Word Association Quotes

#1. A student undergoing a word association test was asked why a snowstorm put him in mind of sex. He replied frankly: "Because everything does."

Honor Tracy

#2. People always say there's no such thing as bad publicity, and you always think they're right, because it seems self-evident: nobody's going to buy a magazine that nobody ever talks about, so people should want to buy a magazine that everybody's talking about.

Rachel Johnson

#3. It is only in Hebrew that you feel the full meaning of it
all the associations which a different word has.

David Ben-Gurion

#4. How the hell can I owe that much? That's not right.

Jon Jones

#5. You don't go into space just for the science. Economically, it is not worth it. I think the reason we should be in space is for the exploration; it's the human endeavour.

Helen Sharman

#6. Life was short, no matter how many days you were granted. And people were precious, each and every one, no matter how many you were lucky enough to have in your life. And love ... love was worth dying for.
Worth living for, too. -Tohrment

J.R. Ward

#7. You don't want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.

Rufus Choate

#8. The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.

Orson Welles

#9. Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless

Hugh Laurie

#10. The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.

Duke Ellington

#11. I never minded the random scribblings of other readers, found them interesting in fact. It is a truth universally acknowledged that people write the darndest things in the margins of their books.

Tara Bray Smith

#12. If a kid calls his grandma "Mommy" and his mama "Pam", he's going to jail!

Chris Rock

#13. And oh I want so much to sing, I tell myself no. But it is so hard to keep from singing.

Donna Jo Napoli

#14. You're dead, Cordelia.'
No I'm not.
'Yes you are. You're dead.
Lie down.

Margaret Atwood

#15. The women are threatening, because, among other reasons, they are not virgins. The sexual experience that nationalist soldiers sense in them seems to release a particularly powerful fear. That fear is brought into association with the word communist

Anonymous

#16. Well, you always know who you are. I just don't know who I'm gonna become.

Bob Dylan

#17. Everything is, the way it is, for a reason. Or it isn't. Or neither. Or both. It's so hard to tell. It's so hard to tell you're a mile away by the Luke in your eye.

Alistair McHarg

#18. If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Rudyard Kipling

#19. We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance, and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

Mark Twain

#20. When we first hear [a] word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.

Joshua Foer

#21. Probably a concern to either a major or minor degree with most actors if they're really motivated to kind of make a significant difference in the business is the 'pigeon-holing' thing.

Dominic Monaghan

#22. We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

Woodrow Wilson

#23. When Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain ... I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.

Maurice Sendak

#24. The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

#25. He showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. "Guilt" was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: "celebration.

Michael Pollan

#26. Every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.

Freya Stark

#27. The word "essay" means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.

Stanley Fish