Top 100 Quotes About Phrases
#1. Her new friends especially liked the southern phrases she recalled from her childhood, such as her father's remark that 'if I hadn't sold that Coca Cola stock I could just sit and pat my foot.
Sherill Tippins
#2. Two of my favorite phrases to repeat to myself daily are 'Life is perfect' and 'I am grateful'. The more I do, the better I feel. Try it for yourself!
Hal Elrod
#3. Demonslayer planted every step with care, keeping as silent as he could moving through the grass. Teenagers slung insults at each other beyond the hedgerow on his left, a barrage of words and phrases
Cassandra Leuthold
#4. The universe does not work in phrases; don't focus on the commas; just wait for the full stop.
Jude Idada
#5. Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.
Isaac Asimov
#6. Scholars of religion refer to the current metamorphosis in religiousness with phrases like the "move to horizontal transcendence" or the "turn to the immanent." But it would be more accurate to think of it as the rediscovery of the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual within the secular.
Harvey Cox
#7. What all these lofty and vague phrases boil down to is that the court can impose things that the voters don't want and the Constitution does not require, but which are in vogue in circles to which the court responds.
Thomas Sowell
#8. The two most important phrases in the human language are "If only" and "Maybe someday". Our past mistakes and our unrequited longings. The things we regret and the things we yearn for. That's what makes us who we are.
Will Ferguson
#9. It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart.
Thornton Wilder
#10. For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all.
Lewis Carroll
#11. They're singing your praises while stealing your phrases.
Charles Mingus
#12. Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.
Frantz Fanon
#13. If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.
Stephen Fry
#14. Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.
Gilbert Highet
#15. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle.
William James
#16. There has never been a poet able to heal with words, nor accurately express with phrases, the pain of missing a lost loved one.
Steve Maraboli
#17. conventional phrases are a sort of fireworks, easily let off, and liable to take a great variety of shapes and colours not at all suggested by their original form.
Charles Dickens
#18. Kutesosh gajair'is." It was a bare whisper.
"Such simple phrases. I destroy the enemy. I protect life. And my personal favorite - "
"Kun-kabynalti osu fuir'is."
"None shall die while I watch over them. The irony is so beautiful." Elkinsair wiped at his eyes.
Patrick Weekes
#19. Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over.
Villiers De L'Isle-Adam
#20. (I resent people who use phrases like "my first," so the person they're speaking to is practically obliged to imagine them having sex to complete the sentence. It's not nice.)
Anna Maxted
#21. Ah! I--to you, Petrovitch, this--" It must be known that Akakiy Akakievitch expressed himself chiefly by prepositions, adverbs, and scraps of phrases which had no meaning whatever.
Nikolai Gogol
#22. The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.
George Henry Lewes
#23. I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
Margaret Atwood
#24. If my phrases shock the reader, that only shows it is high time he or she was shocked.
H.G.Wells
#25. It is time to browse through the precious books that have meant the most to you that you may rediscover illuminating phrases and sentences to light your pathway to the future ...
Wilferd Peterson
#26. Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader's soul.
The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#27. Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!
Anne McCaffrey
#28. I tried to find a rhythm, and I stopped comparing myself to anybody else. One of the great phrases for me is "Compare and despair." If I compare myself to Kate Middleton or Dame Judi Dench, I'm going to come out at the bottom and be sad.
Jamie Lee Curtis
#29. I tossed up whether I'd see [the critic] or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing.
Graham Greene
#30. I wanted to say a prayer and tried hard to remember one, but all I could think of was silly phrases such as 'Dear Sir' and 'Under the Circumstances'. In my sadness and confusion I mumbled those.
Hermann Hesse
#31. I tend to employ braided narrative threads in the lyric, so often echoes (of phrases or images) will occur and will hit my ear so I can shape different resonances and shifts in tone.
