Describing her first day back in grade school after a long absence, a teacher said, It was like trying to hold 35 corks under water at the same time.
|
In describing the Mound-builders no effort has been made to paint their costume, their modes of life or their system of government. They are presented to the reader almost exclusively under a single aspect, and under the influence of a single emotion. It matters not to us whether they dwelt under a monarchical or popular form of polity; whether king or council ruled their realms; nor, in fine, what was their exact outward condition. It is enough for us to know, and enough for our humanity to inquire, that they existed, toiled, felt and suffered; that to them fell, in these pleasant regions, their portion of the common heritage of our race, and that around those ancient hearth-stones, washed to light on the banks of the far western rivers, once gossiped and enjoyed life, a nation that has utterly faded away.
|
There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, which he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light, is error with its unknown characteristics. Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.
|
The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
|
Seizing this rare opportunity, I motion to the airhostess and inform her that I could easily rid them of vast quantities of cumbersome beer and make this flight a lot safer for all concerned, to which she replies 'Sorry sir, we don't serve drinks until we are airborne.' Obviously she mistook my perfectly understandable English for some alien code and I was forced to reduce my instruction to monosylables which was surprisingly met with compliance. Having secured something liquid refreshment, I released the hostages and returned to my seat.
|
Cattle dragged and choked...Knocking ‘em four, five, ten times. Every now and then when they’re stunned they come back to life, and they’re up there agonizing. They’re supposed to be restunned but sometimes they aren’t and they’ll go through the skinning process alive. I’ve worked in four large [slaughterhouses] and a bunch of small ones. They’re all the same. If people were to see this, they’d probably feel really bad about it. But in a packing house everybody gets so used to it that it doesn’t mean anything.
|
I'm drowning here, and you're describing the water!
|
I am not describing a distant utopia, but the kind of education which must be the great urgent work of our time. By the end of this decade, un...
|
These people have served a longer sentence than some people who have committed murder. (describing the jury in the OJ Simpson murder trial)
|
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.
|
In years to come the phrase 'tight as Graham’s Arsenal' may replace the present colourful colloquialism describing someone reluctant to part with money.
|
He is neither a strategist nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general. Other than that he's a great military man. (describing Saddam Hussein of Iraq, 1991)
|
'Listen... If you can't spot the sucker in your first half-hour at the table, YOU are the sucker.
|
It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.
|
Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour ...
|
Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
|
As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there.
|
It's so glamorous, you have to see it. (describing the 92 million Rock & Roll Hall of Fame)
|
The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.
|
The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath laboured more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.
|
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
|
One truly cannot be described, If the one doing the describing Has a bad attitude.
|