Nouns Quotes

1. "Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs."
Author: A.B. Guthrie Jr.

2. "There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets `things' with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns `my' and `mine' look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God's gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution."
Author: A.W. Tozer

3. "English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities."
Author: Alan Wilson Watts

4. "Does it really matter if I choose the bus over a BMW, and generic over Gucci? Because the car, the wardrobe, the zip code-those are just nouns, things that are fun to have around, sure, but in the end, they have nothing to do with the real me. Nothing to do with who I really am."
Author: Alyson Noel

5. "What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being."
Author: Anne Carson

6. "I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn't know. "Did you see the octopus?" Someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY?"
Author: Barry Lopez

7. "Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages."
Author: Benjamin Whorf

8. "And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere."
Author: Bill Bryson

9. "Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."
Author: C.S. Lewis

10. "If we do no mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery, then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?"
Author: Carol P. Christ

11. "Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?"
Author: Carol P. Christ

12. "The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns connected one to the other create a verb, and verbs had created everything, had skittered across the face of the void like pebbles across a frozen pond. She had not created a verb herself, but the cherry-wood cabinet in the hall contained book after book, jar after jar, vessel upon vessel, all brown as branches, and she had faith."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

13. "It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe."
Author: Daniel Handler

14. "I think they would like the songs betterif I left out the names, or changedthe pronouns."
Author: David Levithan

15. "I eat nothing that's processed or refined - no high-fructose corn syrup, no sugar, no trans-fats. I eat a lot of fish and monounsaturated fats from olives, olive oil and nuts. A lot of organic, fresh fruits and vegetables. No bread. No gluten. No wheat. No rice."
Author: Dean Karnazes

16. "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."
Author: E.B. White

17. "I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns."
Author: Elizabeth Cady Stanton

18. "And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren't we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?"
Author: Elizabeth Wurtzel

19. "Once women are not excluded, I don't think any of us will give a damn what pronouns are used. That wasn't the point."
Author: Holly Near

20. "Or, God, maybe this was just life. For everyone on the planet. Maybe the Survivor's Club wasn't something you "earned," but simply what you were born into when you came out of your mother's womb. Your heartbeat put you on the roster and then the rest of it was just a question of vocabulary: the nouns and verbs used to describe the events that rocked your foundation and sent you flailing were not always the same as other people's, but the random cruelties of disease and accident, and the malicious focus of evil men and nasty deeds, and the heartbreak of loss with all its stinging whips and rattling chains... At the core, it was all the same."
Author: J.R. Ward

21. "What brings you onto my property?" Rhev said, cradling his mug with both hands and trying to absorb its warmth. "Got a problem." "I can't fix your personality, sorry." Lassiter laughed, the sound ringing through the house like church bells. "No.. I like myself just as I am, thank you." "Can't help your delusional nature, either." "I need to find an address." "Do I look like the phone book?" "You look like shit, as a matter of fact." "And you with the compliments." Rhev finished his coffee. "What makes you think I'd help you?" "Because." "You want to toss in a couple of nouns and verbs there? I'm lost." Lassiter grew serious, his ethereal beauty losing its SOP fuck-yourself smirk. "I'm here on official business." Rhev frowned. "No offense, but I thought your boss pink-slipped your ass." "I've got one last shot at being a good boy."
Author: J.R. Ward

22. "...after I published a paper showing that suicidal poets used pronouns differently from non-suicidal poets, a slightly inebriated poet threatened me with a butter knife at a party in my own home."
Author: James W. Pennebaker

23. "Relax," Edith says. "The perfect name will come to you in time." Which is when Gogol announces, "There's no such thing." "No such thing as what?" Astrid says. "There's no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen," he adds. "Until then, pronouns."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

24. "The Psalms wrap nouns and verbs around our pain better than any other book."
Author: Joni Eareckson Tada

25. "There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

26. "I actually have a thing about proper nouns. They clang on my ear in a weird way when I hear them dropped into movies."
Author: Josh Radnor

27. "Observations," he says. "Four imperial Unseelie guards were the only commonality I was able to isolate endemic to both scenes." They'd been standing, armed, at the dock doors, overseeing the delivery. He gives me a sidewise look. "Wow. That was, like, a whole sentence. With nouns and verbs and connective tissue. Endemic. Fancy word."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

