Syllables Quotes - Page 2

• Some women get divorces on the grounds of incompatibility; others, on just the first two syllables.

  Evan Esar

  Divorce, Two, Firsts

  Evan Esar (1961). “Humorous English: a guide to comic usage, jocular speech and writing, and witty grammar”

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• I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus, that I never altered one syllable of God's Word against my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in earth, whether it be honor, pleasure, or riches, might be given me.

  William Tyndale

  Jesus, Honor, Records

  "Foxe's Book of Martyrs". Book by John Foxe, March 20, 1563.

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• In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Equality, Facts, Nonsense

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (1996). “Only Words”, p.109, Harvard University Press

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• What are you? (Zarek) I’m a nymph. (Astrid) I hope you just left an important syllable off that word, princess. (Zarek)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Princess, Nymphs, Important

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• When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.

  Jodi Picoult

  Simple, Expectations, Comfort

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “Handle with Care: A Novel”, p.208, Simon and Schuster

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• If man were relieved of all superstition, and all prejudice, and had replaced these with a keen sensitivity to his real environment, and moreover had achieved a level of communication so simplified that one syllable could express his every thought, then he would have achieved the level of intelligence already achieved by his dog.

  Robert Breault

  Dog, Real, Communication

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• Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered. It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim, of property in man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.

  Frederick Douglass

  Men, Giving, Needs

  Frederick Douglass, Philip Sheldon Foner, Yuval Taylor (1999). “Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings”, p.536, Chicago Review Press

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• A game of great charm in the adoption of mathematical measurements to the timing of human movements, the exactitudes and adjustments of physical ability to hazardous chance. The speed of the legs, the dexterity of the body, the grace of the swing, the elusiveness of the slide - these are the features that make Americans everywhere forget the last syllable of a man's last name or the pigmentation of his skin.

  Branch Rickey

  Baseball, Men, Swings

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• Still may syllables jar with time,
  Still may reason war with rhyme,
  Resting never!

  Ben Jonson

  War, Poetry, May

  Ben Jonson, “A Fit Of Rhyme Against Rhyme”

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• I tried to make sense of the Four Books,
  until love arrived,
  and it all became a single syllable.

  Yunus Emre

  Book, Four, Make Sense

  Yunus Emre (1989). “The Drop that Became the Sea: Lyric Poems of Yunus Emre”, Shambhala Publications

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• When you're expecting bad news you have to be prepared for it a long time ahead so that when the telegram comes you can already pronounce the syllables in your mouth before opening it.

  Robert Pinget

  Long, News, Mouths

  Robert Pinget (1966). “Mahu: Or, The Material: a Novel”, Riverrun Press

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• To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place. In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Book, Fall, Humility

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• A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

  Norton Juster

  Smell, Gone, Phantom Tollbooth

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• To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

  William Shakespeare

  Inspirational, Life, Death

  'Macbeth' (1606) act 5, sc. 5, l. 16

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• You and I are standing this very second at the meeting place of two eternities: the vast past that has endured forever, and the future that is plunging on to the last syllable of recorded time. We can't possible live in either of those eternities - no, not even for a split second. But, by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and our minds. So let's be content to live the only time we can possible live: from now until bedtime.

  Dale Carnegie

  Future, Past, Two

  Dale Carnegie (2012). “The Leader In You”, p.136, Simon and Schuster

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• I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.

  Louise Erdrich

  Ice, Ears, Fists

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• Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.

  Jerry Spinelli

  Past, Wake Up, Vowels

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• And neither do I, asshole. (Wren) Wow. Multiple syllables and a whole sentence from the tiger. Who’d have ever thought it? Whoever she was, she must have had a lot of talent to make you speak. Next thing you know, she’ll have the dead walking. Quick, call a Dark-Hunter. I’m sure some of them would like another resurrection. (Dev)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Dark, Hunters, Wrens

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2009). “Unleash The Night”, p.70, Hachette UK

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• It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Stars, Children, Distance

  "Transcript for the Piece Audio version of A Wizard of Earthsea: A Big Read Documentary". www.prx.org.

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• Eva. Every day I've climbed up the belfry chanting a lucky chant at one syllable per beat, "To-day-to-day-let-her-be-here-to-day-to-day.

  David Mitchell

  Lucky, Beats, Chanting

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• Most people in America want an easy read. I call it McFiction - books which pass right through you without you even digesting them. I don't mean a book that has two-syllable words. I mean chapters you can read in a toilet break. Happy endings. We are more of a TV culture.

  Jodi Picoult

  Book, Mean, Two

  "The great unknown". Interview with Louise France, www.theguardian.com. April 14, 2007.

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• It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  Lonely, Long, Stories

  Naomi Shihab Nye (2009). “I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

  Rick Moody

  Love, Running, Fall

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• I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal." And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable fell duskly upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Voice, Dwelling, Departed

  Edgar Allan Poe (1857). “The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe: Poems and tales. Eureka, an essay on the material and spiritual universe”, p.294

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• For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next...They are set up on the course of their existence, and the faster they climb towards its zenith, the more they hasten towards the point where they exist no more.

  Saint Augustine

  Giving, Zenith, Way

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