Top 100 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. A person who uses party as a verb is a person who will walk into a shop and walk out wearing a rubber jumpsuit.
Cynthia Heimel
#10. The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do .
Thomas Carlyle
#11. I do so like all-encompassing words. Verb, adjective, noun. Yes, you are shitted.
Kim Harrison
#12. 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
#13. Feminism is something you do. It's a verb. It's what you are. It's an activity; it's something you're actively engaged in.
Kathleen Hanna
#14. All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection.
Joseph Devlin
#15. 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
#16. The verb that's been enforced on girls is to please. Girls are trained to please ... I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be educate, or activate, or engage, or confront, or defy, or create.
Eve Ensler
#17. 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
#18. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.
A.B. Guthrie Jr.
#19. 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
#20. I wish I was the verb 'to trust' and never let you down ...
Eddie Vedder
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. If he was trying German irregular verbs on the poor beast," said Clovis, "he deserved all he got.
Saki
#24. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.
Ulysses S. Grant
#25. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.
Richard Brautigan
#31. In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be.
Franz Liszt
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.
Philip Pullman
#37. Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.
Jonathan Raban
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Green is a process, not a status. We need to think of 'green' as a verb, not an adjective.
Daniel Goleman
#41. 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
#43. He was just alive," [Gansey] said helplessly. "He just taught us four irregular verbs last week. And you killed him.
Maggie Stiefvater
#44. Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.
John Dryden
#45. Is there a God? No. God is a verb, not a noun.
Micky Dolenz
#46. Ours is an active faith. It is made alive and appealing only when our nouns turn into verbs.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
#47. 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
#48. The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
#49. The Apple Pie Hubbub was a significant novel for me, because that's when I first started using verbs.
Steve Martin
#50. Mother is not a title. Mother is a verb. It is not who you are. It's what you do.
Shonda Rhimes
#51. Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents.
Mary Oliver
#52. I stopped speaking when I realized I was no longer using any verbs or nouns, or making any sense
Jenny Han
#54. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.
Elmore Leonard
#55. To me, Faith is not just a noun but also a verb
Jimmy Carter
#56. Theater used to be a verb; it used to be an act. But nowadays it is just a noun. It is a place.
Martha Graham
#57. If you are using an adverb, you have got the verb wrong.
Kingsley Amis
#58. In the history of the concept of number has been adjective (three cows, three monads) and noun (three, pure and simple), and now ... number seems to be more like a verb (to triple).
Barry Mazur
#59. We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.
Henry A. Kissinger
#60. 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
#62. In these cases, where there is an unjust aggression, I can only say that it is licit to stop the unjust aggressor, ... I underscore the verb 'stop.' I'm not saying 'bomb' or 'make war,' just 'stop.' And the means that can be used to stop them must be evaluated.
Pope Francis
#63. Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns.
Zadie Smith
#64. 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
#65. Love is a verb. We have to let our love call us to action.
Lierre Keith
#66. Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.
Guy De Maupassant
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. There are but two future verbs which man may appropriate confidently and without pride: "I shall suffer," and "I shall die.
Sophie Swetchine
#74. Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.
Soren Kierkegaard
#75. I should start with an apology to Rudy Giuliani. I said every sentence Rudy utters has a noun, a verb, and 9/11 in it. I was wrong. He called me to tell me after Pat Robertson's endorsement, there's an Amen in every sentence he says too.
Joe Biden
#77. I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on.
Anne Waldman
#78. Honesty is an active verb, not a passive noun. Go out of your way to be truthful, beginning with the things that you say to yourself.
Joe Tye
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.
Steven Pinker
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. A garden without its statue is like a sentence without its verb.
Joseph Beach
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. J, n. A consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel ... from a Latin verb, "jacere", "to throw," because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog's tail assumes that shape.
Ambrose Bierce
#92. 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
#94. In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."
Arthur Eddington
#95. 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
#96. Love is more than a word. It's a noun and a verb.
LeCrae
#97. 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
#98. Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer,' and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave.
Frederick Busch
#99. 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
#100. 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
