Top 53 Mark Forsyth Quotes
#1. Lord, deliver us from what we already knew we wanted. Give us some new desires, the weirder the better.
Mark Forsyth
#2. Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.
Mark Forsyth
#3. Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of 'Mary Jane' for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember.
Mark Forsyth
#4. The period is one of the most complicated and concepts of classical rhetoric. Nobody in the ancient world could quite decide what it meant, but they were united in the belief that it was terribly, terribly important.
Mark Forsyth
#5. Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a good dose of rough Enlightenment pornography.
Mark Forsyth
#6. Position for his colleague in Secret Intelligence would be just the reverse. Sir Mark was having
Frederick Forsyth
#7. A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. So eternal happiness is beaten by a ham sandwich.
Mark Forsyth
#8. Wamblecropt is the most exquisite word in the English language. Say it. Each syllable is intolerably beautiful.
Mark Forsyth
#9. Gambling in medieval France was a simple business. All you needed were some friends, a pot, and a chicken. In fact, you didn't need friends - you could do this with your enemies - but the pot and the chicken were essential.
Mark Forsyth
#10. So just to recap, polyptoton is a favorite of Jesus, Shakespeare, and John Lennon.
Mark Forsyth
#11. You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.
Mark Forsyth
#12. The glamour's off. Almost any question you ask can be answered. It's only the questions that you didn't know to ask that remain, dancing the can-can behind your back. The unknown unknowns.
Mark Forsyth
#13. Schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilized society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer.
Mark Forsyth
#14. Antanaclasic, which means that it keeps using the same word in different senses.
Mark Forsyth
#15. If you look back far enough, everything is stolen and every country invaded.
Mark Forsyth
#16. The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing, and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.
Mark Forsyth
#17. The beauty of merism is that it's absolutely unnecessary. It's words for words' sake: a gushing torrent of invention filled with noun and noun and signifying nothing. Why a rhetorical figure that gabs on and on for no good reason should be central to the rite of marriage is beyond me.
Mark Forsyth
#18. Poetry is much more important than the truth, and, if you don't believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.
Mark Forsyth
#19. After all, fiction is only fact minus time.
Mark Forsyth
#20. Now some people will tell you that great writing cannot be learnt. Such people should be hit repeatedly on the nose until they promise not to talk nonsense any more.
Mark Forsyth
#21. The glorious insanities of the English language mean that you can do all sorts of odd and demeaning things to a book. You can cook it.
Mark Forsyth
#22. A dutiful son has to remember not to slouch or swear or, in Hamlet's case, murder the old bat.
Mark Forsyth
#23. The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it's largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.
Mark Forsyth
#24. Most people can improvise in unrhymed dactyls for hours. It's just that you lose all your friends if you do.
Mark Forsyth
#25. The lawyer's lucky phrase is 'including but not limited to', which gets you out of the utterly unnecessary trouble that the unnecessary trouble merism got you into in the first place.
Mark Forsyth
#26. If you're too overcome to even finish your sentence then you must be sincere, you must really mean what you're not saying, you must ... I'm sorry. I cannot type. My fingers are crying.
Mark Forsyth
#27. Anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage will be unsurprised to learn that it is, literally, a /death pledge/.
Mark Forsyth
#28. That the West thinks that seven is lucky and the Chinese think eight is shows both that numerology is wrong and that it's popular across the world. Numbers feel mysterious and significant. So all you need to do to sound mysterious and significant is to pick a number, any number.
Mark Forsyth
#29. Thank God for modern medicine. It was not until 1905 that ergophobia (the morbid fear of returning to work) was first identified and reported in the British Medical Journal. As yet there is no known cure, but doctors have been working on it, and may get back to working on it sometime soon.
Mark Forsyth
#30. But facts obscure the truth, which is that writing prose doesn't make you a prose writer any more than philosophizing makes you a philosopher or fooling around makes you a fool.
Mark Forsyth
#31. For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine and is technically known as a progressio. It was a favorite of God and Dickens
Mark Forsyth
#32. So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.
Mark Forsyth
#33. Reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.
Mark Forsyth
#34. Oscar Wilde said that "All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime," and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads.
Mark Forsyth
#35. Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.
Mark Forsyth
#36. Stern people dislike rhetoric, and unfortunately it's usually stern people who are in charge: solemn fools who believe that truth is more important than beauty.
Mark Forsyth
#37. Offices are peculiar places and nobody is ever quite sure what happens in them, least of all the people who work there. But the day tends to begin with a morning meeting, in which everybody decides what they will fail to do for the rest of the day.
Mark Forsyth
#38. Human beings, for some reason or another, like symmetry. You leave a bunch of them next to a jungle for a couple of days and you'll come back to find an ornamental garden. We take stones and turn them into the Taj Mahal or St. Paul's Cathedral.
Mark Forsyth
#39. Love is nothing because those who do something for the love of it do it for nothing.
Mark Forsyth
#40. Oxygen was called flammable air for a while, but it didn't catch on.
Mark Forsyth
#41. The Three Musketeers had a cry of 'All for one and one for all'. The symmetry makes it memorable but also reflects the reciprocity. It is that great human symmetry: the deal.
Mark Forsyth
#42. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.
Mark Forsyth
#43. So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He's like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.
Mark Forsyth
#44. When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one's body parts and attach similes to them.
Mark Forsyth
#45. Who needs sense when you have alliteration?
Mark Forsyth
#46. It is time to buddle (scrub in water) all that is not illutile (unwash-awayable). Baudelaire said that humans were deluded if they thought they could wash away all their spots with vile tears, but Baudelaire was French and therefore knew nothing about hygiene or shower gel.
Mark Forsyth
#47. A book would therefore have a twofold benefit. First, it would rid me of my demons and perhaps save some innocent conversationalist from my clutches. Second, unlike me, a book could be left snugly on the bedside table or beside the lavatory: opened at will and closed at will.
Mark Forsyth
#48. The Bible is chock-a-block with such unnecessary but beautiful antitheses. God, whatever his other failings, is a great rhetorician.
Mark Forsyth
#49. Freud said that everything was secretly sexual. But etymologists know that sex is secretly food.
Mark Forsyth
#50. It's sad to see Time's toothless mouth laughing the poets to scorn. The stars are all explained and the mist is all measured, and there is no magic left in this dreary world.
Mark Forsyth
#51. It is much harder than you might think to show people your bottom.
Mark Forsyth
#52. If somebody learns how to phrase things beautifully, they might be able to persuade you of something that isn't true.
Mark Forsyth
#53. Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you.
Mark Forsyth
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