Detail The World Quotes & Sayings

What is it about this book - essentially a military history of the first month of the First World War - which gives it its stamp and has created its enormous reputation? Four qualities stand out: a wealth of vivid detail which keeps the reader immersed in events, almost as an eyewitness; a prose style which is transparently clear, intelligent, controlled and witty; a cool detachment of moral judgment - Mrs. Tuchman is never preachy or reproachful; she draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human villainy as amused and saddened by human folly. These first three qualities are present in all of Barbara Tuchman's work, but in The Guns of August there is a fourth which makes the book, once taken up, almost impossible to set aside. Remarkably, she persuades the reader to suspend any foreknowledge of what is about to happen. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Paris ... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail. — Edmund White

When I was 10, we drove to Disney World. When we arrived, what impressed me most was the meticulous attention to detail; there wasn't a gum wrapper anyplace. — Jason Kilar

A writer can't just be well-educated or good at research; to build a living, breathing world with interesting characters, you have to write from the gut. I'm not saying you have to live your life like a fantasy adventure. The trick is the ability to synthesize your own everyday experiences into your fiction. Infuse your characters with believable emotions and motivations. Infuse your world with rich sensory detail. For that you have to be in touch with your own existence and your own soul, the dark and the light of it. — Lynn Flewelling

The Weather Channel is not about weather; it is about the world! It is about how weather affects us all, our entire global economy, health, happiness, spirit. The channel delves with great detail into weather phenomena of all different kinds - hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, monsoons, hail, rain, lightning storms - and they especially delight in the confluence of multiple phenomena. — Garth Stein

Michael Jackson was the biggest star the world has ever seen - he put so much into everything; a lot of attention to detail. I want to do that. I want to pay that kind of attention to detail in everything - in music, visually - all of that. — Kris Allen

The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail. — Imre Kertesz

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction. — Rohinton Mistry

Without memories to cloud it, the mind perceives with absolute clarity. Each observation stands out in stark relief. In the beginning, when there's not yet a smudge, the slate still blank, there is only the present moment: each vital detail, shocked color, the fall of light. Like film stills. The mind relentlessly open to the world, deeply impressed, even hurt by it: not yet gauzed by memory. — Nicole Krauss

It never was anything very splendid at the best," said he. He lifted the lamp from the table with a sort of abstraction, not remarking even my offer to take it from him, and led the way. He was on the verge of seventy, and looked his age; but it was a vigorous age, with no symptom of giving way. The circle of light from the lamp lit up his white hair and keen blue eyes and clear complexion; his forehead was like old ivory, his cheek warmly colored; an old man, yet a man in full strength. He was taller than I was, and still almost as strong. As he stood for a moment with the lamp in his hand, he looked like a tower in his great height and bulk. I reflected as I looked at him that I knew him intimately, more intimately than any other creature in the world, - I was familiar with every detail of his outward life; could it be that in reality I did not know him at all? * — Mrs. Oliphant

We could unleash all this technology at once. You can imagine what would happen then. But that's not the interesting thing."
"What is the interesting thing?"
"The interesting thing is that we have a moral sense. It is on punched cards, perhaps the most advanced and sensitive moral sense the world has ever known."
"Because it is on punched cards?"
"It considers all considerations in endless and subtle detail," he said. "It even quibbles. With this great new moral tool, how can we go wrong? I confidently predict that, although we could employ all this splendid new weaponry I've been telling you about, we're not going to do it. — Donald Barthelme

It was a very touch- and- go business, in 1955, to get a wholly plausible reading from Mrs. Glass's face, and especially from her enormous blue eyes. Where once, a few years earlier, her eyes alone could break the news (either to people or to bathmats) that two of her sons were dead, one by suicide (her favorite, her most intricately calibrated, her kindest son) and one killed in World Ward II (her only truly lighthearted son)- where once Bessie Glass's eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her husband nor any of her adult surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in, now, in 1955, she was apt to use this same terrible Celtic equipment to break the news, usually at the front door, that the new delivery boy hadn't brought the leg of lamb in time for dinner or that some remote Hollywood starlet's marriage was on the rocks. — J.D. Salinger

