Specificity Quotes

“In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!"

(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)”
― Anton Chekhov

“This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“There is a deeper point to be made here, however, having to do with the specificity of everything. One of the great failings of our culture is the nearly universal belief that there can be anything universal. We as a culture take the same approach to living in Phoenix as in Seattle as in Miami, to the detriment of all these landscapes. We turn wild trees to standardized two-by-fours. We turn living fish into fish sticks. But every fish is different from every other fish. Every student is different from every other student. Every place is different from every other place. If we are ever to hope to begin to live sustainably in place (which is the only way to live sustainably), we will have to remember specificity is everything.”
― Derrick Jensen, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution

“The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific.”
― Peter Levi, The Light Garden of the Angel King: Travels in Afghanistan with Bruce Chatwin

“The biological universe was full of molecules picking out their partners like clever locks designed to fit a key: toxins clinging inseparably to antitoxins, dyes that highlighted only particular parts of cells, chemical stains that could nimbly pick out one class of germs from a mixture of microbes. If biology was an elaborate mix-and-match game of chemicals, Ehrlich reasoned, what if some chemical could discriminate bacterial cells from animal cells--and kill the former without touching the host?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Influencing the world for good starts with service, self-care and specificity in time contribution to family.”
― Richie Norton

“When you are able to overcome distractions, then you will be able to do something more specific, something more precise and definite with the time that you have.”
― Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?

“How might a drug coursing through the whole body specifically attack a diseased organ?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The stronger your choice is, the stronger your voice is.”
― Monroe Mann

“It certainly does," the escort dragon said. "It said all, and I meant all. If I'd meant 'all the humans,' I'd have said 'all the humans,' or maybe 'some of you' or 'you over there' or 'all you non-dragons' or --”
― Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons