Without it, no amount of sizzling dialogue or exquisite description or beautiful language is enough.
This is an exquisite description, light as gossamer, but it's also horrific, reflecting the author's belief that something always stands between us and a true understanding of the surrounding world.
His exquisite description of teaching highs and lows resonated with my own teaching experiences, first as a middle school science teacher and now as a professor of science methods for preservice and in-service teachers.
"Bowen wrote like a filmmaker, with wonderful dialogue, exquisite descriptions and a brilliant use of light as a metaphor," Ms. Warner said, adding with a laugh, "We tried hard not to make it too Chekhovian".
And McMurtry's exquisite descriptions are written for a single breath, bringing their objects to life with a few well-chosen words: "The prairies had assumed an almost eerie quiet, broken only by the skipping notes of a plover".
Some men he flew with there and afterward became celebrated aces, and others, such as Aldrin, Grissom, and White, eventually entered legend as astronauts, but Salter's greatest achievement in war may have been surviving it, so that he could bring back his exquisite descriptions of jet fighting and of flying in general.
And that sense of him being unrealised comes in spite, or perhaps partly because, of this exquisite opening description: Mr George Smiley was not naturally equipped for hurrying in the rain, least of all at dead of night … Small, podgy and at best middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth.
In an e-mail, Mr. Pierce offered a more particular description: "Kristine has exquisite timing, infinite vocal, physical and emotional range, and also she is insane, which is very helpful in Chris's work".
Yet there it was, tucked between two ordinary effusions, typed in a silly, curly, childish font, a sonorous description, framed with exquisite irony, of everything she couldn't remember about her "mother country".
Hollinghurst's exquisite phrasing extended equally to descriptions of architecture and social behaviour, while his masterly ability to weave character and social history drew comparisons to George Eliot's Middlemarch.
The Elegies go on to offer, with exquisite lyrical compression, observations about, descriptions of and exhortations to love and lovers ("Fling the emptiness out of your arms / to broaden the spaces we breathe").
