Wording Quotes

#1. Home after midnight from a debate on the wording of a minor municipal bylaw on bottle recycling, he felt like he was a pin in the hinge of power.

Annie Proulx

#2. In the year 1752 it was announced that the second of September would be followed by the fourteenth. The matter was merely one of wording, of course; time in its substance was not to undergo any change.

Emma Donoghue

#3. Jordan, Attached, please find a copy of the schedule for our trip. Best Courtney.
I was really proud of it. The email i mean. Because it was so short and cold.Of course, it took me and my friend Jocelyn about two hours to come up with the perfect wording, but Jordan doesn't know that.

Lauren Barnholdt

#4. A cold wind swept across the patio, causing me to shiver. Noah shrugged off his black leather jacket and tossed it around my shoulders. "How are you going to tutor me if you get fucking pneumonia?" I cocked an eyebrow. What an odd combination of romantic gesture and horribly crude wording.

Katie McGarry

#5. I often feel caught in a dilemma: on the one hand I wish to be more natural with you and yet, on the other hand, because I feel that you're easily wounded and that you give my comments inordinate power, I feel I must consider my wording very, very carefully.

Irvin D. Yalom

#6. Notice how often he reframes the question (examines whether the question is the right question) before answering. In several cases, how he dissects wording is as interesting as his answers.

Timothy Ferriss

#7. All science requires mathematics.
[Editors' summary of Bacon's idea, not Bacon's wording.]

Roger Bacon

#8. Kale, jackass. His name is Kale, I snapped. Someone had joined the line behind Dad. The woman made an irritated noise of disapproval at my choice of wording and covered her small son's ears.
Great. Now I was corrupting children.

Jus Accardo

#9. I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

Fernando Pessoa

#10. At high school they expect answers, but at university all you're supposed to do is dispute the wording of the question.

Eleanor Catton

#11. Some men are daylight readers, who peruse the ambiguous wording of clouds or the individual letter shapes of wandering birds. Some, like myself, are librarians of the night, whose ephemeral documents consist of root-inscribed bones or whatever rustles in the thickets upon solitary walks.

Loren Eiseley

#12. It ain't bragging if you've done it. There's nothing wrong with being proud of doing something well. In fact, if you intend to do something creative for a living, it's absolutely essential.
[check for wording] Proper pride says, "I'm good at this." Improper pride says, "I'm better than you.

James A. Owen

#13. Conscious positive wording assists us in maintaining our joy and a positive outlook on life. It allows us to make the choice to be consciously joyful and consciously grateful for all life experiences.

Molly Friedenfeld

#14. We have to stop acquiescing even to the wording that the liberals use.

Ted Cruz

#15. You can always tell when an old person has no idea what you are talking about, because they mess up the wording almost as if they're trying to defeat the thing you are discussing by refusing to name it correctly.

Matthew Quick

#16. On the wall of this yard there was the wording, painted in high letters: Reliable Autos. We get you there.
"Get you where?" asked Fanwell. Chobie smiled. "Where you want to get. That's where everybody's heading, after all. To where they want to get.

Alexander McCall Smith

#17. But what are you? Buddhist? Japanese? Communist? What?' 'I'm nothing.' 'Can you be nothing?' I never knew how to answer that question when I was asked it as a child, because the wording troubled me. Can you be nothing? I will be nothing.

Jaume Cabre

#18. Hiking is great because it's a lifelong sport and you're outdoors, active, so whether you call that a sport or a hobby or a recreation, I think the wording - it's a great way to get exercise, and it can be as challenging as you want to make it.

Jennifer Pharr Davis

#19. Traditionally, wake-up calls are meant to wake you up rather than send you to sleep: the clue is in the wording. But those who talk of wake-up calls tend to have an easy-going way with words.

Craig Brown

#20. The only uncertainty surrounding the decision is the wording of the accompanying statement and, in particular, whether the assessment that 'some further policy firming may be needed to keep the risks ... roughly in balance' will be dropped.

Paul Ashworth

#21. Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

John Keats

#22. Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.

Frances Ridley Havergal

#23. It's very interesting, the joke comes first and then the wording comes within five seconds, maybe ten seconds. My thing is to get the joke across in as few words as possible. However, sometimes a word that's not really needed does help the rhythm of it. It's a gut feeling.

Steven Wright

#24. I try to be careful about wording. One of the things I've tried to combat in my blog is the notion that journalists are arrogant and unconcerned with the readership.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#25. Gospel songs to me are about the mansion in the sky, and washed in the blood of Christ's crimson blood, songs that are filled with biblical wording that's no longer understood by a lot of people.

Larry Norman

#26. On vague wording of drone strike criteria: Are you going to just drop a hellfire missile on Jane Fonda? Are you going to drop a missile on Kent State? That's gobbledygook.

Rand Paul

#27. At bottom, textual criticism for virtually all other ancient literature relies on creative conjectures, or imaginative guesses, at reconstructing the wording of the original. Not so with the New Testament.

Daniel B. Wallace

#28. Reframing an extract as a quotation constitutes a kind of coauthorship. With no change in wording, the cited passage becomes different. I imagine that the thrill of making an anthology includes the opportunity to become such a coauthor.

Gary Saul Morson

#29. People say I love you all the time - when they say, 'take an umbrella, it's raining,' or 'hurry back,' or even 'watch out, you'll break your neck.' There are hundreds of ways of wording it - you just have to listen for it, my dear.

John Patrick

#30. The notion that we are products of our environment is our greatest sin; we are products of our choices.
Margaret Mead
(this may not be her exact wording, but it's close enough).

Margaret Mead

#31. But the wording. He had said, "Your firstborn child will be mine.

K.M. Shea

#32. obsequious courting of the mob

Marcus Aurelius

#33. That was a mean thought, and not funny at all. I let it turn to sand and blow out of my head.

Christopher Buehlman

#34. One always has a choice.

Dona Wording

#35. a blossom past its perfection, shedding petals like a sad metaphor

Matthew Hughes

#36. She hugged him and said, "Flowers and ravens," because she wanted him to know she remembered.
Then she hugged Matthew and said, "My love," because he was her favorite.
She said nothing at all to Declan, because he wasn't there.

Maggie Stiefvater