The mechanism by which quantum mechanics injects an element of chance into the operation of the universe is called "decoherence" (Gell-Mann and Hartle, 1994). Decoherence effectively creates new bits of information, bits which previously did not exist. In other words, quantum mechanics, via decoherence, is constantly injecting new bits of information into the world. Every detail that we see around us, every vein on a leaf, every whorl on a fingerprint, every star in the sky, can be traced back to some bit that quantum mechanics created. Quantum bits program the universe. — Paul Davies

Knowing that somewhere in the world there is someone who cares what you wore, an insignificant detail of your life that would seem unimportant to anyone else, makes you feel more connected to that person and less alone in the world. — Deborah Tannen

Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to work my apparat's screen, the colourful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors. — Gary Shteyngart

The day was ill-omened from the beginning; one of those unlucky days when every little detail seems to go wrong and one finds oneself engaged in a perpetual and infuriating strife with inanimate objects. How truly fiendish the sub-human world can be on these occasions! How every atom, every cell, every molecule, seems to be leagued in a maddening conspiracy against the unfortunate being who has incurred its obscure displeasure! — Anna Kavan

The remarkable thing about the world of insects, however, is precisely that there is no veil cast over these horrors. These are mysteries performed in broad daylight before our very eyes; we can see every detail, and yet they are still mysteries. If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs. The earth devotes an overwhelming proportion of its energy to these buzzings and leaps in the grass. Theirs is the biggest wedge of the pie: Why? I ought to keep a giant water bug in an aquarium on my dresser, so I can think about it. — Annie Dillard

In your dream you call for Chaplain Charlie. You met the Navy chaplain when you interviewed him for a feature article you were writing. Chaplain Charlie was an amateur magician. With his magic, Chaplain Charlie entertained Marines in sick bays and distributed spiritual tourniquets to men who were still alive, but weaponless. To brutal, godless children Chaplain Charlie spoke about how God is merciful, despite appearances, about how the Ten Commandments lack detail because when you're writing on stone tablets with lightning bolts you've got to be brief, about how the Free World will conquer Communism with aid of God and a few Marines, and about free fish. One day a Vietnamese child booby-trapped Chaplain Charlie's black bag of tricks. Chaplain Charlie reached in and pulled out a bright ball of death... — Gustav Hasford

A bit of a blurred vision of a better world. Much of an organizer's daily work is detail, repetitive and deadly in its monotony. In the totality of things he is engaged in one small bit. It is as though as an artist he is painting a tiny leaf. It is inevitable that sooner or later he will react with "What am I doing spending my whole life just painting one little leaf? The hell with it, I quit." What keeps him going is a blurred vision of a great mural where other artists - organizers - are painting their bits, and each piece is essential to the total. — Saul D. Alinsky

As she read over Eve's shoulder, Mavis let out a low whistle. "Not the Roarke! The incredibly wealthy, fabulous to look at, sexily mysterious Roarke who owns approximately twenty-eight percent of the world, and its satellites?"
All Eve felt was irritation. "He's the only one I know."
"You know him." Mavis rolled her green shadowed eyes. "Dallas, I've underestimated you unforgivably. Tell me everything. How, when, why? Did you sleep with him? Tell me you slept with him, then give me every tiny detail."
"We've had a secret, passionate affair for the last three years, during which time I bore him a son who's being raised on the far side of the moon by Buddhist monks. — J.D. Robb

It's as if I've never seen Jane before, never known her. With just an undervest on, she looks unbelievably thin. Arms no wider than the sticks of a bower. A collarbone protuding from the skin in all its detail. And with that one gesture, I learn the fundamental truth of her. When she takes off her sweater and, without thinking, hands it over to David to use as wool, I can see how Jane loves. And I know -with all my heart I know- that there is no protection in the world for someone who loves like that. — Helen Humphreys

One way was Taylorism. Frederick W. Taylor had been a steel company foreman who closely analyzed every job in the mill, and worked out a system of finely detailed division of labor, increased mechanization, and piecework wage systems, to increase production and profits. In 1911, he published a book on "scientific management" that became powerfully influential in the business world. Now management could control every detail of the worker's energy and time in the factory. As Harry Braverman said (Labor and Monopoly Capital), the purpose of Taylorism was to make workers interchangeable, able to do the simple tasks that the new division of labor required - like standard parts divested of individuality and humanity, bought and sold as commodities. — Howard Zinn

