mine.
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'I refer to those who describe murders/riots/panics and other catastrophes perpetrated by humans, and who say to be 'acting like animals.' I refer specifically to comments regarding a recent ship hijacking where it was said that the terrorists acted like 'cowardly animals.' These terrorists and guerrilla acts are NOT animal in nature - they are HUMAN in nature. As one who sees the balance, beauty and meaning of the world in which nonhuman animals must face life-or-death situations everyday just to survive and perpetuate their species, I grossly resent and take offense at these statements! When was the last time we saw a gorilla hijack a plane? A pod of whales hijack an ocean liner? A group of nonhuman animals walk down the street and terrorize the neighborhood??? Human animals are the terrorists and guerrillas when they go into the nonhuman animals' homes to slaughter them for fur coats, hunting trophies, plumage and all the other atrocious reasons society gives for the gross lack of respect for life, and murder of our fellow creatures inhabiting this world. If and when man comes off his ego trip, maybe he'll see just how insignificant he is to the total scheme of beings on this planet in which ALL creatures share. Then, the saying will be turned around to 'They behaved like people.'' (Letter to Abigail Van Buren in the York Daily Record)
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In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.
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Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words—that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canvas or chisel...
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If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles.
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Next to reasoning, the greatest handicap to the optimum development of Man lies in the fact that this planet is just barely habitable. Its minimum temperatures are too low, and its maximum temperatures too high. Its day is not long enough, and its night is too long. The disposition of its water and earth is distinctly unfortunate (the existence of the Mediterranean Sea in the place where we find it is perhaps the unhappiest accident in the whole firmament). These factors encourage depression, fear, war, and lack of vitality. They describe a planet, which is by no means perfectly devised for the nurturing or for the perpetuation of a higher intelligence.
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It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.
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Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete.
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The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.
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I have said nothing because there is nothing I can say that would describe how I feel as perfectly as you deserve it.
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We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
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The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.
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Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
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Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe, aren't even aware of.
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The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.
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The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.
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Chris closed his eyes. How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, but as long as Em was with him, he was at home?
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Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.
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The great difference between present-day Christianity and that of which we read in these letters is that to us it is primarily a performance, to them it was a real experience. To these men it is quite plainly the invasion of their lives by a new quality of life altogether. They do not hesitate to describe this as Christ living in them.
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