Quotes About The Subjunctive

#1. It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

Alan Bennett

#2. A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

Donna Leon

#3. At one point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what was not, could invent an alternative reality. He

Donna Leon

#4. Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

Mark Twain

#5. And if we never slept together or otherwise 'realized' our relationship, I would leave Spain with this gorgeous possibility intact, and in my memory could always ponder the relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.

Ben Lerner

#6. Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.

David Mitchell

#7. History cannot be unwritten or written in the subjunctive, and the wholesale application of late twentieth-century values distorts the past and makes it less comprehensible.

Lawrence James

#8. As a rule of thumb, if a verb or phrase is about wishes, emotions, doubt, denial, recommendations, knowledge and understanding, then there's a strong possibility the Subjunctive will follow.

Linda Plummer

#9. The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.

W. Somerset Maugham

#10. Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood will
one day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?

Carl Sagan

#11. A woman gets into a taxi in Boston's Logan airport and asks the driver, 'Can you take me somplace where I can get scrod?' He says, 'Gee, that's the first time I've heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.

Steven Pinker

#12. Everyone knows the best volume of the encyclopedia is the one with ships-S.

Roger Angell

#13. When you are always ready for the worst, then the worst is likely to show up

Gary Hopkins

#14. You are where you are in your life because of what has gone into your mind, and the ONLY WAY to change where you are is to change what goes into your mind."~ Zig Ziglar

Dale Calvert

#15. The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive.

Robertson Davies

#16. When there is hope, there is life.

Estelle

#17. It's with my brush that I make love.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#18. You gotta love an attentive vampire

--Kylie

C.C. Hunter

#19. I love music, especially classical like Verdi; it's a great way to relax.

David Suchet

#20. Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem.

James Merrill

#21. I didn't have parents who were, you know, racing to get a reality television show, you know? Or looking to benefit in some way from their daughter's fame.

Molly Ringwald

#22. One can suffer a convulsion of one's entire nature, and, unless it makes some noise, no one notices. It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.

Elizabeth Bowen

#23. Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality.

C.J. Cherryh

#24. So," Chronicler said. "Subjunctive mood." "At best," Kvothe said, "it is a pointless thing. It needlessly complicates the language. It offends me.

Patrick Rothfuss

#25. I was born lucky, and I have lived lucky. What I had was used. What I still have is being used. Lucky.

Katharine Hepburn

#26. London keeps me grounded. We don't get praised every time we open our gobs there.

Miranda Richardson

#27. I hate all these crazy verbs, using a subjunctive to get what's happened in the future and the past mixed up.

Kerstin Gier

#28. Michelangelo was once asked how he would carve an elephant. He replied, I would take a large piece of stone and take away everything that was not the elephant.

Sharon Salzberg