Descriptive quotes:

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Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying. -- Noam Chomsky
Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions. -- Claude Bernard
I've always thought of fat as just a descriptive word. -- Camryn Manheim
If Art relates itself to an Object, it becomes descriptive, divisionist, literary. -- Robert Delaunay
Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue. -- Douglas Wood
The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.' -- Moby
I'm not the most detailed writer. I have a tendency to be more action-oriented vs. descriptive. -- Lisa Gardner
So to me, fat just seems to be right to the point and the most descriptive way to say it. -- Camryn Manheim
Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific. -- Eric Gill
The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation. -- Louise Brooks
The general statement that the mental faculties are class concepts, belonging to descriptive psychology, relieves us of the necessity of discussing them and their significance at the present stage of our inquiry. -- Wilhelm Wundt
Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode. -- Sarah Hall
The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness. -- Edmund Husserl
Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative. -- Marilyn Hacker
Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes. -- Jonathan Sacks
Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved. -- Gavin Bryars
Something I've learned being in this industry for so long is that if you want to work with somebody, call them up. Very few musicians have any illusions about genre boundaries. They are useful descriptive terms, but they don't really bind musicians. -- John Darnielle
At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places. -- Peter Singer
If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication. -- Ian Anderson
A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts. -- Elizabeth Peyton
I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring. -- Marisha Pessl
Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry. -- Ernst Haas
I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.' -- Brian Eno
One of the greatest things about 'Continuum' is how great the writing is; our writing room is one of the most talented ones I've ever had. It really helps me as far as character development because they paint a very descriptive picture of who the characters are while still letting us have freedom to put in our own ideas. -- Richard Harmon
I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together. -- Scott Turow
Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive. -- Elliott Erwitt
I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy. -- Daniel Handler
I've always thought of fat as just a descriptive word -- Camryn Manheim
In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods. -- Hans Arp
The words "silent majority" are very descriptive of what is happening with me. -- Donald Trump
I like writing in an illustrative, descriptive way. I prefer describing to rather than explaining. -- Iron & Wine
Metrical geometry is thus a part of descriptive geometry, and descriptive geometry is all geometry. -- Arthur Cayley
Crabgrass is aptly descriptive of this hated weed, for it does scuttle quickly through a lawn. -- Allen Lacy
Writing is not possible without images. Yet, images don't have to be descriptive; they can be concepts. -- Paul Virilio
A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical. -- Paul Dirac
Interactive Decision Theory" would perhaps be a more descriptive name for the discipline usually called Game Theory. -- Robert Aumann
When you have a company name that is to descriptive about what you do, you don't stand out. -- Philip J. Kaplan
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. -- C. S. Lewis
Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity. -- Clark Coolidge
I don't like super-descriptive modern fiction. I like, "Here's what was happening in 1582 all over the planet." Then that gets my imagination going. -- Andrew Bird
Always refer to those of the female gender as ladies.The descriptive woman is usually reserved in Dixie for females of questionable respect. -- Ann Barrett Batson
God's Word does not merely impart information; it actually creates life. It's not only descriptive; it's effective too, God speaking is God acting. -- Michael Horton
Reconnaissance memoranda should always be written in the simplest style and be purely descriptive. They should never stray from their objective by introducing extraneous ideas. -- Napoleon Bonaparte
He looks like a man.' 'How descriptive,' Susan said in a droll tone. 'Remind me never to advise you to seek work as a novelist. -- Julia Quinn
Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth. -- Gregory Bateson
It is through color changes that we go forward... all decisions come about as the picture is made and in response to painterly demands. The descriptive and anecdotal come second. -- Wolf Kahn
A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. -- David Mamet
From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the dÃ©cor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place. -- Paul Valery
What a newspaper needs in its news, in its headlines, and on its editorial page is terseness, humor, descriptive power, satire, originality, good literary style, clever condensation and accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. -- Joseph Pulitzer
In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy. -- Kerry James Marshall
Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences. -- Ernst Boris Chain
The violence in the Old Testament and New Testament is descriptive. The violence in the Koran is for all time and it is prescriptive. And Mohammed said "I have been made victorious through terror.". -- Pamela Geller
The most vitally characteristic fact about mathematics is, in my opinion, its quite peculiar relationship to the natural sciences, or more generally, to any science which interprets experience on a higher than purely descriptive level. -- John von Neumann

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