Quotes About Clauses

#1. Turning into a vampire is like signing a supernatural contract and like any contract, there are clauses.
And there is the fine print.

Cyma Rizwaan Khan

#2. In the long sentences of the president's message, semicolons followed by "yet" or "but" separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt's characteristic "on the one hand, on the other" style of crediting antagonistic views.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#3. Your children are not the same. Not at all. Each one is unique. There are no "boiler plate" clauses that fit all children. They are like snowflakes with their own patterns and their own shapes and their own sizes.

Bob Benson

#4. My wife was a riddle. I think all women are. Men are not riddles, even the smart ones. We are independent clauses, such as: "I like meat." "Water feel good.

Harrison Scott Key

#5. Muggles have garden gnomes, too, you know," Harry told Ron as they crossed the lawn.
"Yeah, I've seen those things they think are gnomes," said Ron, bent double with his head in a peony bush, "like fat little Santa Clauses with fishing rods ...

J.K. Rowling

#6. The translator, a lonely sort of acrobat, becomes confused in a labyrinth of paradox, or climbs a pyramid of dependent clauses and has to invent a way down from it in his own language.

Lydia Davis

#7. I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.

Anna Quindlen

#8. There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed.

Ella Dominguez

#9. Two Santa Clauses on the corner. How can you tell the Polish one? The one with the Easter basket.

Henny Youngman

#10. Marriage succeeds only as lifetime commitment with no escape clauses.

James Dobson

#11. The standard clauses of the American dream only included two weeks of vacation a year.

Jeff Deck

#12. You folks feeling the economic pinch? Are you a little fed up with the economic news? It's bad. The department stores, this holiday season, no Santa Claus. They're laying off department-store Santa Clauses. So more bad news for John McCain.

David Letterman

#13. Today, the religion clauses of the First Amendment do not need to be fixed; they need to be followed.

Walter F. Mondale

#14. The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses,

Margaret Atwood

#15. The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.

Fredric Jameson

#16. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren't. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#17. Look at the international bodies that came out of U.N. - international, publicly funded bodies that neither you or I know their names, because they are completely outdated and still publicly funded because there are no sunset clauses.

Mo Ibrahim

#18. Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.
From, The Joy of Writing, Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska

#19. The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.

Stanley Fish

#20. Mandatory arbitration clauses I think, more often than not, work to the detriment of working people.

Thomas Perez

#21. 5. Do not join independent clauses by a comma.

William Strunk Jr.

#22. His sentences are in homely English, and yet there is something Roman in the easy handling of clauses, and something Greek in their ascent from analogy to idea.

Jocelyn Gibb

#23. Nonbelievers are protected by the religion clauses of the Constitution not because secular humanism is a religion, which it is not, but because when the government acts on the basis of religion it discriminates against those who do not "believe" in the governmentally favored manner.

Norman Dorsen

#24. I know what an Act to make things simpler means. It means that the people who drew it up don't understand it themselves and that every one of its clauses needs a law-suit to disentangle it.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#25. We shall not bind ourselves by treaties. We shall not allow ourselves to be entangled by treaties. We reject all clauses on plunder and violence, but we shall welcome all clauses containing provisions for good-neighbourly relations and all economic agreements; we cannot reject these.

Vladimir Lenin

#26. It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#27. 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

#28. Partly because the town is just finicky, there are strange Catch 22 clauses in the consciousness of this community and one of them was that you, I found out, you can't do a comedy unless you've just done a comedy.

Val Kilmer

#29. Spirit and soul is horseshit of the worst sort. Obviously there are no fairies, no Santa Clauses, no spirits. What there is, is human goals and purposes as noted by sane existentialists. But a lot of transcendentalists are utter screwballs.

Albert Ellis

#30. The real difference between the United States and other nations lies not in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, but in the fact that the substantive clauses of that Constitution are enforced by individuals independent of and not beholden to the elected branches.

Harold H. Greene

#31. Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective.

Kenneth L. Pike

#32. Today, the law is a crazy quilt of provisions and clauses that very often have little to do with securing general happiness but instead are designed to secure the particular happiness of various advocacy groups, politicians and bureaucrats.

Joel Miller

#33. 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

#34. He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.

Jorge Luis Borges

#35. Swaraj, without any qualifying clause, includes that which is better than the best one can conceive or have today.

Mahatma Gandhi

#36. [Did you] ever know a sincere emotion to express itself in a subordinate clause?

Dorothy L. Sayers