Quotes About Verbs

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

Kerstin Gier

#2. I think we live in a unique time - the verbs that make up our online and mobile lives haven't been completely invented or imagined for us. That was kind of a life path I was on.

Mark Pincus

#3. When I got bored, I conjugated verbs. Kissing and conjugating go well together. They're both French. No.

Rebekah Crane

#4. James Blish told me I had the worst case of "said bookism" (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary.

Anne McCaffrey

#5. There are objects you may desire but cannot explain. There are objects that are not nouns, there are actions that are not verbs. There are things we want that exist at the edge of the forest, at the rim of the ocean, just over the hill, just out of sight.

Charles Yu

#6. You know what would help the instruction form? Verbs! Verbs would be nice! Because they help you get to the end of a thought!

Lewis Black

#7. First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

Peter Ellis

#8. Take these verbs and enjoy them. They're yours, Craig. You deserve them because you chose them. You could have left them all behind but you chose to stay here.

Ned Vizzini

#9. Out, he said. People who can supply that amount of firepower don't need to supply verbs as well. Ford and Arthur went out, closely followed by the wrong end of the Kill-O-Zap gun and the buttons. Turning

Douglas Adams

#10. A writer need not be bound by flat statement like "It was a rough sea," when verbs like tumble and roil and seethe wait to spell from her pen.

Rebecca McClanahan

#11. It has been brought to my attention that I may be a verbivore. I consumptor of words, that I subsequently spew forth with considerable consternation.
A Volley of verbs that are quite vexing has taken form, perhaps under the guise of consonants most foul!! Where have you wandered faithful vowels?

Neil Leckman

#12. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.

A.B. Guthrie Jr.

#13. I don't grasp things this early in the day. I mean, I hear voices, all right, but I can't pick out the verbs.

Jean Kerr

#14. The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.

James Russell Lowell

#15. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word postmodernist.

Donna Tartt

#16. If he was trying German irregular verbs on the poor beast," said Clovis, "he deserved all he got.

Saki

#17. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#18. He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

Robert Cormier

#19. I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded.

Dylan Thomas

#20. The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.

Richard Brautigan

#21. So many problems are solved simply by knowing enough verbs.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden

#22. So what you're saying is you can't explain it."
"I did explain it."
"No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format.

Maggie Stiefvater

#23. I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Steven Pinker

#24. It wasn't fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping - pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective.

John Casey

#25. But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ...

Julio Cortazar

#26. She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.

Philip Pullman

#27. I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.

Carl Sandburg

#28. Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.

E.B. White

#29. I know I have difficulties with some verbs. But if they get me, they get me. And if they don't understand me, they don't understand me.

Thalia

#30. He was just alive," [Gansey] said helplessly. "He just taught us four irregular verbs last week. And you killed him.

Maggie Stiefvater

#31. Ours is an active faith. It is made alive and appealing only when our nouns turn into verbs.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss

#32. I talk in subjects and verbs, and sort of wind around in concentric circles until I get far enough away from the beginning so that I can call it the end, and it ends.

Garrison Keillor

#33. The Apple Pie Hubbub was a significant novel for me, because that's when I first started using verbs.

Steve Martin

#34. I stopped speaking when I realized I was no longer using any verbs or nouns, or making any sense

Jenny Han

#35. He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions ... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the

H.G.Wells

#36. Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Marianne Moore

#37. Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns.

Zadie Smith

#38. Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.

Mark Twain

#39. I think there simply comes a point at which you're beating your head against the wall with revision, when you're making something different but not better. For me, revision usually has more to do with making the language prettier, finding clearer images, using more active verbs.

Mary J. Miller

#40. Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

Frida Kahlo

#41. Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

Donald Hall

#42. Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.

Janet Fitch

#43. I miss Latin. So much fun
all those exciting verbs that don't come until the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.

Libba Bray

#44. Second, English has dispensed with the need to match nouns and verbs by gender, so you don't have to know what sex a table is before you can correctly talk about a table.

Robert M. Knight

#45. There are but two future verbs which man may appropriate confidently and without pride: "I shall suffer," and "I shall die.

Sophie Swetchine

#46. Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.

Soren Kierkegaard

#47. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs

Arthur Conan Doyle

#48. If you want your style to be energetic and lively, take the most direct route and use the most energetic and lively part of speech in the English language: verbs.

Stephen Wilbers

#49. Some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice. Yet the passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason.

Constance Hale

#50. You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

Steven Pinker

#51. The list of verbs associated with the six levels in Table 4-1 helps you to select a verb that fits the level of learning.

Elaine Biech

#52. There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance.

W. H. Auden

#53. I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me.

