Top 92 Quotes About Syntax
#1. And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.
Jean M. Auel
#2. We write programs not because we understand the syntax but to solve a problem
Various
#3. Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is syntax, grammar and logical continuity, which together form the carrier-wave of plain sense within which its deeper meanings are broadcast.
Don Paterson
#4. It sometimes happens to me while writing, that I seek a word; mischievous as it is it appears in English, it appears in Arabic, but refuses to come in Hebrew. To some extent I made up my Hebrew. Unquestionably, the influence of Arabic is dominant, my syntax is almost Arabic.
Sami Michael
#5. Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
Siri Hustvedt
#6. He had a shaggy black dog whom he called Syntax.
Anton Chekhov
#7. Nouns and verbs hold the power but syntax casts the spell.
Janet Peery
#8. A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
Patrick Modiano
#9. Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.
Mason Cooley
#11. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after "semicolons," and another one after "now." And
Ursula K. Le Guin
#12. Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes.
Erik Naggum
#13. Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking.
Quentin Crisp
#14. When a person has lived alone for a long time, the only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax: this face, these bones that walk, this mouth, this hand that writes.
Valeria Luiselli
#15. Since Feeling is first who ever pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you ...
E. E. Cummings
#16. A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of language.
Marya Mannes
#17. Don't you hate code that's not properly indented? Making it [indenting] part of the syntax guarantees that all code is properly indented.
Guido Van Rossum
#18. The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.
Fernando J. Corbato
#19. JavaScript derives its syntax from Java, its first-class functions from Scheme, and its prototype-based inheritance from Self. But
David Flanagan
#20. The course of a man's destiny can seem sharply altered by a sudden illumination. But illumination is no more than the Spirit's sudden vision of a road that is long prepared. Gradually I learned grammar. I practiced syntax. My feelings were awakened. Then a poem suddenly blazed in my heart.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#21. Uncertainty is a good thing at the end of a narrative. A simultaneous gain and loss captures the complexity of human existence. The way one sentence follows another, if we pay attention to syntax and rhythm, should express the final effect we want the narrative to have on a reader.
Lee Martin
#22. We depend on various cultural forms-the syntax and semantics of English, the deliverances of modern astronomy-to know that the earth is round, but this in no way jeopardizes the objective circularity of the planet.
Douglas Groothuis
#23. Why do you seem so annoyed at what I'm saying?"
"Because we're too much like each other. I loathe your face, which is a caricature of mine, I loathe your voice, which is a mockery of mine, I loathe your pathetic syntax, which is my own.
Jorge Luis Borges
#24. Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#26. Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'
Terry Eagleton
#27. I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.
Jerry Fodor
#28. Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
Gordon W. Allport
#29. He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.
Evelyn Waugh
#30. Prose is not necessarily good because it obeys the rules of syntax, but it is fairly certain to be bad if it ignores them.
Wilson Follett
#31. Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.
George Eliot
#32. 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
#33. Grammar, which is the art of using words properly, comprises four parts: Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody.
Samuel Johnson
#34. [Dennis Mathis] was very sensitive about keeping the unique way that I spoke English - it had a lot of Mexicanisms or Mexican syntax. So you keep it in because it's adding something unique.
Sandra Cisneros
#35. Do not be alarmed by the minor inconsistencies in the syntax. They are meant to heighten your level of attention and thereby make you a better programmer.
David Geary
#36. Mr Robert Montgomery's genius [is] far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax? [His] readers must take such grammar as they can get and be thankful.
Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild
#37. Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.
Lincoln Kirstein
#38. The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax
Thomas Paine
#39. 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
#40. If you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and trameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!
William Makepeace Thackeray
#42. We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy.
Anne Carson
#43. I got hung up on diction and syntax; I agonized over every word.
M. Pierce
#44. It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.
Richard K. Morgan
#45. It's hard to get motivated fixing a compile-time syntax error when you can buy a powder that turns a house into a monster.