Anna Journey
#32. To be angered by evil is to partake of it, stupid. - Phrases of Import and Salvation, Chapter IX, The Book of Universal Truths and Other Humorous Anecdotes
Alan Dean Foster
#33. There's nothing good about being certain about things. And I don't think there's any real talent in using language in a manipulative way, with phrases like "tax relief" or "Social Security reform." It's politically clever, but it's also completely disingenuous, and it's not something to aspire to.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#34. Effective readers, even at their earliest levels, read in five to seven word phrases rather than word by word.
Richard Allington
#35. And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.
Gustave Flaubert
#36. The triumphs of a mysterious non-meeting are desolate ones; unspoken phrases, silent words.
Anna Akhmatova
#37. People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be, until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.
Vladimir Lenin
#38. Sometimes when an idea flashes, you distrust it because it seems too easy. You qualify it with all kinds of evasive phrases because you're timid about it. But often, this turns out to be the best idea of all.
Saul Bass
#39. I to my friends, to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken.
Virginia Woolf
#40. The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from "controversial" matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life.
John Gresham Machen
#41. she's offering me more cryptic phrases with a depth to them that even the top-ranked philosophers would have a difficult time decoding.
Kayla Krantz
#42. One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.
Mark Twain
#43. Don't be ridiculous. Only one of the most condescending phrases in the English language ... and
Christine Pope
#44. I hate phrases like that. "Jesus vocab," El would call them. Things you learn in church that are hammered into you until they're so normal that you expect everyone else who doesn't go to church to know what you mean.
Julie Murphy
#45. I'm a Roman Catholic. Or was. I was brought up that way and used to say my prayers every night, but I don't pray to God any more. I might use the usual phrases I picked up from my parents, 'Oh, if God spares me next year ... ' or 'Please God ... ' but they're only phrases.
Cilla Black
#46. I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
Virginia Woolf
#47. He who repeats a tale after a man,
Is bound to say, as nearly as he can,
Each single word, if he remembers it,
However rudely spoken or unfit,
Or else the tale he tells will be untrue,
The things invented and the phrases new.
Geoffrey Chaucer
#48. We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.
Emil Cioran
#49. Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere - not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!
Sinclair Lewis
#50. No one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two "Alice" books.
Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
#51. There was no pretention here, no hidden meanings in the phrases they spoke, no elaborate plans designed to impress the other. Though it had always been easy to spend time with Mike, she suddenly realized that in the whirlwind of the past couple of weeks, she'd almost forgot how much she enjoyed it.
Nicholas Sparks
#52. In phrases as brief as a breath worldly wisdom concentrates.
Willis Regier
#53. The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a
Lyndsay Faye
#54. I basically try not to waste any lines in any of my songs, and I think the witty phrases and funny lyrics I have bring a smarter sound to college hip-hop.
Mike Stud
#55. Phrases and images from the game filtered through his head... hitting the sweet spot, working the rosin bag, over the bat, going deep, in the hole, double header, baseball was a filthy, dirty sport!
J.D. Ruskin
#56. O Fame! if I ever took delight in thy praises, Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases, Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover The thought that I was not unworthy to love her.
Lord Byron
#57. I twisted words, phrases, and idioms around,
and deftly nixed the budding metaphor bounds.
Voila, a virtual book in a blog became softbound!
Rebecca Rose Orton
#58. I hate it when people use phrases like 'no offense' right after they say the crappiest things to you.
Stephanie Tromly
#59. There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil
improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?"
"Are you a young lady?"
"I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.
Charlotte Bronte
#60. It is the whole modern concept of love which should be re-examined, such as is commonly but transparently expressed in phrases like 'love at first sight' and 'honeymoon'. All this shoddy terminology is on top of that tainted with the most reactionary irony.
Andre Breton
#62. I should have" is one of the most tragic phrases in the English language. Live while you can.
Michael A. McLellan
#63. I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'
Tao Lin
#64. What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.
Northrop Frye
#65. The act of speaking felt like shaking his head until the right phrases fell out.
Robert Repino
#66. Thus, to take the phrases in Acts and make them into a magical incantation upon which God s forgiveness rests is to grossly misunderstand the phrase and, consequently, grossly misportray the kind of God whom Scripture reveals. Beyond
Gregory A. Boyd
#67. Someone did a study of the three most-often-heard phrases in New York City. One is "Hey taxi." Two is "What train do I take to get to Bloomingdales?" And three is "Don't worry, it's only a flesh wound.
