Verbs In Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. What had she learned about verbs? In the past and future tenses, the verb came at the end. And in the present it followed the subject. Wherever she went it tailed her. She dragged it behind like a sack of stones.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#4. Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.

Barbara Kingsolver

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

Soren Kierkegaard

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music.

Artie Shaw

#10. [On her recently widowed father's much younger wife:] My father has been very busy in conjugating the verb to love, and I assure you he declines its moods and tenses inimitably.

Abby May Alcott

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."

Arthur Eddington

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Check the cover letter. In a cover letter, you get actual communication instead of a list of skills, verbs, and years of irrelevance.

Jason Fried

#19. My wife wanted to call our daughter Sue, but I felt that in our family that is usually a verb.

Dennis Wolfberg

#20. The verb 'highly favored' (Luke 1:28) is the same as 'made us accepted' in Ephesians 1:6, referring to all of God's children. All true believers have been 'highly graced' by the Lord.

Charles Spurgeon

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

Benjamin Whorf

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

Juan Felipe Herrera

#23. Don't you DARE use party as a verb in my shop

Dylan Moran

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

Tyler Knott Gregson

#25. 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

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

Ray Bradbury

#27. The verb 'to love' in Persian is 'to have a friend.' 'I love you' translated literally is 'I have you as a friend,' and 'I don't like you' simply means 'I don't have you as a friend.

Shusha Guppy

#28. The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and in the passive.

William Ralph Inge

#29. Beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't

George Orwell

#30. English loves to stay out all night dancing with other languages, all decked out in sparkling prepositions and irregular verbs. It is unruly and will not obey - just when you think you have it in hand, it lets down its hair along with a hundred nonsensical exceptions.

Catherynne M Valente

#31. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.

Janet Fitch

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

Kerstin Gier

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be.

Franz Liszt

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

Elmore Leonard

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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