Adjectives In Quotes

#1. I had always thought that the 'good,' and the 'bad' and the 'violent' did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference.

Sergio Leone

#2. But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ...

Julio Cortazar

#3. I start looking for adjectives in news reporting, and if there are too many of them, if they're all sort of repeatedly designed to influence my thinking in a certain way, I start getting concerned. I'm leery of people trying to paint a picture in a certain way.

Thomas Sadoski

#4. I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

Dick Schaap

#5. Don't leave out the key adjectives in there. Kill one low-ranked, disappointing brother in order to save the long-lost hero with a bright future. That makes the equation a bit easier.

Tui T. Sutherland

#6. When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.

P.G. Wodehouse

#7. Reg coughed repressively.Habit had made of the standard nouns and adjectives in his own vocabulary something merely conventional,like italics or points of exclamation.He sometimes found Laurie's conversation highly obscene,and would have voiced his disapproval to anyone he had liked less.

Mary Renault

#8. Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.

Mark Forsyth

#9. A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

Mark Twain

#10. Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.
'That's how it's done,' he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.

Anita Diamant

#11. When a man is in love
how can he use old words?
Should a woman
desiring her lover
lie down with
grammarians and linguists?
I said nothing
to the woman I loved
but gathered
love's adjectives into a suitcase
and fled from all languages.

Nizar Qabbani

#12. It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman

#13. Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.

Carolyn Heilbrun

#14. I like me better naked. I don't mean that in a vain way ... When you put clothes on, you immediately put a character on. Clothes are adjectives, they are indicators. When you don't have any clothes on, it's just you, raw, and you can't hide.

Padma Lakshmi

#15. 'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music.

Artie Shaw

#16. In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names.

Mortimer Adler

#17. The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school.

William Gibson

#18. A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls. Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives.

Margaret Atwood

#19. If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, "I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives," you'd probably get a pretty strange look;

Leonard Mlodinow

#20. Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

Ezra Pound

#21. If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullied.

Steven Pinker

#22. There are so many moments in our life which we cannot describe with mere words. There are not enough adjectives to justify the emotions behind such moments. Those moments are your life- they define who you truly are

Viraj J. Mahajan

#23. I think the best way to put it is that newspictures are the noun and the verb; our kind of photography is the adjective and adverb. The newspicture is a single frame; ours, a subject viewed in series. The newspicture is dramatic, all subject and action. Ours shows what's back of the action.

Roy Stryker

#24. Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."

William Zinsser

#25. Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

Margaret Atwood

#26. It wasn't that I didn't feel like sharing. Mostly I just figured they couldn't do anything about it, so there was no point in worrying them. I said, 'A wee little bit,' instead, in honor of being in Ireland, where one adjective was never enough if three would do.

C.E. Murphy

#27. We had got as far as this, when who should walk in but the gentleman himself, who had been drinking his beer in the taproom and had heard the whole conversation. Who was I? What did I want? What did I mean by asking questions? He had a fine flow of language, and his adjectives were very vigorous.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#28. Beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't

George Orwell

#29. It was here in Mayfair, that adjectives such as gracious elegant sophisticated and sublime trip off the tongue like coins into a parking meter.

Tyne O'Connell

#30. One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.

H.P. Lovecraft

#31. 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

#32. But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?

Logan Pearsall Smith

#33. Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth,one subterfuge was tried after anothersentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.

Virginia Woolf

#34. I think 'ambitious' is one of those adjectives used for women in a derogatory way.

Clare Balding

#35. I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments.

Isabel Allende

#36. Shane met him owing to the storybooks she studied to discover what attributes made one princessly - this wasn't technically a word, but she felt there should be equity in adjectives if not in life.

Thomm Quackenbush

#37. The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.

James Russell Lowell

#38. The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#39. Nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of which Want is the mother. "Miserable" covers many; "shabby" most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, "disagreeable" includes them all.

Albion Fellows Bacon

#40. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.

Gregory Bateson

#41. The question that arises as we use all these adjectives and adverbs to describe our physicians as we approach a Supreme Court nominee is where are we in America when we decide that it's legal to kill our unborn children?

Tom Coburn

#42. Empty your knapsack of all adjectives, adverbs and clauses that slo your stride and weaken your pace. Travel light. Remember the most memorable sentences in the English language are also the shortest: "The King is dead" and "Jesus wept."

Bill Moyers

#43. People have only two or three adjectives to describe people in the public eye. And that's okay. As long as those adjectives aren't train wreck, mess, terrible.

Taylor Swift

#44. She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.

Michael Chabon

#45. A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

Isabel Allende

#46. A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction
besides unexpected interludes
has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end.

Yann Martel

#47. I remember in second grade, everybody in the class had to come up with adjectives for each other, and I got shy. In a way, I force myself to perform, because if I didn't, I'd stay home rolled up in a ball watching 'The Real Housewives of Orange County' all day.

June Diane Raphael

#48. The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

#49. I despise all adjectives that try to describe people as liberal or conservative, rightist or leftist, as long as they stay in the useful part of the road.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#50. The adjectives that are in the book ["Win"] - passion, persuasion, persistence, perfection, prioritization, being people-centered - none of them are as important as principles. Without principles, the language will fail.

Frank Luntz

#51. Bad sign when the thought of your x-girlfriend sends you reeling in a search for new adjectives to describe stupidity and thoughtlessness?

Dov Davidoff

#52. For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.

Hal Borland