Verbs famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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[On her recently widowed father's much younger wife:] My father has been very busy in conjugating the verb to love, and I assure you he declines its moods and tenses inimitably.
-- Abby May Alcott -
A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.
-- Aberjhani -
To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.
-- Aleister Crowley -
Fear is only a verb if you let it be. Don't you dare let go of my hand!
-- Andrea Gibson -
James Blish told me I had the worst case of "said bookism" (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary.
-- Anne McCaffrey -
In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."
-- Arthur Eddington -
Marriage is not a noun; it's a verb. It isn't something you get. It's something you do. It's the way you love your partner every day.
-- Barbara De Angelis -
Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
In the history of the concept of number has been adjective (three cows, three monads) and noun (three, pure and simple), and now ... number seems to be more like a verb (to triple).
-- Barry Mazur -
But love is really more of an interactive process. It's about what we do not just what we feel. It's a verb, not a noun.
-- Bell Hooks -
Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.
-- Benjamin Lee Whorf -
If you can't illustrate 'it', 'it' doens't belong in Physics as a noun! You can't put an article in front. You can't put a verb after!
-- Bill Gaede -
I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.
-- Carl Sandburg -
Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.
-- Clive James -
A person who uses party as a verb is a person who will walk into a shop and walk out wearing a rubber jumpsuit.
-- Cynthia Heimel -
The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.
-- Dashiell Hammett -
One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.
-- Edward Sapir -
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
-- Elaine de Kooning -
Acutely aware of the poverty of my means, language became obstacle. At every page I thought, 'That's not it.' So I began again with other verbs and other images. No, that wasn't it either. But what exactly was that it I was searching for? It must have been all that eludes us, hidden behind a veil so as not to be stolen, usurped and trivialized. Words seemed weak and pale.
-- Elie Wiesel -
Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue... I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
-- Elmore Leonard -
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.
-- Elmore Leonard -
Never use an adverb to modify the verb 'said' . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange.
-- Elmore Leonard -
Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue.
-- Elmore Leonard -
Evident in every small act of kindness, it was love as a verb. Love that made me feel more complete than I had ever felt in my glamorous, Jimmy Choo filled past.
-- Emily Giffin -
The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.
-- Erez Lieberman Aiden -
Happiness is not a noun or a verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.
-- Eric Weiner -
The verb that's been enforced on girls is to please. Girls are trained to please...I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be educate, or activate, or engage, or confront, or defy, or create.
-- Eve Ensler -
We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do... forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in , the fundamental verb, to Be.
-- Evelyn Underhill -
We spend most of our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do.
-- Evelyn Underhill -
In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be.
-- Franz Liszt -
Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer,' and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave.
-- Frederick Busch -
Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.
-- Gretel Ehrlich -
He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the
-- H. G. Wells -
There's nothing quite like a Scotch education. One is left with an irreparable debt. My head is full of irregular verbs still.
-- Ivor Cutler -
His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action.
-- Jennifer Crusie -
To me, Faith is not just a noun but also a verb
-- Jimmy Carter -
Honesty is an active verb, not a passive noun. Go out of your way to be truthful, beginning with the things that you say to yourself.
-- Joe Tye -
Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.
-- John Dryden -
In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb VACILAR... It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction.
-- John Steinbeck -
When it's done properly, taco should be a verb.
-- Jonathan Gold -
Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.
-- Jonathan Raban -
The Psalms wrap nouns and verbs around our pain better than any other book.
-- Joni Eareckson Tada -
A garden without its statue is like a sentence without its verb.
-- Joseph Beach -
Feminism is something you do. It's a verb. It's what you are. It's an activity; it's something you're actively engaged in.
-- Kathleen Hanna -
I'm usually homeboys with the same ni**as I'm rhyming wit/But this is hip-hop and them ni**as should know what time it is/And that goes for Jermaine Cole, Big KRIT, Wale/Pusha T, Meek Millz, A$AP Rocky, Drake/Big Sean, Jay Electron', Tyler, Mac Miller/I got love for you all but I'm tryna murder you ni**as/Tryna make sure your core fans never heard of you ni**as/They dont wanna hear not one more noun or verb from you ni**as
-- Kendrick Lamar -
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty. The Nouns were struck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
-- Kenneth Koch -
Love is a verb. We have to let our love call us to action.
-- Lierre Keith -
Information is currency. ... Power is a place as well as a verb; it is inside the information tent.
-- Lynda Obst -
Life on earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.
-- Lynn Margulis -
I like to think of home as a verb, something we keep recreating.
-- Madeleine Thien -
whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
-- Mark Twain -
Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.
-- Martha Graham -
Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
-- Mary Oliver -
When people use your brand name as a verb, that is remarkable.
-- Meg Whitman -
Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
-- Michael Shermer -
If you know how to handle the verbs, you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary.
-- Michel Thomas -
Is there a God? No. God is a verb, not a noun.
-- Micky Dolenz -
Acting is doing, because everything you say or do is some kind of an action, some kind of a verb. You're always connected to the other person through some kind of action.
-- Mira Sorvino -
It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb ? it's more like a process than it is a thing.
-- Pat Metheny -
...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.
-- Pat Metheny -
I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller -
God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller -
I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me.
-- Ralph Steadman -
I think that we all do heroic things, but hero is not a noun, it's a verb.
-- Robert Downey, Jr. -
If you go through any newspaper or magazine and look for active, kicking verbs in the sentences, you will realize that this lack of well used verbs is the main trouble with modern English writing. Almost all nonfiction nowadays is written in a sort of pale, colorless sauce of passives and infinitives, motionless and flat as paper.
-- Rudolf Flesch -
Mother is not a title. Mother is a verb. It is not who you are. It's what you do.
-- Shonda Rhimes -
The verb 'to love' in Persian is 'to have a friend.' 'I love you' translated literally is 'I have you as a friend,' and 'I don't like you' simply means 'I don't have you as a friend.
-- Shusha Guppy -
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
-- Stephen Fry -
I’ve heard it said: ‘By his home you shall know him’; and we all know that we must pay attention to anyone who reverses the subject and auxiliary verb in his sentence.
-- Steven Brust -
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.
-- Steven Pinker -
I'm more relaxed. I know I have difficulties with some verbs. But if they get me, they get me. And if they don't understand me, they don't understand me.
-- Thalia -
The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.
-- Ulysses S. Grant -
All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection.
-- Joseph Devlin -
"Balance" as a verb doesn't mean "stillness," but the constant act of making minor corrections from one side to another to bring one towards a center of stability.
-- Brenda Strong -
My wife wanted to call our daughter Sue, but I felt that in our family that is usually a verb.
-- Dennis Wolfberg -
There's no verbs before time itself exists, right? There's no popping into existence, there's no fluctuating, there's no quantum mechanical craziness, there is literally nothing.
-- Sean M. Carroll -
Let me begin by saying that I am one of those naturally wary people who considers the verb return a kind of insidious threat.
-- John Burnham Schwartz