Ryan North
#46. Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language.
William Shawn
#47. Syntax must be bad, having sin and tax in it.
Will Rogers
#48. I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.
Marvin Bell
#49. A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.
Denis Donoghue
#50. What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
David Baker
#51. There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
Dorothy Parker
#52. Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.
John Steinbeck
#53. The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I'll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you're not worrying so much about the underlying syntax.
Tim Berners-Lee
#54. I have been so-many too-many persons; life, unlike syntax, allows one more than three.
Salman Rushdie
#55. A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.
Fred Brooks
#56. The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It
David Crystal
#57. I think one reason I'm drawn to expansive syntax is that arias are so often exercises in extending language as a means of intensifying feeling.
Garth Greenwell
#58. A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.
Alice Steinbach
#59. Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception - a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to ... inevitabilities.
Brian Friel
#60. I want to prove you don't need to have academic syntax to be intelligent.
Eddie Huang
#61. Geordie wrote a letter to Mr. Webster in which the shrieking figure of Apology was hounded through a labyrinth of agonized syntax.
Robertson Davies
#62. I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
Frantz Fanon
#63. My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters.
Bram Cohen
#64. The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
Marilyn Hacker
#65. Obama's gift for delivering set-piece oratorical tours de force had special resonance to Americans fed up with a president who could hardly string two words together without a collision of syntax and whose idea of clever was the single entendre.
Tina Brown
#66. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them.
Edwin H. Friedman
#67. I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#68. With Dremel, engineers could formulate queries using an SQL-like syntax, speeding up the process of iterative analysis without dealing with the overhead of defining raw MapReduce jobs.
Anonymous
#69. The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
Marilyn Hacker
#70. If the nails are weak, your house will collapse. If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.
William Zinsser
#71. Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
#72. Since feelings come first, who cares about the syntax of things?
E. E. Cummings
#74. I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than ... is where it all comes from.
Zachary Cole Smith
#75. Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning variety-of syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary-from region to region.
Israel Shenker
#76. I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax ...
Dennis Ritchie
#77. I envied Victor's certainty, the idiot syntax of the righteous. This belief - that the world had a visible order, and all we had to do was look for the symbols - as if evil were a code that could be cracked.
Emma Cline
#78. But the world, as a creation, is not a mere construction; it too is more than a syntax. It is a poem, which we are apt to forget when grammar takes exclusive hold of our minds.
Anonymous
#79. Syntax, like government, can only be obeyed. It is
therefore of no use except when you
have something particular to command
such as: Go buy me a bunch of carrots.
John Cage
#80. What makes sense is not law, syntax, rules or structure
Aaron Betsky
#81. When meter is honored over thythm, line over syntax, form over structure, even the most prodigious manipulation of traditional patterns may be rendered purely decorative.
Ellen Bryant Voigt
#82. Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints
the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk
we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.
Harry Mathews
#83. I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations ... English from Edwardian times.
Sandra Cisneros
#84. Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are deconstructed and post-individual.
Patrice Pavis
#85. The Canadian dialect of English ... seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.
Lister Sinclair
#86. Syntax is complex, but the complexity is there for a reason. For our thoughts are surely even more complex, and we are limited by a mouth that can pronounce a single word at a time.
Steven Pinker
#87. Some authors wouldn't know their syntax from a Tampax.
Kevin Ansbro
#88. Panic is a synonym for being; in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntax, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss. Its opposite is oblivion: not the tranquil oblivion of sleep but the threatening oblivions of sex and death.
Louise Gluck
#89. She walks to a table
She walk to table
She is walking to a table
She walk to table now
What difference does it make
What difference it make
In Nature, no completeness
No sentence really complete thought
Language, like woman,
Look best when free, undressed.
Wang Ping
#90. A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general description, a Biker.
David Foster Wallace
#91. They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#92. I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
The past, present, and future walk into a bar - it was tense.
Kelli Russell Agodon
