Subjunctive Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#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. 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

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

David Mitchell

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Patrick Rothfuss

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Kerstin Gier

#16. Being a kid growing up with Kurosawa films and watching Sergio Leone movies just made me love what it could do to you, and how it could influence you - make you dream.

Antoine Fuqua

#17. He who remembers from day to day what he has yet to learn, and from month to month what he has learned already, may be said to have a love of learning.

Confucius

#18. Everything that is said is said by an observer.

Heinz Von Foerster

#19. It had been love, and I'd meant it-the happiness, the lust, the peace... I'd felt all of those things. Once.

Sarah J. Maas

#20. In the papers this morning: 'Police closing in on Ian Holloway.' Sorry, it's 'Palace closing in on Ian Holloway.'

Alan Brazil

#21. God's grace turns out men and women with a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ, not milksops.

Oswald Chambers