Vocabulary Quotes - Page 9

• Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we're reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can't even talk or think about it directly.

  Diane Ackerman

  Passion, Fighting, Love Is

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “A Natural History of Love: Author of the National Bestseller A Natural History of the Senses”, p.19, Vintage

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• The words: never, can't, quit, and fail, are not in my vocabulary.

  Robert Cheeke

  Motivational, Bodybuilding, Quitting

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• Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society.

  Jimmy Reid

  Race, Ducks, Giving

  "Still irresistible, a working-class hero's finest speech". www.independent.co.uk. August 12, 2010.

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• All my life, people have made fun of the way I speak. I guess because a lot of my vocabulary is made up of things that other people say. I started making fun of them and imitating them and now that's how I speak.

  Gabourey Sidibe

  Fun, People, Way

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• Words are not even within me. They're not in my vocabulary to really express the kind of feeling that I had.

  Tanya Tucker

  Feelings, Kind

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• I don't swear much; I've taken those words out of my vocabulary, and having kids, you have to have two sets of language!

  Keith Urban

  Taken, Kids, Two

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• The purpose of all of this is not to walk around with new vocabulary words, but to cause you to speculate on the marvel of your own being.

  Frederick Lenz

  Inspirational, Buddhism, Purpose

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• I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

  Tom Waits

  Appreciation, Thinking, Musician

  "Tom Waits: 'I'm a night-owl reporter' - a classic interview from the vaults". Interview with Richard Cromelin, www.theguardian.com. August 7, 2012.

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• Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.

  Joseph Campbell

  Coercion, Reason, Symbols

  Joseph Campbell (1968). “The Masks of God: Creative Mythology”

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• WHY is the most important word in an actor's vocabulary.

  Sanford Meisner

  Important, Important Words, Actors

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• The term 'laity' is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from the Christian conversation.

  Karl Barth

  Christian, Conversation, Worst

  Karl Barth (1986). “A Karl Barth Reader”, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

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• As slippery as smooth grapes, words exploding in the light like dormant seeds waiting in the vaults of vocabulary, alive again, and giving life: once again the heart distills them.

  Pablo Neruda

  Heart, Light, Giving

  Pablo Neruda, Margaret Sayers Peden (2000). “Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda”, p.199, Univ of California Press

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• Style is a continuum. Style never changes. It's a straight line. It's a refinement of the same vocabulary. Style takes you from day to evening, season to season.

  Ralph Rucci

  Style, Lines, Evening

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• Human language has a vocabulary suited to our daily needs and functions: the shape of any human language maps approximately to the needs and activities of our mundane lives. But few would deny that there is another dimension of human existence which transcends the mundane: call it the soul, the spirit: it is that part of the human frame which sees the shimmer of the numinous.

  Julian Burnside

  Communication, Media, Soul

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• What is comfortable fashion? To be comfortable, that can't be in the vocabulary of fashion. If you want to be comfortable, stay home in your pajamas.

  Donatella Versace

  Fashion, Home, Want

  Interview with Nicki Minaj, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 28, 2011.

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• Cults use our vocabulary, but they don't use our dictionary.

  Charles R. Swindoll

  Use, Cult, Dictionary

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• I love ballet. Ballet is its own being. It has its own vocabulary. I feel as if I am in a different world when I am in the ballet studio.

  Kiernan Shipka

  Ballet, Different, World

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Writers that pretend to be in the throes of some kind of genius-demon, some kind of possessing spirit that refuses to let them engage with Normal Life are bullshit artists of the highest degree, looking to excuse their antisocial tendencies and bad manners away with a flourish of vocabulary and the semantic waving of hands.

  Matt Fraction

  Artist, Hands, Bullshit

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• In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

  Mary Wesley

  Friends, Important, My Best Friend

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• Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

  Yann Martel

  Love, Blessing, Qualms About

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice and Virgil”, p.23, Canongate Books

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• Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.

  Samuel Johnson

  Real, Class, Style

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1799). “Life of Johnson: Including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Diary of a Journey Into North Wales”, p.253

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• Difference of thoughts will produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of a larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies?

  Samuel Johnson

  Nice, Thinking, Differences

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1825). “The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: with Murphy's essay”, p.589

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• Many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one's vocabulary throughout life is a sure reflection of intellectual progress.

  Bergen Evans

  Reflection, Intellectual, Progress

  Bergen Evans (1963). “The word-a-day vocabulary builder”, Ballantine Books

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• We can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.

  Steven Pinker

  Brain, Events, Shapes

  Steven Pinker (2010). “The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language”, p.1, Harper Collins

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• I'm interested in the way that the language of labor has been suppressed in our culture, the way it has disappeared from our vocabulary and is never heard on stage. . . . I'm better at writing than I am at organizing [political action]. SLAUGHTER CITY is my small contribution. If it gives people a voice it is worth something. So often we forget what we are no longer hearing.

  Naomi Wallace

  Writing, Cities, Voice

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