Top 100 Quotes About Dictionary
#1. I'm beginning to think a dictionary would have been a far more advantageous birthday gift for you."
"More advantageous than being eaten alive by a giant, carnivorous bunny? Yes, most things fall in that category, I think.
William Ritter
#2. I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Steven Wright
#3. Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.
David Levithan
#5. Only a person with the true heart of a dictionary-writer would be lying in bed, three days after being stabbed in the gut, worrying about his P's.
Kristin Cashore
#6. If you would look up bad labor relations in the dictionary, you would have an American Airlines logo beside it.
Elton Joe Kendall
#7. What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
Sylvia Plath
#8. A great many years ago I purchased a fine dictionary. The first thing I did with it was to turn to the word "impossible," and neatly clip it out of the book. That would not be an unwise thing for you to do.
Napoleon Hill
#9. I contend, most seriously, that there is a real need for a good, thick, complete-as-possible dictionary of 'What People Used to Call Things.'
Gary Jennings
#10. As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
Charles De Lint
#11. Those who are absent, by its means become present: correspondence is the consolation of life. - VOLTAIRE, Philosophical Dictionary
Colin Dexter
#12. My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate.
China Mieville
#13. I've been in 'Who's Who' and I know what's what, but it'll be the first time I ever made the dictionary.
Mae West
#14. My word processor has spell-check capability, which lets me add words that didn't originally come in its comprehensive dictionary. It's interesting to see what words I had to add when writing this book: feedback, throughput, overshoot, self-organization, sustainability.
Donella H. Meadows
#15. When I see a dictionary on my desk I feel like I'm looking at some strange dog leaving a twisty piece of poop on our lawn out back.
Haruki Murakami
#16. Always remember that striving and struggling precede success, even in the dictionary.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
#17. My dictionary has no such expression as a violent fight.
Mahatma Gandhi
#18. Mistake is a single page in a part of Life ...
but Relation is a book of dictionary
So don't lose a full Book for a single page.
Rubeccapalm Rose
#19. Zarathustra: Do you have words? Do your words belong to you?
Giannina: No, my answer is no. I have no property in the dictionary. Words are anonymous like the disenfranchised masses that haven't been weighed - or named - or framed. My words belong to those who don't belong.
Giannina Braschi
#20. I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Zadie Smith
#21. Now what is a wedding? Well, Webster's dictionary describes a wedding as the process of removing weeds from one's garden.
Homer
#22. Jason straightened his shirt. "What's 'chauvinistic' mean?"
"It's in the dictionary next to a picture of your father," muttered
Kyle.
Kathleen Peacock
#24. I want to read the entire dictionary, but I am afraid that someone is going to spoil the ending!
Jen Selinsky
#25. Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.
Eddie Cantor
#26. If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?
Deb Caletti
#27. The word 'Sudra' which means 'Son of prostitute' should not find a place even in the history hereafter. We will not allow it to find a place in the dictionary or encycl
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
#28. Sometimes words just don't get you there ... don't let you say all the stuff from deep in your heart, stuff that no dictionary has a name for.
Bill Condon
#29. Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.
Anthony Marra
#30. We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.
Mervyn Peake
#31. Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.
Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.
Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
Ambrose Bierce
#32. There ought to be a dictionary of smiles; somewere you can look them up and find out what they mean.
Tom Holt
#33. I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
Jamaica Kincaid
#34. Who is to say who is the villain and who is the hero? Probably the dictionary.
Joss Whedon
#35. Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.
Alice Sebold
#36. It strikes me that I need to throw out the dictionary the world gave me about what it means to be a mother, a wife, a person of faith, an artist, and a woman and write my own.
Glennon Doyle Melton
#37. Lonely. I hated that word more than any other in the dictionary.
Pepper Winters
#38. Love?' he asked himself, giving no sense of recognition for that word in the dictionary of his mind. It was the only battle he had lost in life, the only thing that had been snatched away from him, before he could even claim it.
Faraaz Kazi
#39. Because you're mine and sharing isn't part of my dictionary.
Priya Kanaparti
#40. Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
Walter Lippmann
#41. If you look up the definition of greatness in the dictionary, it will say Michael Jordan.
Elgin Baylor
#42. Devils?" he said, his mind finding its train of thought as his hand found his cigarette lighter. "Devils are superstitions. Products of small minds and even smaller imaginations. There's one word that should be banned from the dictionary - devils. Ha! Now there's a flippant word.
Jason Mott
#43. The only place success comes before is in the dictionary
Milton Berle
#44. Might not hurt you to pick up a book, just as an experiment."
Whatever. I looked up the definition for 'nerd' in the dictionary. Know what it said?"
"I bet you'll tell me."
" 'If you're reading this, you are one.' "
You're a riot.
Brandon Mull
#45. At least Lester had the decency to weep at his act of perfidy. Reader, do you know what 'perfidy' means? I have a feeling you do, based on the scene that unfolded here. But you should look up the word in your dictionary, just to be sure.
Kate DiCamillo
#46. There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.
Erin McKean
#47. Trickle-down theories do not address the legitimate aspirations of the poor. We must lift those at the bottom so that poverty is erased from the dictionary of modern India.
Pranab Mukherjee
#49. My lad chewed and swallowed a dictionary. We gave him Epsom salts - but we can't get a word out of him.
Les Dawson
#50. People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers-
a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry.
Anthony Liccione
#51. If I would be given a chance to rewrite the dictionary, I would flip through the pages so quick and would replace India with, the land where beauty is redefined in itself, kindness has been touched, warmth has been spread and emotions has been felt.
