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Small Details Quotes

Browse 37 quotes about Small Details.

Small Details Quotes

“Sam looked at her outstretched hand, which he knew as well as any hand except his own---the precise pattern of the lines that made up the grid of her palm, the slim fingers with the purplish veins at the knuckles, the particular creamy olive hue of her skin, her delicate wrist, pinkish, with a penumbral callus that must have come from Dov, the white gold bracelet she wore that he knew had been a gift from Freda on her twelfth birthday. How could she honestly think he wouldn't know about the handcuffs? He had spent hours sitting next to her, playing games and then making them, staring at her hands as her fingers flew across a keyboard or jabbed at a controller. Tell me I don't know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don't know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.”

Small DetailsMemorizedYour Hand
Book:Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
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“The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that's how they are caught.”

DetailsStorytellingStorytellerSmall DetailsStory TellingStory Teller
Book:The Brothers Karamazov
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“But you cannot preserve the memory of applause; it is too volatile, too perishable. Later it would astonish me that I could not satisfactorily summon back that moment[...]No, I would remember the towel...Bo Maybank's towel. Precisely and completely and for the rest of my life. I do not know how he got to know me, but I felt his light leaps up to my face and felt the towel warm against my brow. And his face, I would remember his face as he wiped the sweat from mine, transfigured with joy for me - his face vulnerable and febrile and anonymous - as he danced on the floor below me, as he tried to reach me, as he tried to be a part of the finest moment of my life.”

FriendshipMemoryRemembranceSmall Details
Book:The Lords of Discipline
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“Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts - including my own - where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: “This is where the novel should actually start.” A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.”

FeelsShouldTwoCharacterStoriesMovingMy OwnNovelCuttingCrazyInformationEmotionalHugeAmountSceneIncludingDetailsAttachmentFadesChaptersManuscriptsLess Is MoreSmall Details
Author:Sarah Waters
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“The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.”

MindSocialGrowsFieldsOrdinaryTasksPressesDetailsSensesSignificanceCivilizedHuntersCognitionNaturalistWoodlandSmall DetailsScanningPleasantries
Author:E. O. Wilson
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“Motherhood has most definitely changed me and my life. Its so crazy how drastic even the small details change - in such an amazing way. Even silly things, like the fact that all of my pictures on my cell phone used to be of me at photo shoots - conceited, I know! - but now every single picture on my phone is of Mason.”

KnowsWayFactsUsedCrazyChangedPhonesDetailsMotherhoodSillyUsed To BeCellsCell PhoneConceitedMasonsDrasticPhoto ShootsSilly ThingsSmall DetailsSingle Picture
Author:Kourtney Kardashian
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“Now when naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of habits, tastes and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or between nearly-allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument that all are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed; and consequently that all should be classed under the same species. The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of man.”

MenShouldMayTwoFactsUseFormForceNaturalCommonRaceHabitTasteArgumentSpeciesDetailsAgreementDispositionNaturalistSmall DetailsNatural Forms
Book:The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
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“It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.”

LittlesBigsHappensPracticeCourageBasketballDetailsCoachesThings HappenCoachingMotivational SportsLittle ThingsBig ThingsSmall ThingsMotivational BasketballBasketball CoachBasketball MotivationMake Things HappenGreat CoachUclaAttention To DetailSports CoachCoaches MotivationalSmall StuffBasketball LeadershipBaseball CoachSmall DetailsSports Leadership
Book:They Call Me Coach
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“If we look at life in its small details, how ridiculous it all seems. It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with protozoa. How we laugh as they bustle about so eagerly and struggle with one another. Whether here, or in the little span of human life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect”

IfsHumansLooksLittlesSeemsWaterLaughingStruggleEffectsProduceTerribleActivityDetailsRidiculousComicHuman LifeMicroscopesDrop Of WaterBustleSmall Details
Author:Irvin D. Yalom
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“For the 99 percent of the time we've been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.”

WorldStillsEarthSongLanguageNatureImaginationKnowingOur LivesDivineFinePercentLongingDetailsDependentOur WorldHuntersDeep InsideDivine NatureSong And DanceSmall Details
Author:Janine Benyus
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“In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.”

IfsWritingLittlesEyePastNightStarsBlackPiecesDogBrokenReaderShadowBallsGlassesDetailsInstanceHis EyesDescriptionBottlesMillsDamsSmall Details
Book:The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings
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“When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.”

IfsShouldWritingMindEyeNightDarkPiecesDogBrokenReaderActivityShadowDetailsInstanceHis EyesBottlesCaptureHumankindShrinksSimileDescribingGleamArrangingStarlightSmall Details
Author:Anton Chekhov
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“Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.”

ShouldMomentsCareBeautifulArtistWaitingProcessCreativityTakenProgressConsciousGoldDetailsInsightTalesPainterFairyTransitionTransformedFairy TaleAlasDetoursAmbushSmall DetailsDetaining
Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
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