Syntax Quotes - Page 3

• Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mother, Art, Thinking

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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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• 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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• 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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• since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a far better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry --the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter which says we are for eachother: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

  e. e. cummings

  Spring, Flower, Fate

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than... is where it all comes from.

  Zachary Cole Smith

  Writing, School, Important

  "Interview: Diiv On Their Sophomore Album, 'Is The Is Are'". Interview with Rose Riddell, www.coupdemainmagazine.com. February 29, 2016.

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• The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Even worse is the notion that writers should provide an example of how to live. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for me. But I do not want to become Virginia Woolf. That is not why I read her.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Virginia, Hands, Sweaters

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

  Daniel Day-Lewis

  Country, Parent, Custodians

  "In the name of the father". Interview with Simon Hattenstone, www.theguardian.com. February 28, 2003.

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• In the 1970s, for example, I found myself learning to relish the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and getting a handle on poetry of plainer speech than I had dwelt with heretofore. Which led me into a new appreciation of middle [William Butler ] Yeats, of the short three-beat line and forward-driving syntax, and that paid in, in turn, to a poem like Casualty in Field Work. The traffic, however, was usually the other way. My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

  Adam Kirsch

  Appreciation, Teaching, Reading

  Source: harvardmagazine.com

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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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• We're so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don't realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet... It's what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I'm saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored.

  Adam Fuss

  Running, Cameras, Lenses

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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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