I was trying to match my mental image of the world, rather than the world itself, and mental images of objects aren't full of detail. If you think house, you're going to get something very general ... Dropping detail made the photographs more general, like mental images. — Judy Fiskin

I have said, and I repeat, at the risk of appearing sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War ... If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what's called a detail. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole. — Orhan Pamuk

The techno-medical model of maternity care, unlike the midwifery model, is comparatively new on the world scene, having existed for barely two centuries. This male-derived framework for care is a product of the industrial revolution. As anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has described in detail, underlying the technocratic mode of care of our own time is an assumption that the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects. Pregnancy and labor are seen as illnesses, which, in order not to be harmful to mother or baby, must be treated with drugs and medical equipment. Within the techno-medical model of birth, some medical intervention is considered necessary for every birth, and birth is safe only in retrospect. — Ina May Gaskin

I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times ... The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them. — Gustave Flaubert

My business is creating fame and celebrity, and I'm one of the best in the world. I know it to the finest detail. I reflect what's out there, and if there's a demand for something, I recognise it. I don't think I'm crass. I stand by everything I do. — Simon Fuller

Every task you are given, no matter how menial, offers opportunities to observe this world at work. No detail about the people within it is too trivial. Everything you see or hear is a sign for you to decode. Over time, you will begin to see and understand more of the reality that eluded you at first. For instance, a person whom you initially thought had great power ended up being someone with more bark than bite. Slowly, you begin to see behind the appearances. As you amass more information about the rules and power dynamics of your new environment, you can begin to analyze why they exist, and how they relate to larger trends in the field. You move from observation to analysis, honing your reasoning skills, but only after months of careful attention. — Robert Greene

Notable American Women gives us, with great panache and in eerie detail, a world that is cruelly reasonable within the near-religious limitations of its weird laws and customs. It is a book as unique as it is wonderfully strange. — Gilbert Sorrentino

From early childhood he had experienced the wish to die, to commit suicide, as they say, but never was totally concentrated. He could never come to terms with being born into a world that basically repulsed him in every detail from the very beginning. He grew older and thought that his wish to die would suddenly no longer be there, but this wish grew more intense from year to year, without ever becoming totally intense and concentrated. My constant curiosity got in the way of my suicide, so he said, I thought. We never forgive our fathers for having sired us, nor our mothers for having brought us into the world, he said, nor our sisters for continuing to be witnesses to our unhappiness. To exist means nothing other than we despair, he said. — Thomas Bernhard

My brain power depends on my retained mastery of analyzing in detail what's happening in my world and in my mind and body. I must continue to practice to retain my constructive and analytic powers. The goal is to be a master of my environment. — Michael Merzenich

He thought of Darwin sleeping out on the pampas during his Beagle trip, a middle-class white kid travelling the world, the first of the backpackers. It was only afterwards, really, that he had made any sense of what he had seen. Alex wondered what, in the fullness of time, he himself would make sense of, what small, crucial detail might be lodging itself in his brain that would shake his life to its foundations. — Nino Ricci

By autistic standards, the "normal" brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine. Thus people on the spectrum experience the neurotypical world as relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space. — Steve Silberman

Jorge Luis Borges understood this. In a fantasy short story published in 1942, "Funes the Memorious," he described a man, Ireneo Funes, who found after an accident that he could remember absolutely everything. He could reconstruct every day in the smallest detail, and he could even later reconstruct the reconstruction, but he was incapable of understanding. Borges wrote, "To think is to forget details, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes there were only details. — Stephen M. Stigler

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently 'fuzzy' - the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed. — Martin Rees

Larry David's armor is his dissatisfaction with the world down to the smallest detail, and up to the whole ghastly arrangement. He won't win, but he'll enjoy losing. — Tom Shales

As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail: it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue. — Mary Oliver

That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one's back too often in favour of sleep. I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthfully I couldn't even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never know. — Anne Michaels

I'm blown away by the graphical detail of today's games. I can't imagine that it's going to get any better, but it's just going to continually progress and soon we'll be living in that world. — Christian Slater

The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro. — Ansel Adams

I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it's madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much. — George R R Martin