Ralph Steadman

#54. Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence.

Stephen King

#55. We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do ... forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in , the fundamental verb, to Be.

Evelyn Underhill

#56. In the end, the tenses of the verbs settled into a common groove, the persons of the narrators, first and third (the latter with so many variants and identities), became one, and events thronged toward a day that began uncertainly and remained undecided, with a light gray film covering the sky.

Filip Florian

#57. Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Gretel Ehrlich

#58. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

Stephen Fry

#59. Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world postmodernist.

Donna Tartt

#60. 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

#61. so many theological terms, words like 'monotheism' are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology,

N. T. Wright

#62. Males categorize their worlds by counting, naming, and organizing the objects they confront. Women, in addition to personalizing their topics, talk in a more dynamic way, focusing on how their topics change. Discussions of change require more verbs.

James W. Pennebaker

#63. Breathe deep."
"Deeply," I forced out through my tingling mouth.
"What?"
"Deeply. Adverbs follow verbs."
"Seriously? You're giving me a grammar lesson in the middle of your barfing?

Rachel Hawthorne

#64. The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.

Erez Lieberman Aiden

#65. When a grammatical construction is associated with politicians you can be sure that it provides a way to evade responsibility. Zombie nouns, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That

Steven Pinker

#66. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#67. Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence, that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#68. If you know how to handle the verbs, you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary.

Michel Thomas

#69. I'm uncomfortable with verbs; they expect too much.

Caitriona Lally

#70. You must hear the birds song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#71. We spend most of our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do.

Evelyn Underhill

#72. One moment you can say the words 'I am'. And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.

Lynne Truss

#73. Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.

Chuck Palahniuk

#74. One of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring.

Margaret Atwood

#75. I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

P. J. O'Rourke

#76. For now, let's just say that if your API is re-defining the HTTP verbs or if it is assigning new meanings to HTTP status codes or making up its own status codes, it is not RESTful.

George Reese

#77. After all, it is an ancient and valuable right of the English people to turn their nouns into verbs when they are so minded.

Henry Watson Fowler

#78. No proper princess would come out looking for dragons," Woraug objected.
"Well I'm not a proper princess then!" Cimorene snapped. "I make cherries jubillee and I volunteer for dragons, and I conjugate Latin verbs
or at least I would if anyone would let me. So there!

Patricia C. Wrede

#79. Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

Benjamin Whorf

#80. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

Jonathan Franzen

#81. Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

Mary Oliver

#82. Sometimes you can do things with Spanish - like verbs and genders - easier than you can in English.

Juan Felipe Herrera

#83. They've a temper, some of them
particularly verbs: they're the proudest
adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs
however I can manage the whole lot of them!

Lewis Carroll

#84. Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves.

Pat Conroy

#85. There are two basic groups of German verbs ... strong and weak. Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow typical rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don't follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on your own terms ... Like people, ... The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are the same.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#86. Sydney! Stop. Think of something else. Conjugate Latin verbs. Recite the periodic table.

Richelle Mead

#87. Nouns and verbs hold the power but syntax casts the spell.

Janet Peery

#88. Know the adjectives that define you and pay no heed to the verbs that defy you.

Vidya Kumar

#89. Strunk and White don't speculate as to why so many writers are attracted to passive verbs, but I'm willing to; I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.

Stephen King

#90. There's nothing quite like a Scotch education. One is left with an irreparable debt. My head is full of irregular verbs still.

Ivor Cutler

#91. Verbs. All of them tiring.

Charles Frazier

#92. I am leaking letters and dripping verbs and bathing myself in the actions they long to take.

Tyler Knott Gregson

#93. For example, from nouns to verbs to aspects of grammar, we each store language in different areas, recruiting different regions for different components.

John Medina

#94. Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.

Ray Bradbury

#95. Writing is like painting with words, the paper is the canvas, the pen is the brush, the words are the colors and the verbs, nouns and adjectives are the blending of the hues that add depth to the picture you are creating.
-Reed Abbitt Moore-

Reed Abbitt Moore

#96. The Psalms wrap nouns and verbs around our pain better than any other book.

Joni Eareckson Tada

#97. Travel. Fly. Swim. Meet. Love. Dance. Win. Smile. Laugh. Hold. Walk. Skip. Ski. Sled. Play basketball. Run. Run. Run. Run home. Run home and enjoy. Enjoy. Take these verbs and enjoy them.

Ned Vizzini

#98. I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.

Richard Ford

#99. His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action.

Jennifer Crusie

#100. Looping. Some days are so dark I can't see anything but a miserable fog of number after number, word after word, clouds of verbs and nouns and none of them the ones that will make time go backward.

Maria Dahvana Headley