Phrases Quotes - Page 19

• 'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.

  Philip Roth

  Past, Stronger, Grows

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• I'm trying to tell the story in the most clear, concise, and truthful way, taking those everyday words and phrases and capturing them in a way that they become something else.

  Jay-Z

  Everyday, Trying, Stories

  Interview with Elvis Mitchell, www.interviewmagazine.com. January 11, 2010.

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• I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.

  Sophie Calle

  Art, Wall, Writing

  Interview with Louise Neri, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 7, 2009.

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• Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.

  Donna Tartt

  Kids, College, Air

  Interview with Michael Pietsch, www.slate.com. October 11, 2013.

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• When we listen to improvisational jazz, or solo classical violinists, the way they phrase and inflect melodies feels vocal, like they’re talking to us. When I was figuring out how to perform solo, I wanted to move back and forth between bass riffs, melody, and harmony, so I often used sounds instead of — or alongside — the words of a song. I found that if I sang a line using the consonants, vowels, shadings, and inflection we recognize as human language sounds, people responded as if I were talking to them.

  Bobby McFerrin

  Song, Moving, Talking

  "Sing Your Prayers: An Interview With Bobby McFerrin". Omega Institute Interview, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 11, 2012.

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• Here is one optimists reason for believing unity will prevail ... within the next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century -- citizen of the world -- will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st. All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.

  Strobe Talbott

  Country, Real, Believe

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• Leukemia is evidently psychosomatic in origin and at least eight cases of leukemia had been treated successfully by Dianetics after medicine had traditionally given up. The source of leukemia has been reported to be an engram containing the phrase 'It turns my blood to water.'

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Medicine, Eight, Blood

  Journal of Scientology, Issue 15-G, 1953.

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• The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.

  Joseph A. Schumpeter

  People, World, Levels

  "The Crisis of the Tax State" (1918)

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• For fools admire and love those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down, and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears and comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.

  Lucretius

  And Love, Sound, Ears

  Lucretius (2008). “On the Nature of the Universe”, p.90, OUP Oxford

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• I am told that there is a proverbial phrase among the Inuit: 'a long time ago, in the future.' Let the children see our history, and maybe it will help to shape the future.

  Romeo LeBlanc

  Children, Long, Inuit

  Address to the Empire Club and the Royal Commonwealth Society, June 26, 1996.

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• Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!

  Rollo May

  Movement, Starting, Interest

  Rollo May (2015). “The Discovery of Being”, p.76, W. W. Norton & Company

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• My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.

  Neil Postman

  Creating, Use, Definitions

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.27, Penguin

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• Sometimes when an idea flashes, you distrust it because it seems too easy. You qualify it with all kinds of evasive phrases because you’re timid about it. But often, this turns out to be the best idea of all.

  Saul Bass

  Ideas, Bass, Kind

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• Nudity is a state of fact; lewdity, to coin a phrase, is a state of mind

  Paul Outerbridge

  Mind, Coins, Facts

  Paul Outerbridge, Jeannine Fiedler (1993). “Paul Outerbridge Jr: photographs”

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• Now everybody who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business letter does not deserve the paper on which it is written unless it contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in the night to remember and think about.

  Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

  Night, Thinking, Doe

  Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (2012). “Molly Make-Believe”, p.7, The Floating Press

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• The bulletproof vest--'bullet resistant,' technically--is made of two double panels of a synthetic material called Kevlar, inside a cloth carrier that holds it around your torso like a lead X-ray smock. One cop wrote phrases from the Bible on his, 'Yea, though I walk in the valley of the Shadow of Death...' Other cops wrote their blood type.

  Edward Conlon

  Shadow Of Death, Bulletproof Vest, Blood

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• I'm an aspiring writer. I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not.

  Jack Black

  Hate, Writing, Aspiring Writers

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• The most important thing is that you make sure you follow the music, which is a musician's way of saying follow your heart. The two things are intertwined. You know, when you even mention the phrase "music business," the older you get, the sourer it sounds. It's a terrible business, you know. Music and business have nothing to do with each other; there's no correlation, so it's always a rub. I would encourage people, don't be swayed by the music business. If you're truly, in your heart, a musician, stay one, and let the business find you.

  Robben Ford

  Heart, Two, People

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• Every year at this time, an important phrase marks the season: peace on earth and goodwill towards men. It's so common we sometimes forget about what it really means - that we strive for a world without war, a society where we respect and help our neighbors, a place where we protect and uplift our most in need. This isn't a phrase we should live by for one day or one month. It's a set of values that must bond and motivate us every day.

  Dennis Kucinich

  Uplifting, War, Mean

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• Live in the moment, just do it - those are phrases thrown around by people who don't know what they mean. Just do it - it's idiotic. You could slap that slogan on a picture of Hitler and it would make as much sense. He did it, all right.

  Gregory Galloway

  Mean, People, Live In The Moment

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• I'd like to name my kid a whole phrase. You know, something like Ladies and Gentlemen. That'll be a cool name for a kid. This is my son, Ladies and Gentlemen! Then, when he gets out of hand, I get to go, Ladies and Gentlemen, please!

  Louis C. K.

  Funny, Kids, Son

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• I don't write down my experiences, but I have a very decent memory. I have tons of books in which I write down phrases as they occur to me. That's how I write songs. I'll need a line and I'll go through the books and find it, the right rhyme and everything.

  Evan Dando

  Song, Memories, Book

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• If you can’t reduce your argument to a few crisp words and phrases,
  there’s something wrong with your argument.

  Maurice Saatchi

  Argument, Crisps, Ifs

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• I know all the new phrases: 'cowabunga,' 'radical,' cat's pajamas,' 'duh,' and 'hey, homie don't play that.

  Si Robertson

  Cat, Play, Duh

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• I have learned, as has many another better writer, to summon inspiration to my call as soon as I begin my day's stint, and not to hang around waiting for it. Inspiration is merely a pretty phrase for the zest to work. And it can be cultivated by anyone who has the patience to try. Inspiration that will not come at its possessor's summons is like a dog that cannot be trained to obey. The sooner both are gotten rid of, the better.

  Albert Payson Terhune

  Dog, Inspiration, Zest

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