The 'public' artist confirms the world that we already accept, though he inevitably widens our experience of it; his method is one of research, the progressive uncovering of detail. — Kenneth Coutts-Smith

I've watched a never-ending line of relationships crumple around me, with each sordid detail publicized to the world. I couldn't stand to hurt you that way. — Eden Summers

---Sleeps through the washes of the morning's colors and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before. — Ashley Hay

If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more. — Gregory Peck

Look at the Coen brothers. All their minor characters are as interesting as their protagonists. If the smaller characters are well-written, the whole world of the film becomes enriched. It's not the size of the thing, but the detail. — Brendan Gleeson

World-building is my favorite pastime, so with me, I'm always about reining myself in. I don't want to lose too much of the mystery by hammering every detail to death. I did fiddle with lots of maps for 'Glass Sword,' as the second installment sees Mare, Cal and company traveling throughout their country, and that's always fun for me. — Victoria Aveyard

Some people believe that "fashion" is everything. Every six months, they spend a fortune changing some tiny detail in order to keep up their membership in the very exclusive tribe of the rich. If they were to visit Silicon Valley, where the billionaires of the IT industry wear plastic watches and beat-up jeans, they would understand that the world has changed — Paulo Coelho

Let your mind see every detail of your own special version of the very best that life can be. If you could make the world exactly to your liking, consider very specifically just how that world would be. If you could spend your time doing precisely what you wish, how would the moments of your life be lived? — Ralph Marston

Culture is a way of coping with the world by defining it in detail. — Malcolm Bradbury

For a moment I was filled with the sensation of white snow against black water. The way the whiteness erases all the detail around a lake or a river in the forest so that the difference between land and water is absolute, and the water lies there as a deeply alien entity, a black hole in the world. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The whole world of 'Game of Thrones' was realized with such detail, with directors and writers who really geeked out and really loved all the little bits of it. — Harry Lloyd

He could galvanize the dead with his talk. It was a sort of devouring process: when he described a place he ate into it, like a goat at tacking a carpet. If he described a person he ate him alive from head to toe. If it were an event he would devour every detail, like an army of white ants descending upon a forest. He was everywhere at once, in his talk. He attacked from above and below, from the front, rear and flanks. If he couldn't dispose of a thing at once, for lack of a phrase or an image, he would spike it temporarily and move on, coming back to it later and devouring it piecemeal. Or like a juggler,- he would toss it in the air arid, just when you thought he had forgotten it, that it would fall and break, he would deftly put an-arm behind his back and catch it in his palm without even turning his eye. It wasn't just talk he handed out, but language - food and beast language. He always talked against a landscape, like the protagonist of a lost world. — Henry Miller

The judges' primary objective was to conduct a scrupulously fair legal proceeding that would win the respect of the world. Hausner's goal was to tell the story of the Holocaust in all its detail, and in so doing, to capture the imagination not just of Israel's youth and world Jewry, but of the entire world .

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 121 — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Drift. Down through deltas of former girlfriends, degrees of confirmation of girlfriendhood, personal sightings of Rez or Lo together with whichever woman in whatever public place, each account illuminated with the importance the event had held for whoever had posted it. This being for Laney the most peculiar aspect of this data, the perspective in which these two loomed. Human in every detail but then not so. Everything scrupulously, fanatically accurate, probably, but always assembled around the hollow armature of celebrity. He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy's idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band's fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that. — William Gibson

Bingley prowled his library like a caged animal. The rain separating him from Jane imprisoned him in the house, creating his own personal hell. His sisters worked themselves into a frenzy over the ball, his brother-in-law consoled himself with increasing amounts of drink, and Darcy stared into space with a small smile on his lips. He wondered if the world had turned upside down if Darcy was the besotted man, smiling too much while he grumbled over every detail. — Rose Fairbanks

Ever wondered why people from the tropical regions cannot imagine a life without coconuts? Since coconut makes an everyday special food for the tropics, there are a number of reasons why it makes the major ingredient in their daily consumption. So what's the miracle in coconut or coconut oil? To put it simply, coconut oil is the most unique oil among all the rest. This is the main reason why it has gained immense popularity around the world. The factor that makes coconut oil unique is the unusual level of fat molecules found in this miracle oil. Too technical to understand? Let's learn about it in detail. All fats — Dogwood Apps