28. "Even if, at the moment, you can't sit down and do the gruntwork of stringing verbs and nouns together, you are writing. It is a way of seeing, a way of being. The world is not only the world, but your personal filing cabinet. You lodge details of the world in your sparkling nerve-library that spirals through your brain and coils down your arms and legs, collects in your belly and your sex. You write, even if you can't always "write." However, writers write. Active, not passive."
Author: Luis Alberto Urrea

29. "No, you used nouns and verbs together in a pleasing but illogical format."
Author: Maggie Stiefvater

30. "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers."
Author: Margaret Atwood

31. "By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.These are worth it. These are what I have come for."
Author: Margaret Atwood

32. "Poetry is all nouns and verbs."
Author: Marianne Moore

33. "All of our faith and practice arise out of the drama of Scripture, the "big story" that traces the plot of history from creation to consummation, with Christ as its Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. And out of the throbbing verbs of this unfolding drama God reveals stable nouns — doctrines. From what God does in history we are taught certain things about who he is and what it means to be created in his image, fallen, and redeemed, renewed, and glorified in union with Christ. As the Father creates his church, in his Son and by his Spirit, we come to realize what this covenant community is and what it means to belong to it; what kind of future is promised to us in Christ, and how we are to live here and now in the light of it all. The drama and the doctrine provoke us to praise and worship — doxology — and together these three coordinates give us a new way of living in the world as disciples."
Author: Michael S. Horton

34. "Ours is an active faith. It is made alive and appealing only when our nouns turn into verbs."
Author: Nancy Leigh DeMoss

35. "At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors;the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in thegarden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love."
Author: Octavio Paz

36. "You will eat this and go to sleep, so your pronouns get their antecedents back."
Author: Patricia Briggs

37. "There are many similarities between Germans and blacks. The nouns themselves are loaded with so much historical baggage it's impossible for anyone to be indifferent to the simple mention of either group. We're two insightful people looking for reasons to love ourselves; and let's not forget we both love pork and wear sandals with socks."
Author: Paul Beatty

38. "First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs."
Author: Peter Ellis

39. "I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."
Author: Ray Bradbury

40. "Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?"
Author: Richard Powers

41. "As real as,' said Eddie.'As real as what?' said Jack.'Wish I knew,' said Eddie. 'But I can't do corroborative nouns. None of us are perfect, are we? I can get started. As big as, as obscene as, as foul as. But I can't get any further. But that's life for you again. As unfair as..."
Author: Robert Rankin

42. "Pronouns are only useful when you combine them with other words. I have a few I can give you, if you're at a loss."
Author: Seanan McGuire

43. "We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun."
Author: Stephen Fry

44. "The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures. Highly verbal autistic children like I was can sometimes learn how to read with phonics. Written words were too abstract for me to remember, but I could laboriously remember the approximately fifty phonetic sounds and a few rules."
Author: Temple Grandin

45. "What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender."
Author: Terry Jones

46. "What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite."Mathematically, boy," he told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?" What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.It scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

47. "As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus."
Author: Walter M. Miller Jr.

48. "The ladies egged him on; in Eve's name, they dared him; so he made love with discreet verbs and light nouns, delicate conjunctions. They begged; they defied him to define...define everything. They could not be scandalized—impossible, they said. Indecent prepositions such as in, on, up, merely made them smile, and the roundest exclamation broke upon them like a bubble's kiss, a butterfly's. Smooth and creamy adjectives enabled them to lick their lips upon the crudest story. How charmingly you speak, Reverend Furber, how much you've seen of this wicked world, and how alive you are to it, they said."
Author: William H. Gass

49. "1. Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's."
Author: William Strunk Jr.

50. "I," she [the Holy Spirit] opened her hands to include Jesus and Papa, "I am a verb. I am that I am. I will be who I will be. I am a verb! I am alive, dynamic, ever active and moving. I am a being verb. And as my very essence is a verb, I am more attuned to verbs than nouns. Verbs such as confessing, repenting, living, loving, responding, growing, reaping, changing, sowing, running, dancing, singing, and on and on. Humans, on the other hand, have a knack for taking a verb that is alive and full of grace and turning it into a dead noun or principle that reeks of rules. Nouns exist because there is a created universe and physical reality, but the universe is only a mass of nouns, it is dead. Unless 'I am' there are no verbs and verbs are what makes the universe alive."
Author: Wm. Paul Young

Nouns Quotes Pictures