Top 100 Quotes About Adjectives
#1. 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
#2. Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can.
Anton Chekhov
#3. 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
#4. If you need three adjectives to describe something, then you've probably chosen the wrong something.
Roger Rosenblatt
#5. I think 'ambitious' is one of those adjectives used for women in a derogatory way.
Clare Balding
#6. Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.
Mark Forsyth
#7. Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.
Harper Lee
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.
A.B. Guthrie Jr.
#12. I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Eschew all those beastly adjectives ...
Roald Dahl
#18. 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
#19. It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
Zadie Smith
#20. 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
#21. It wasn't fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping - pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective.
John Casey
#22. 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
#23. I know I look good. The regular adjectives that come my way - sexy, hot, dusky, bong bombshell ... I love them.
Bipasha Basu
#24. 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
#25. Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.
E.B. White
#26. 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
#27. Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.
Paul Valery
#28. When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list - even if it's a mental list that you make - of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.
Omari Hardwick
#29. 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
#30. I spot a small cleft on his chin that should be awarded with a whole new set of definitions and adjectives.
A.A. Gupte
#31. Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy mustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#32. 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
#34. Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives.
Lois Lowry
#35. His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives.
Frank Herbert
#36. 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
#37. Most cities are nouns, but New York is a verb. What might Beunas Yerbas be, I wonder?'
'A string of adjectives and conjunctions?'
'Or an expletive?
David Mitchell
#38. 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
#39. Obviously, you want me to kiss you. And I'll be happy to oblige, when the time is right. But not yet." "Mr. Hunt, you are the most - " "Yes, I know," he said with a grin. "You may as well spare yourself the effort of hurling adjectives at me, as I've heard them all before.
Lisa Kleypas
#41. I'm proud of the two adjectives, superficial and frivolous.
Jeanloup Sieff
#42. But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives.
Margaret Atwood
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Every team has kind of a style or adjectives people use to describe the game that the team plays.
Rachel Martin
#46. Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the pretentiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to recondite adjectives, whisky nosers spoke the language of everyday life, detecting hints of stale seaweed, or even diesel fuel.
Alexander McCall Smith
#47. A world without adjectives would still have the sun rising and setting, the flowers blooming, the trees bearing fruits, the birds singing, and the bees stinging.
A.A. Patawaran
#48. 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
#49. Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.
Donald Hall
#50. I get imaginative with a mouth full of adjectives,
A brain full of adverbs, and a box full of laxatives,
Shittin' on rappers, causin' hospital accidents.
Eminem
#51. 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
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don't need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let's play him more.
Jacques Barzun
#57. It had been wonderful and magical and all the adjectives that people use to describe "making love.
Laurelin Paige
#58. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.
C.S. Lewis
#60. I confess I found it somewhat insipid when I last went ... it was all so prosy - so bonnety - so whisty and teacuppy - you see, the adjectives for it do not even exist, and I must invent them.
Jude Morgan
#61. Frankly I've never really subscribed to these adjectives tagging me as an 'icon', 'superstar', etc. I've always thought of myself as an actor doing his job to the best of his ability.
Amitabh Bachchan
#62. 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
#63. A mathematician is a magician who converts adjectives into nouns: continuous into continuum, infinite into infinity, infinitesimal into location, 0D into point, 1D into line, curved into geodesic ...
Bill Gaede
#64. Prepositions are painful, articles are arduous, adjectives are wild overachievements.
Isaac Marion
#65. In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names.
Mortimer Adler
#66. When you're young, you think of your parents with the simplest adjectives. As you get older, you add more adjectives and notice some of them contradict each other.
Elan Mastai
#67. Amazing, powerful, inspirational - those adjectives might make me sound like a fawning fan, but REWORK is that useful. Be prepared for a new feeling of clarity and motivation.
Kathy Sierra
#68. Your personal brand isn't a couple of adjectives, and it shouldn't be a resume either. It should demonstrate your authentic talents and strengths.
Sean Pisini
#69. Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.
Dick Schaap
#70. If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.
Ian Anderson
#71. Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.
Angela Davis
#72. Strike all the adjectives from your bio. If you take photos, you're not an 'aspiring' photographer, you're not an 'amazing' photographer either. You're a photographer. Don't get cute. Don't brag. Just state the facts.
Austin Kleon
#73. To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.
Maya Angelou
#74. 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
#76. A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime.
Sufjan Stevens
#77. 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
#78. Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
Mary Oliver
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. They've a temper, some of them
particularly verbs: they're the proudest
adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs
however I can manage the whole lot of them!
Lewis Carroll
#83. When you hear a Spanish cook describe a paella or a cake, you realize she's using a much richer repertoire of adjectives than what one of us would use to characterize a book or an important experience.
Julio Cortazar
#84. A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.
Mark Twain
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.
Gore Vidal
#90. I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.
Violette Leduc
#91. I dropped a word from the string of negative adjectives that had trailed behind me like tin cans behind the village idiot. Unappreciated, unloved, unmarried. But no longer unpublished.
Francine Prose
#92. Know the adjectives that define you and pay no heed to the verbs that defy you.
Vidya Kumar
#93. If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives, and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.
Henry Cabot Lodge
#94. 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
#95. Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver - words like "enthralling" and "luminous."
William Zinsser
#96. Writing is like painting with words, the paper is the canvas, the pen is the brush, the words are the colors and the verbs, nouns and adjectives are the blending of the hues that add depth to the picture you are creating.
-Reed Abbitt Moore-
Reed Abbitt Moore
#97. Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.
William Zinsser
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Millennials are often portrayed as apathetic, disinterested, tuned out and selfish. None of those adjectives describe the Millennials I've been privileged to meet and work with.
Chelsea Clinton