If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what's ahead when there's a well-rounded script inside your head. Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you're applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. "We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative," Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. "It's a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That's who everyone tries to get." III. — Charles Duhigg

What profound reward you must glean from studying the world so closely ... Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away. — Ian McEwan

I know that much of the structure and plan of the universe is beyond my understanding and not at all similar to anything of our earthly world that I have experienced so far. I marvel at the intellect and attention to detail, the precision manifested by the workings of this great and often unseen force of which we are all a part. — Rosemary Altea

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him! — John Irving

While many have doubted the accuracy of the Bible, time and continued research have consistently demonstrated that the Word of God is better informed than its critics. In fact, while thousands of finds from the ancient world support in broad outline and often in detail the biblical picture, not one incontrovertible find has ever contradicted the Bible. — Norman Geisler

Always look at the people, not at the mass. A face, not the crowd. Look at the world, not at the ground. Every little detail you see is a victory. — Vic James

It might be extremely dorky to point out, but who you are is singular. It's science. No one else in existence has your point of view or exact genome (identical twins and clones, look for inspiration elsewhere, please). That is why we need people to share and help us understand one another better. And on a bigger level than just taking a selfie. (Not hating on selfies, but a few is enough. You look good from that angle; we get it.) We need the world to hear more opinions, give glimpses into more diverse subcultures. Are you REALLY into dressing your cat in handcrafted, historically authentic outfits? No problem, there are people out there who want to see that! Probably in excruciating detail! — Felicia Day

Consider an event from the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the world's greatest military strategists: During a meeting, his subordinates informed Napoleon Bonaparte of a new general who was turning out to be extremely capable. The new man's bravery, skill, determination and organizational capabilities were outlined for Napoleon in great detail. Napoleon waved his hand impatiently. 'That's all very well,' said Napoleon. 'But tell me: Is he lucky?' Napoleon's question may sound rather strange in our times, but he saw luck as a personal trait rather than an extraneous factor. A — Ashwin Sanghi

The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world. — Barbara Kingsolver

The world's full of details, have you noticed? And since no detail is ever repeated in exactly the same shape and always sets off other details, there's no end to it. — Fred Vargas

I've never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist, now that's a different matter. To invent this wizard world, I've learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy. Perhaps much of it I'll never use in the books, but I have to know in detail what magic can and cannot do in order to set the parameters and establish the stories' internal logic. — J.K. Rowling

Suppose a person entering a house were to feel heat on the porch, and going further, were to feel the heat increasing, the more they penetrated within. Doubtless, such a person would believe there was a fire in the house, even though they did not see the fire that must be causing all this heat. A similar thing will happen to anyone who considers this world in detail: one will observe that all things are arranged according to their degrees of beauty and excellence, and that the nearer they are to God, the more beautiful and better they are. — Thomas Aquinas

I was the only person in an infinite exploding universe who knew that this powder was made of opal. In a wide, wide world, full of unimaginable numbers of people, I was - in addition to being small and insufficient - special. I was not only a quirky bundle of genes, but I was also unique existentially, because of the tiny detail that I knew about Creation, because of what I had seen and then understood. Until I phoned someone, the concrete knowledge that opal was the mineral that fortified each seed on each hackberry tree was mine alone. Whether or not this was something worth knowing seemed another problem for another day. I stood and absorbed this revelation as my life turned a page, and my first scientific discovery shone, as even the cheapest plastic toy does when it is new. I — Hope Jahren

He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before the rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given. — James Salter

All we're trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen. — Eamon Grennan

The play is independent of the pages on which it is printed, and 'pure geometries' are independent of lecture rooms, or of any other detail of the physical world. — G.H. Hardy

Alligator: The crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World. — Ambrose Bierce

The stories told, the words, create their own reality. The details are important. Words create realities and decide destinies.

