Verbs Quotes - Page 2

• Destroy the Museums. Crack syntax. Sabotage the adjective. Leave nothing but the verb.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

  Museums, Cracks, Adjectives

  62 Copy quote

• After the verb 'to Love', 'to Help' is the most beautiful verb in the world.

  Bertha von Suttner

  Love, Inspirational, Relationship

  12 Copy quote

• Find something you like, go into a room, close the door and read it aloud. Read it aloud. Everybody in the world who likes dance can see dance, or hear music, or see art, or admire architecture - but everybody in the world uses words who is not a recluse or mute. But the writer has to take these most common things, more common than musical notes or dance positions, a writer has to take some adverbs, and verbs and nouns and ball them up together and make them bounce.

  Maya Angelou

  Art, Doors, Musical

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• You expect far too much of a first sentence. Think of it as analagous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.

  Larry McMurtry

  Country, Philosophy, Simple

  Larry McMurtry (2010). “Some Can Whistle”, p.6, Simon and Schuster

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• Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.

  Donald Hall

  Hurt, Addiction, Important

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• 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

  Writing, Passive Voice, Arrows

  "Mistakes were made" by Lisa Dusenbery, therumpus.net. May 02, 2012.

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• Why indeed must 'God' be a noun? Why not a verb - the most active and dynamic of all.

  Mary Daly

  God, Faith, Spiritual

  Mary Daly (2015). “Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation”, p.52, Beacon Press

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• 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

  Book, Writing, News Stories

  Robert Cormier (2013). “I Am the Cheese”, p.120, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from "Disappearance of Literature

  Mark Twain

  Cutting, Hard Times, Two

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.7281, Delphi Classics

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• It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb ? it's more like a process than it is a thing.

  Pat Metheny

  Fruit, Becoming, Jazz

  9 Copy quote

• whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Humor, German Language

  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court ch. 22 (1889)

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• Art is a Verb, not a Noun.

  Ernest West Basden

  Art, Nouns, Art Is

  7 Copy quote

• Marriage is not a noun; it's a verb. It isn't something you get. It's something you do. It's the way you love your partner every day.

  Barbara De Angelis

  Love, Marriage, Nouns

  39 Copy quote

• Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Love, Inspirational, Marriage

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• His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action.

  Jennifer Crusie

  Nouns, Action, Politician

  Jennifer Crusie (2011). “Charlie All Night”, p.87, HQN Books

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• Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue... I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

  Elmore Leonard

  Reading, Writing, Lines

  7 Copy quote

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

  Ray Bradbury

  Writing, Two, Clean

  10 Copy quote

• If the noun is good and the verb is strong, you almost never need an adjective.

  J. Anthony Lukas

  Strong, Writing, Nouns

  45 Copy quote

• Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

  Frida Kahlo

  Love You, Sky, Wings

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• Love is a word that is constantly heard,
  Hate is a word that is not.
  Love, I am told, is more precious than gold.
  Love, I have read, is hot.
  But hate is the verb that to me is superb,
  And Love but a drug on the mart.
  Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
  But Hating, my boy, is an Art.

  Ogden Nash

  Art, Hate, School

  'Plea for Less Malice Toward None' (1933)

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• She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.

  Philip Pullman

  Life, Coffee, Pistols

  Philip Pullman (2008). “The Tin Princess”, Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Nouns, Statistics, Biodiversity

  No More Secondhand God (1963) p. 28 (poem written in 1940)

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• The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects - nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs - ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I'm most happy to be a writer.

  Maya Angelou

  People, Together, Nouns

  10 Copy quote

• If you go through any newspaper or magazine and look for active, kicking verbs in the sentences, you will realize that this lack of well used verbs is the main trouble with modern English writing. Almost all nonfiction nowadays is written in a sort of pale, colorless sauce of passives and infinitives, motionless and flat as paper.

  Rudolf Flesch

  Writing, Editing, Kicking

  Rudolf Flesch (1946). “The Art of Plain Talk”

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• I think that we all do heroic things, but hero is not a noun, it's a verb.

  Robert Downey, Jr.

  Hero, Thinking, Nouns

  "The Complete Robert Downey Jr". Interview with Cal Fussman, www.esquire.com. April 16, 2012.

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