Slang Quotes

1. "Sometimes advises from others are more difficult to bear with than even slang."
Author: Amit Kalantri

2. "The downtrodden are the great creators of slang."
Author: Anthony Burgess

3. "H. L Mencken's Dictionary of the American Language supplies a long list of slang terms for being drunk, but the Irish are no slouches, either. They're spannered, rat-arsed, cabbaged, and hammered; ruined, legless, scorched, and blottoed; or simply trolleyed or sloshed. In Kerry, you're said to be flamin'; in Waterford, you're in the horrors; and in Cavan, you've gone baloobas, a tough one to wrap your tongue around if you ARE baloobas. In Donegal, you're steamin', while the afflicted in Limerick are out of their tree."
Author: Bill Barich

4. "Slang is the writer's palette of colors."
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

5. "I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It's good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn't do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It takes sand, in the literal and the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that is fear. And if you're out of sand, then you must burn up.("New York Blues")"
Author: Cornell Woolrich

6. "...three particular T-shirts with vulgar slang written on them that made the vein in his forehead poke out. It was a cute little vein and I grew fond of seeing it's public appearance while I walked behind him like a parade of humiliation."
Author: Dannika Dark

7. "The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun."
Author: Dennis Farina

8. "Australians are descended from a boatload of English convicts, right? So two hundred years in isolation at the bottom of the planet is plenty of time for the language to evolve into some sort of double-speak prison slang."
Author: Elle Lothlorien

9. "I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation."
Author: Etgar Keret

10. "If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

11. "My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next."
Author: Grace Paley

12. "Sever sarcastic snakes, sting six soulless slaves, severely smack saucy sin, scar sooky saps' spines snogging snug sexy slang, 666 I'm glad yourang…"
Author: Initially NO

13. "I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others."
Author: James Weldon Johnson

14. "A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was to point out to him that it was ridiculous to put slang words and expressions between quotation marks, for that prevents them from entering the language. But I decided not to. When I received his letters, his parentheses made me shudder. At first, it was a shudder of slight shame, disagreeable. