Syntax Quotes - Page 3

What makes sense is not law, syntax, rules or structure

Aaron Betsky

Law, Structure, Make Sense

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Amid chaos of images, we value coherence. We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language.

William Shawn

Believe, Printed Word, Coherence

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Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning variety-of syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary-from region to region.

Israel Shenker

Vocabulary, Quality, Earth

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It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

Richard K. Morgan

Forgiving, Phrases, Weaponry

Richard K. Morgan (2003). “Altered Carbon”, Del Rey

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And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

Jean M. Auel

Couple, Reading, Different

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Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

Stephen King

Writing, People, Stories

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I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.

Jerry Fodor

Virtue, Process, Formal

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It is always just telling a story, regardless of the age of the reader. Except, if I'm writing something for kids, I know there has to be hope. I don't necessarily feel that responsibility for adults, but I emphatically feel it for children. That's the only difference. There's no syntax difference. There's no semantics difference. There's no thematic difference.

Kate DiCamillo

Children, Kids, Responsibility

Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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This is what happens when the discourse of publishing, defined and driven by spoken and written language, is talked about in exactly the same vocabulary and syntax as any widgetmaking industry. Books are reformulated as 'product' - like screwdrivers or flea-bombs or soap - and the majority of writers are perceived as typists with bad attitudes.

Suzette Haden Elgin

Attitude, Book, Vocabulary

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[Dennis Mathis] was very sensitive about keeping the unique way that I spoke English - it had a lot of Mexicanisms or Mexican syntax. So you keep it in because it's adding something unique.

Sandra Cisneros

Unique, Mexican, Way

Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

Jerry Garcia

Thinking, Space, Musical

Source: medium.com

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Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

Raymond Chandler

God, Writing, Eye

Letter to Edward Weeks, 18 Jan. 1947, in F. MacShane Life of Raymond Chandler (1976) ch. 7

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Milton on speed. I am going to need about a decade to think about that. That delay in syntax, the putting off of the click of the sentence into itself, is something that has always intrigued me. I love the emotional effect of it, and never want it to be merely a gesture. Sometimes I try it and it doesn't work, so I have to put the poem aside, and try again, more simply and more strange.

Matthew Zapruder

Emotional, Thinking, Trying

Source: therumpus.net

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What I had thought were signs of a broken educational system - the seemingly random placement of commas, the spastic syntax, the obnoxious overuse of quotation marks, the goofy misspelling of 'Jouralism' - were actually signs of the New Instantaneousness. 'Instant Jouralists' cannot be concerned with punctuation and grammar and spelling. That stuff just 'slows you down.' To be an 'Instant Jouralist,' you have to write as if you were being pursued by a cheetah across the Serengeti.

Nicholas G. Carr

Educational, Writing, Broken

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To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.

Terence McKenna

Giving, Political, Mind

"History Ends in Green". Terence McKenna's eight-hour lecture at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, www.youtube.com. 1989.

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Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

George Eliot

Nature, Real, Reading

George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.113, Wordsworth Editions

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Mr Robert Montgomery's genius [is] far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax? [His] readers must take such grammar as they can get and be thankful.

Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild

Being Thankful, Genius, Grammar

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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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When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Marilyn Hacker

Together, Looks, Phrases

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If Henry James were still with us, he'd not only approve of Paris, He Said, he could have written it himself, though without his serpentine syntax. It's a delicious treat, studded with wise and beautifully observed detail, that places side by side those perpetually fascinating antagonists, the eager, casual American and the meticulous, pleasure-driven French. Christine Sneed knows everyone's intimate secrets and her book is lively, amusing, and, ultimately, kind to pretty much all of them.

Rosellen Brown

Wise, Book, Paris

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There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

Dorothy Parker

Best Years Of Your Life, Study, Stealing

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The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.

Lister Sinclair

Vocabulary, Dialect, Results

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A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.

Denis Donoghue

Art, Expression, Looks

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It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.

John Searle

Believe, Numbers, Effort

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I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

Joseph Epstein

Clever, Writing, Arrows

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