Syllables Quotes - Page 6

• I'm from the South, and there's a different understanding of how to chop. There's a syllable play. It's a delicate art. Your accent has a lot to do with it. If you're from a certain area, words don't roll of your tongue as slick.

  Yelawolf

  Art, Play, Understanding

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• Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.

  William Cowper

  Home, Dark, Space

  "Retirement" l. 691 (1782)

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• "Hallelujah" is a joyous expression the Christians have, but "Hare Krishna" has a mystical side to it. It's more than just glorifying God; it's asking to become His servant. And because of the way the mantra is put together, with the mystic spiritual energy contained in those syllables, it's much closer to God than the way Christianity currently seems to be representing Him.

  George Harrison

  Christian, Spiritual, Expression

  "The Mantra 'Keeps Me in Tune with Reality'". Interview with Mukunda Goswami, www.beliefnet.com. 1982.

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• We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished?

  Francis Bacon

  Wisdom, Loss, Hands

  Francis Bacon (2012). “The Advancement of Learning”, p.61, Modern Library

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• Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

  Carl Sandburg

  Echoes, Silence, Cadence

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.317, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Humor is like a rhythm; it's like music. And you throw a couple of extra syllables in, you wreck the beat and you kill the laugh. So I try to follow the writers very carefully because I know how carefully they worked to do it that way.

  Betty White

  Couple, Laughing, Trying

  "Q&A: Betty White Talks ‘Off Their Rockers’, ‘Hot in Cleveland’ and Her Long, Wonderful Career". Interview, www.dailyactor.com. April 24, 2012.

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• Sometimes I just start humming something, find a melody I like a lot, and if it sticks around for a couple days, a few words will lock themselves into place. I might just get the first line. Then words just keep falling into the syllables. The choruses kind of write themselves and verses I have to work at a little bit.

  Jack Johnson

  Couple, Fall, Writing

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• Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious.

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Men, People

  Bertrand Russell, John G. Slater, Peter Köllner (1997). “Last Philosophical Testament: 1943-68”, p.396, Psychology Press

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• This is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.

  T. S. Eliot

  Feelings, Levels, Conscious

  T. S. Eliot (1986). “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England”, p.111, Harvard University Press

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• Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

  Carl Sandburg

  Static, Poetry Is, Arrangements

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.319, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I often think of the space of a page as a stage, with words, letters, syllable characters moving across.

  Susan Howe

  Moving, Character, Thinking

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• To write poetry is to be very alone, but you always have the company of your influences. But you also have the company of the form itself, which has a kind of consciousness. I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that's too many syllables or that's too many lines or that's the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you're in dialogue with the form.

  Billy Collins

  Writing, Mean, Lines

  "Poet Billy Collins discusses humor, authenticity and ‘Aimless Love’". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 29, 2013.

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• People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.

  Bill Bryson

  Running, Rain, Issues

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• The states have authority to interpret the Constitution, enforce it, and protect the people from violations of it by the federal government In the first place, there is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution, or which gives them any greater latitude in this respect than may be claimed by the courts of every State.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Law, Government, Giving

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• You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.

  John Ruskin

  Real, Book, Museums

  John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (1964). “The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings”, p.297, University of Virginia Press

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• It seems to me that the contrast between adjacent syllables has lessened and the result is an over-reliance on enjambment. Now enjambment is a fine, intellectually strong aid, but like all such things it becomes tiresome and calls too much attention to itself.

  Christopher Logue

  Strong, Attention, Too Much

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• DNA is an abbreviation for deoxyribonucleicantidisestablishmentarianism, a complex string of syllables.

  Dave Barry

  Dna, Abbreviations, Strings

  Dave Barry (2009). “Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus”, p.146, Ballantine Books

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• When I was born, my father named me Melissa, and I am still Melissa but I got the nickname Lizzo around the time I was in the Cornrow Clique. I'm from Houston, so naturally, everyone dropped the second syllable of your name and just put an "O" there.

  Lizzo

  Father, Names, Houston

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts.

  Stephen Karam

  Regret, Night, Thinking

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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• Some syllables are swords.

  Henry Vaughan

  Henry Vaughan, Henry Francis Lyte (1871). “The Poetical Works of Herbert and Vaughan: With a Memoir”, p.112

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• Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

  Augustus William Hare

  Book, Men, Hieroglyphics

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• that darkest of syllables, death.

  Mary McMullen

  Mary McMullen (1987). “The Other Shoe”, Jove Publications

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• read the Bible to the children, until they are old enough to read for themselves ... The Bible, not nursery versions of it. There is a Bible in words of one syllable; I am happy to say I have never seen it. Such a monstrosity should be put alongside of the Rhyming Bible, of which, I believe, only one copy is in existence.

  Laura E. Richards

  Bible, Children, Believe

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• Democracy has become, unless I mistake, a kind of test or shibboleth, by which we try men and measures; and this is the same as to say that it is merely a word which is powerful with us, and not the wide and true notion of what the word means. But we must define the true import of words, and not be slaves to syllables; for democracy in form is not necessarily people-power in fact, but power perhaps of a few, who cajole the many and so lead and use the people for their own ends.

  James Vila Blake

  Powerful, Mistake, Mean

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• Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  College, Years, Gold

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Ernest Spiller, Alfred Riggs Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Jean Ferguson Carr (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, addresses, and lectures”, p.58, Harvard University Press

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