Idiom Quotes - Page 3

• I am a writer who is definitely working with a specific language and more than English, that language is American. And I work very much in idiom and am very interested in the play of different kinds of rhetoric, whether it is the more high-flown stuff that reeks of age. I love to juxtapose something like that with something more current or urgent. I am always interested not in America by itself, but America as an idea and how that idea has changed over time, in the eyes of the rest of the world and in the eyes of Americans.

  Sam Lipsyte

  Eye, Age, Different

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• My favorite phrase, that a friend of mine who worked on the Potter films and was a lot older than me would use in front of me, and I picked up from him many great phrases - the English have a lot of great idioms for sweating. I don't know why that is. But that's what we do. I feel like it's particularly our country; probably everywhere has a lot of idioms for sweating. He always said, "I'm sweating like a glassblower's asshole," which I always found an incredibly strange and yet vivid image.

  Daniel Radcliffe

  Country, Strange, Film

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.

  Peter Medawar

  Philosophy, Example, Minors

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.3, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.

  David Biespiel

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

  Lester Bangs

  Real, Past, Islands

  Lester Bangs (2013). “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N'Roll”, p.74, Anchor

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• Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.

  Lincoln Kirstein

  Dance, Vocabulary, Color

  Lincoln Kirstein (1970). “Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks”, p.5, Courier Corporation

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• With theatre, you can interpret the most complex play on stage for it have meaning to an audience because you're dealing in images, you're dealing in action, you can use different idioms to interpret and clarify something which is obscured in the reading and of course there are different kinds of play, there are mythological plays, there are what I call the dramatic sketches, direct political theatre which is virtually everybody, but I find that you can use the stage as a social vehicle, you know, which any kind of audience.

  Wole Soyinka

  Reading, Play, Political

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

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• As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling.

  Bernard Herrmann

  Art, Inspiration, Writing

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• The [Nobel] award [of Bob Dylan] is no affront to literature; it is an insult to pop music. It is a condescending ruffle of pop's hair while handing it a lollipop. An act of beaming condescension whose transparent message is: "This one guy, and just this one guy, he's so good, he transcends his trivial idiom and elevates himself into our significant one."

  David Bennun

  Awards, Hair, Guy

  Source: thequietus.com

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• It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no.

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Differences, Different, Influence

  Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker (1979). “I Love Myself when I Am Laughing ... and Then Again when I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader”, p.68, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

  William A. Dembski

  Intelligent, Design, Information

  "Signs of intelligence: A primer on the discernment of intelligent design". Touchstone Magazine 12 (4), July/August, 1999.

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• The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

  William A. Dembski

  Philosophy, Intelligent, Reality

  "Signs of intelligence: understanding intelligent design". Book by William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner, March 2001.

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• People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom.

  Woody Allen

  People, Anxiety, May

  "In Conversation: Woody Allen". Interview with Adam Moss, nymag.com. September 28, 2008.

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• Most historians accept that Egypt was a cradle of civilization, and that many cultural idioms and traditions come from there. What has yet to be understood, however, is the manner in which Egypt inherited its cultural elements from the lands of the North-West. This fact is not known today because of the threat it poses to Rome and London, the Vatican and Crown, and to all those who have profited from the suppression of knowledge.

  Michael Tsarion

  Egypt, Rome, Land

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• Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

  Joshua Foer

  Age, Principles, Philosopher

  «Utopian for Beginners» by Joshua Foer, www.newyorker.com. December 24 & 31, 2012.

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• Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. If you have no personality, you may be able to save your face and, possibly, your entire anatomy by following the current fashion, but all we shall know about you, when we see you coming down the street, is that you had enough money to buy a glossy magazine and were sufficiently cunning to work out the cut of the garments shown therein.

  Quentin Crisp

  Fashion, Cutting, Work Out

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• I'll fix it up with Mum and Dad, then I'll call you. I know how to use a fellytone now - " "A telephone, Ron," said Hermione. "Honestly, you should take Muggle Studies next year.

  J. K. Rowling

  Dad, Years, Muggles

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• Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.

  Alexander P. de Seversky

  Past, Air, Impossible

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• The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Reality, Drawing, Color

  Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.75, Vintage

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• The 80s were deranged. People had all these liberties all of a sudden and all the freedom in the world, the Less Than Zero sort of themes that came from that period, I think electronic music works very well for that whole idiom.

  Sam de Jong

  Zero, Thinking, People

  Source: noisey.vice.com

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• I don't believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn't use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer's characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary.

  Lydia Davis

  Believe, Vocabulary, Deployment

  Interview with Sarah Manguso, www.believermag.com. January 2008.

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• If idioms are more to be born than to be selected, then the things of life and human nature that a man has grown up with--(not that one man's experience is better than another's, but that it is 'his.')--may give him something better in his substance and manner than an over-long period of superimposed idiomatic education which quite likely doesn't fit his constitution. My father used to say, 'If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven'

  Charles Ives

  Horse, Father, Men

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• You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

  Charlaine Harris

  Love, Life, Optimistic

  Charlaine Harris (2009). “Dead and Gone: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel”, p.29, Penguin

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• It will be a sad day for the world when the Oriental gent realizes that Western bumbling is only Eastern guile in a different idiom. Well, a lot of it, anyway.

  Kyril Bonfiglioli

  Different, World, Realizing

  "After You With The Pistol" by Kyril Bonfiglioli, (Ch. 17), 1979.

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• Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom.

  Karen Joy Fowler

  Earth, Pheromones

  Karen Joy Fowler (2014). “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”, p.194, Serpent's Tail

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