describe quotes

   The poet's business is not to describe things to us, or to tell us about things, but to create in our minds the very things themselves.

- Lascelles Abercrombie
  Poetry: Its Music and Meaning, introduction.

   Shame of the versifying tribe! Your history whither are you spinning? Can you do nothing but describe?

-Thomas Gray
  A Long Story, l.17^20.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain'or 'train'do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance.It is nothing jointed; it flows. A'river'or a 'stream'are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

-William James
  The Principles of Psychology, ch.9. This is the coining of the phrase'stream of consciousness', later applied to the narrative technique used by Joyce and others.