Magith Noohukhan
#52. An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive. - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester
#53. I'm pretty sure that if you looked up the word "nuts" in the dictionary, you'll find my picture. Just another fun feature of my mutant-birdkid-freak package.
James Patterson
#54. The word hammockable (describing two trees that are the perfect distance apart between which a hammock can be hung) is not in the dictionary, but it should be. [Of lying in hammocks]
Dan Kieran
#55. BOOK, a four-letter word for truth serum" -Kevin 'Freak' from Freak's Dictionary
"Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick pg 161
Rodman Philbrick
#56. Hey. Not sure what's going on-gonna go find out. Be careful and don't do anything stupid. Don't come after me-your better on your own. See you. F
I sat on the edge of the bed, holding the note.
Okay, so Fang had looked up vague in the dictionary and this was what it had said to write.
James Patterson
#57. In my dictionary, and everyone's dictionary in the 1970s, the word 'queer' did mean strange and unusual. There was no slur to it.
Joe Wurzelbacher
#58. The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language.
Conan O'Brien
#59. As an artist you're looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I'm striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they've swallowed a f ... dictionary.
Damien Hirst
#60. Everyone knew Eleanor was the smartest person in their class. So when she said sabotage the rest of them went scrambling for the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Judy Blume
#61. Serendipity (n.) finding something good without looking for it
Dictionary
#62. I wonder what the difference between love and control is, but I'm afraid to look those words up in a dictionary.
Kevin Sampsell
#63. I bought a dictionary. First thing I did was, I looked up the word "dictionary", and it said "you're an asshole".
Demetri Martin
#64. It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).
Joseph Brodsky
#65. I didn't even know what the word lesbian meant until I was called one ... and then I had to look it up in the dictionary.
Kathleen Hanna
#66. I started by looking everything up in a Star Trek dictionary so I knew what I was talking about, but you can't do that because they talk in circles, and half of it doesn't make sense, so you'll just end up driving yourself more insane.
Jeri Ryan
#67. Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.
David Lodge
#68. [To beginning readers (ages 4 to 8) at a reading of "Noelle's Treasure Tale"]: If you discover a word in my book that you don't understand, ask your parents so they can look it up in the dictionary for you.
Gloria Estefan
#69. Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn't know, she would always look it up in the dictionary.
Geraldine McCaughrean
#70. People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
Steven Pinker
#71. If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.
Erin McKean
#73. I opened up a dictionary
And tried to find a meaning in a hurry.
Turned the pages to look for the word -- "Perfect"
And saw you listed there, coz I know you're worth it!
Ritika Chhabra
#74. Except you're not on my side, are you Steve? Because if you were on my side you just would have handed me the dictionary like a grown-up. Because if you make a big fucking gesture of it Steve, then it becomes a big fucking deal.
Nathan Filer
#75. 'The Devil's Dictionary' reads like a collection of great Twitter posts. And as people do with tweets, they can swipe Bierce's best lines and recite them as nearly their own. The reflected glory of reposting.
Victor LaValle
#76. Rap music ... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.
Tom Robbins
#77. Locavore" may have been the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year, but there's already been a word for those whose diets are restricted to seasonal items grown in their immediate area: That word is "peasant.
Brett Martin
#79. There is a breed of fashion models who weigh no more than an abridged dictionary.
Dave Barry
#80. I looked up the word "scandal" in my dictionary last night. No wonder there has been such a fuss.
Paula M. Hunter
#81. Pal, if you ever look up the word right in a dictionary, you'll find it's one of the oldest words in the English language. Even so, people have never stopped arguing about what it means. I suspect they always will.
Avi
#82. The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
Carl Sandburg
#83. Suffuse, v.
I don't like it when you use my shampoo, because then your hair smells like me, not you.
David Levithan
#84. Perry: Look up "idiot" in the dictionary. You know what you'll find?
Harry: A picture of me?
Perry: No! The definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!
Shane Black
#85. I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
Victor Hugo
#86. The recent Dictionary of Occupational Titles lists over twenty thousand specialized professions in America; being a millionaire is not one of them.
Jerzy Kosinski
#87. Republican comes in the dictionary just after reptile and just above repugnant.
Julia Roberts
#88. Success brings poise, especially avoirdupois. Success comes before work only in the dictionary.
William Cranch Bond
#89. The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary
Dave Kellett
#90. I read without a dictionary, understood some of each sentence, did not understand quite a bit of it, and was willing to read on ahead without understanding everything I had read.
John Freeman
#91. For me there is no such word as 'luck' in the dictionary.
Fabrice Muamba
#92. Love is binary in nature, either yes or no. True love is just a dictionary thing...
Ankit Rawat
#93. That does it," said Jace. "I'm going to get you a dictionary for Christmas this year."
"Why?" Isabelle said.
"So you can look up 'fun.' I'm not sure you know what it means.
Cassandra Clare
#94. Abstraction, n.
Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.
David Levithan
#95. I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.
E.B. White
#96. If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?
Steven Wright
#97. [T]he distance between sympathy and sensuality is as short as that which separates those two words in the dictionary.
Pitigrilli
#98. The Beatles did everything long before anyone else. They weren't afraid to try things and to experiment with a lot of sounds. In 200 years, when you look up 'rock and roll' in the dictionary, it'll have a picture of the Beatles next to it.
Joe Perry
#100. Most consumers don't have a good metric for deciding on whether the dictionary they want to use is a good one ... so they flip the book over, then go to the back, and it says, 'Over 250,000 entries.' And they go, 'Great, this dictionary must be awesome!'
Erin McKean
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
