Vocabulary Quotes - Page 5

• We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in-a way to signal those lies that could more accurately be understood as dreams.

  Rivka Galchen

  Dream, Liars, Lying

  Rivka Galchen (2008). “Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel”, p.56, Macmillan

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• In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.

  Donald E. Westlake

  Attitude, Writing, Race

  Donald E. Westlake (2014). “The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany”, p.28, University of Chicago Press

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• Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design.

  Eva Zeisel

  Curves, Design, Ornaments

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• My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

  Grace Paley

  Real, Writing, Verbs

  Grace Paley (2014). “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories”, p.85, Macmillan

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• I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I was not poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still do not have a dime but I have a great vocabulary.

  Jules Feiffer

  Thinking, Self, Justice

  1956 Cartoon caption.

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• The danger is that people may mistake what is basically a change in vocabulary for a change in behavior, practices, and attitudes. While practically all Americans have learned to talk inoffensively, not enough have learned to think differently, nor act positively.

  Whitney M. Young

  Attitude, Mistake, Thinking

  Whitney M. Young (1964). “To be equal”

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• Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary by sense.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Thinking, Progress, Doers

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• Well, let’s start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it’s not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling.
  The story you are telling is only as good as the information in it: things you elicit, or things you observe, that make a narrative come alive; things that support your point not just through assertion, but through example; quotes that don’t just convey information, but also personality.

  Gene Weingarten

  Writing, Dancing, Personality

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• In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." -- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Past, Facts, Rivalry

  "Kafka and His Precursors" (1951) (translation by James E. Irby)

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• It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.

  Barbara Kruger

  Mean, Looks, Photographer

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• We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

  Steve Jobs

  Mean, Men, People

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• Duty is duty, conscience is conscience, right is right, and wrong is wrong, whatever sized type they may be printed in. " Large" or "small" are not words for the vocabulary of conscience.

  Alexander MacLaren

  May, Type, Duty

  Alexander Maclaren (1871). “Sermons Preached in Manchester: First series”, p.269

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• Drawing is the simplest way of establishing a picture vocabulary because it is an instant, personal declaration of what is important and what is not.

  Betty Goodwin

  Drawing, Important, Way

  Yolande Racine, Betty Goodwin, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Art Gallery of Ontario (1987). “Betty Goodwin: oeuvres de 1971 à 1987”, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal = Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

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• Conservatives or better, pro-corporate apologists hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress," "opportunity," and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right. This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove the reputed brain of George W. Bush as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.

  Bill Moyers

  Inspiration, Opportunity, Divine Right

  Speech to the "Take Back America" Conference, June 10, 2003.

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• La me  decine a fait quelques petits progre'  s dans ses connaissances depuis Molie'  re, mais aucun dans son vocabulaire. Medicine has made a few, small advances in knowledge since Molie' r e, but none in its vocabulary.

  Marcel Proust

  Son, Medicine, Made

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• When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe. Then I think: 'God, I have no importance. Whatever I do or don't do, or what anybody does, is not more important than the grains of sand that I am lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow.' So I really don't think in the long sense.

  Marlon Brando

  Beach, Stars, Lying

  New York Times, July 2, 2004.

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• Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities... Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist's statements.

  Robert Genn

  Writing, Artist, Style

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• The pseudoscience of astrology has no place in magick. Astrology has already died twice: once with the classical gods, and a second time after the Enlightenment. The complete failure of contemporary psychology to create anything other than a vocabulary of intellectual rubbish has encouraged astrology to resurface.

  Peter J. Carroll

  Astrology, Psychology, Intellectual

  "Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magick: Revised Edition". Book by Peter J. Carroll, 1995.

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• Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.

  Chuck Thompson

  Keys, Games, Skulls

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• Bush is almost always clear when he's speaking cruelly. For example, when the subject is the punitive infliction of great pain, there is no problem with his syntax, grammar, or vocabulary, even if he happens to be lying. ... On the other hand, our president is extraordinarily tongue-tied when he's trying, off the cuff, to sound a note of idealism, magnanimity or -- especially -- compassion.

  Mark Crispin Miller

  Pain, Lying, Compassion

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• What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Age, Next, Sometimes

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1907). “The Writings of Thomas Bailey Aldrich”

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• The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border.

  Amos Oz

  Israel, Ideas, Borders

  "Try a Little Tenderness". Haaretz Interview, March 17, 2000.

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• Genres give a vocabulary. They give a frame of reference for the audience to enter into a movie. Then, once they have their footing, that's when you can start doing things that they don't expect.

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  Giving, Genre, Audience

  "Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Writer/Director Rian Johnson Talk LOOPER, Sci-Fi, and Transforming into Bruce Willis". Interview, collider.com. March 19, 2012.

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• [I]n the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography: better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. As with the call girl and the streetwalker, one is turned out better but both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Girl, Class, Males

  Andrea Dworkin (1989). “Pornography: men possessing women”, Plume

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• Journalism is one set of tools - one toolkit I have. One vocabulary, one lens.

  Michael Pollan

  Lenses, Tools, Journalism

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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