Unidentified writers, under four evangelical pseudonyms, wrote a book that made the world what it is today. Their words created the very reality in which we have been living for two thousand years; the words simply had to be worthy of faith. Had it not been for the detail about the baked fish he ate after going hungry after he died on the cross, and the finger stuck into the wound, the world would not be Christian and would not be awaiting resurrection. The word becomes the reality, a reality of which we ourselves are merely a part. — Mikhail Shishkin

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. — Virginia Woolf

In writing with detail, you are turning to face the world. It is a deeply political act, because you are not staying in the heat of your own emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry. — Natalie Goldberg

In the 19th century the anatomy of the eye was known in great detail and the sophisticated mechanisms it employs to deliver an accurate picture of the outside world astounded everyone who was familiar with them. — Michael Behe

A state of total awakeness. In this state one is not only aware of that which one needs to be aware of in order to survive or to satisfy passionate goals, one is aware of oneself and of the world (people and nature) around one. One sees, not opaquely but clearly, the surface together with its roots. The world becomes fully real; every detail and the details in their configuration and structure become a meaningful unit. It feels as if a veil that had been in front of our eyes permanently - without our recognizing it was there - and had suddenly dropped away. — Erich Fromm

Sometimes it was better not to ever live the fantasy. Because when reality descended, it outlined in stark detail just how much the real world sucked. — Maya Banks

There are people who want to know about everything in the minutest detail, like accountants or lawyers. But show a toe sticking out of a hole in a sock to a poet and it is enough to produce an image of the whole world in him. — Tarkovsky

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred. — Daniel C. Dennett

So many people want to live their lives and their dreams through their own Facebook page or their Twitter page. They want to show every detail of their life to everyone in the world. That scares me because I don't have any Facebook page or Twitter I don't like it, I don't want it. — Emmanuel Petit

Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That, which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant diminished view, although with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

It was a conceit to imagine that they knew the world; that they knew its every detail. Forces ever worked unseen, in elusive patterns no mortal mind could comprehend. — Steven Erikson

Sitting alone with Jean, Avery felt for the first time that he was part of the world, engaged in the same simple happiness that was known to so many and was so miraculous. He wanted to know everything; he did not mean this carelessly. He wanted to know the child and the schoolgirl, what she'd believed in and what she'd loved, what she'd worn and what she'd read
no detail was too small or insignificant
so that when at last he touched her, his hands would have this intelligence. — Anne Michaels

The detail over which these monks went mad with joy was the universe itself;
the only thing really worthy of enjoyment. The white daylight shone
over all the world, the endless forests stood up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy. — G.K. Chesterton

As for the Republicans
how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage' ... ) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead. — H.P. Lovecraft

I think we all want to know where we came from and how we fit into the world, but some of us need to know how it all works in great detail. — George Smoot

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.
You cand resume your flight whereever you like," they say to me, "but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes. — Italo Calvino

So entranced by the feeling of your skin against my fingertips; wrapped up in observing every little detail about you, with the intrinsic curiosity of a child who is exploring the world for the very first time. — Cheri Bauer

Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as thought it were magnified
a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on a man's hands
or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river. — Margaret Laurence

Ian Fleming may have been very practical about writing James Bond, but at heart he was a romantic. He ... was tapping directly into a deep wellspring of his own imagination, which he laced with the usual blend of sex, travel, culinary detail and fine living that encapsulated the aspirations of the age, and was absolutely an expression of Fleming himself. He may have dismissed his creation as idle fantasy, but he was entirely serious about the world he had created ... Ian Fleming could not put any clear water between himself and his fiction because he was living his work as he wrote it ... To discover the origins of James Bond one has to begin by exploring the deep streams that fed the well of Fleming's imagination, and his own complicated personality. — Henry Chancellor

The next night, alone in the tent, Laurent said: 'As we draw closer to the border, I think it would be safer
more private
to hold our discussions in your language rather than mine.'
He said it in carefully pronounced Akielon.
Damen stared at him, feeling as though the world had just been rearranged.
'What is it?' said Laurent.
'Nice accent,' said Damen, because despite everything, the corner of his mouth was beginning helplessly to curve up.
[ ... ]
It was of course no surprise to find that Laurent had a well-stocked armoury of elegant phrases and bitchy remarks, but could not talk in detail about anything sensible. — C.S. Pacat

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas! — T.E. Lawrence

The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details. — Shaun Tan

When we walk slowly, the world can fully appear. Not only are the creatures not frightened away by our haste or aggression, but the fine detail of fern and flower, or devastation and disruption, becomes visible. Many of us hurry along because we do not want to see what is really going on in and around us. We are afraid to let our senses touch the body of suffering or the body of beauty — Joan Halifax