Precise Language Quotes

#1. It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power.

Raymond Carver

#2. The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world.

Etgar Keret

#3. Precise language is not the problem. Clear language is the problem.

Richard P. Feynman

#4. The pauses are a precise language, more a language than actual language is, Elisabeth thinks.

Ali Smith

#5. Sometimes, you just have to reassure the ones you love in precise language that you'll always be there. Sometimes words are enough.

Cassia Leo

#6. English is a beautiful language, a remarkably precise language with a million words to choose from to deliver your exact shade of meaning.

Laura Fraser

#7. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become
and such lucidity is a form of joy.

Eva Hoffman

#8. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.

Gloria Steinem

#9. Mass communication communicates massively: its language lacks precise articulation and avoids demanding terms; it argues for the kind of behavior in life which will make a "good program": ethic equals showbiz.

Frederic Raphael

#10. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.

Elliott Colla

#11. Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language.

Ron Paul

#12. It's a scary thought, isn't it? That every single person on this planet could lose their one true love and live to love again? It means the one you love could love again if they lost you.

Taylor Jenkins Reid

#13. Try - Takes the infinitive: "try to mend it," not "try and mend it." Students of the language will argue that 'try and' has won through and become idiom. Indeed it has, and it is relaxed and acceptable. But 'try to' is precise, and when you are writing formal prose, try and write 'try to.

William Strunk Jr.

#14. The door snicked shut.

Madeline Miller

#15. The closer I get to God, the blacker the little sins appear

Fraser Young

#16. Language is infinite. It can be as creative, and as chillingly precise, as the human mind.

Alena Graedon

#17. What the hell do you call that?" I asked him quietly. "Firefog?"
"We could," he responded. "Kilvin would probably call it an atmospherically enhanced incendiary action.

Patrick Rothfuss

#18. It was so - oh, I wish language were more precise! The red was so beautiful!"
The Giver nodded. "It is."
"Do you see it all the time?"
"I see all of them. All the colors."
"Will I?

Lois Lowry

#19. A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#20. Mathematics is pure language - the language of science. It is unique among languages in its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be formulated in its terms.

Alfred Adler

#21. In the long run, the replacement of the precise and disciplined language of science by the misleading language of litigation and advocacy may be one of the more important sources of damage to society incurred in the current debate over global warming.

Richard Lindzen

#22. Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Jeanette Winterson

#23. Fall in love for as long as you can with the one who sees you when you are invisible.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#24. I have always found that my view of success has been iconoclastic: success to me is not about money or status or fame, its about finding a livelihood that brings me joy and self-sufficiency and a sense of contributing to the world.

Anita Roddick

#25. The number of interrogators who have been bamboozled since the dawn of history by the body language and appealing manner of pretty prisoners is, to be precise, 43,123,465; in the time it has taken to write this sentence, that number has increased by 314.

William R. Johnson

#26. All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

Rabih Alameddine

#27. When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.

Allen Lacy

#28. Photography has clarity in the same way that language has. A word is precise, but its meaning can change based on the words around it: think tank, tank top.

Jason Fulford

#29. We must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

Julian Barnes

#30. The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.

Garth Stein

#31. Sometimes women get devastated by failing. Athletes don't; they just know that means they've got to practise harder, and they've got to do something else differently.

Beth Brooke

#32. I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

Christopher Hitchens