David Letterman
#69. Why don't these translation books just include general phrases that could be applied in a variety of situations like, "Say nothing unless it's in English"?
Joe Cawley
#70. I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.
John Updike
#71. We had so many of those meaningless banter phrases, those icebreakers ... they were meaningless-but without malice of harm, and they helped awkward people get over their embarrassment at being alive.
Frank Delaney
#72. The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare - all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#73. The old phrases crack and meaning shakes out wet and new.
Nadine Gordimer
#74. Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
Eleanor Catton
#75. The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
John Steinbeck
#76. Slowly the darkness began to weave its way into my mind, and before long I was hopelessly out of control. I could not follow the path of my own thoughts. Sentences flew around in my head and fragmented first into phrases and then words; finally, only sounds remained.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#77. The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
Jakob Nielsen
#78. the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, "unutterably alone.
Julia Cameron
#79. In 5 minutes, 1 minute and many other phrases most of them are a lie..., but why do we say them?
Deyth Banger
#80. Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires.
Simone De Beauvoir
#81. The early cars already are drawing deep breaths past my door. And last night's phrases sick with lack of basis are still writhing on my floor.
Fiona Apple
#82. Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains ...
Virginia Woolf
#83. Avoid theatrical flourishes - the phrases that sound so damned good that they stand up and beg to be recognized as "good writing," and therefore must be struck from the text.
Donald Spoto
#84. For a wise man, I have been told, once said, 'Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate in empty phrases.' But alas, my lady, I am but a mass of empty phrases, it would seem.
Isaac Asimov
#85. The phrase 'blue plate special' has always been one of the homiest, coziest, most sweetly nostalgic phrases in the English language for me.
Kate Christensen
#86. How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things.
D.H. Lawrence
#87. Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.
Michel De Montaigne
#88. This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind.
John Drinkwater
#89. How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins.
Elena Ferrante
#90. That has to be one of the dumbest phrases Christians use: "finding God's will." We don't have to "find" God's will, because it's not lost. "The Lord ... is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9 NKJV). His will is that we be involved in that mission.
J.D. Greear
#91. There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet (you can call it science fiction or speculative fiction; you can call it anything you wish) and they are simple phrases: What if . . . ? If only . . . If this goes on
Ray Bradbury
#92. Each asana is like a sound or letter in an alphabet. Every letter in an alphabet produces a unique sound vibration. Each asana vibrates at a specific frequency. When asanas are performed in sequence, beautiful phrases or sutras result, producing a mystical language.
Sharon Gannon
#93. It's not often that I get to remember and use phrases like "on out my farm" or "powerful ugly" in modern scripts.
Mark Waid
#94. My intellect, my wit - I'd forgotten I'd even possessed them, and they were dull and neglected, to be sure. But in the company of others who prized thought over action, laughter over brooding, they blossomed and sharpened. My tongue fairly tripped with sparkling phrases, insightful comments.
Melanie Benjamin
#95. When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker
#96. Also, when on a campaign to convince a stranger that you aren't a few fries short of a Happy Meal, throwing around phrases like "tangentially Swedish" is not the best way to go.
Maureen Johnson
#97. When asked what I'd be if I weren't a writer, I'm tempted to respond with one of father's favorite phrases, one I despised while growing up: "I hate 'what-ifs.'"
Cate Marvin
#98. But I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution.
Azar Nafisi
#99. I write as clearly as I am able to. I sometimes tackle ideas and notions that are relatively complex, and it is very difficult to be sure that I am conveying them in the best way. Anyone who goes beyond cliche phrases and cliche ideas will have this trouble.
R.A. Lafferty
#100. Robin: I'm sure you've learnt to bake, but you have not learned to handle Much. The phrases that you need my lady, are "No", "No you can't", and "No, get out of here before I throw something at you".
Robin McKinley
