The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work. Donna Tartt
Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives. Vincent Canby
The imagination, which is the source of poetry, has in every country been the beginning as well as the ornament of civilization. It civilizes because it refines. Letitia Elizabeth Landon
What purifies the heart refines language. John Lancaster Spalding
The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilisation is a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. Mary Wollstonecraft
A Palestinian man refines sesame to be sold in markets, near Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, September 1, 2019. Source: Internet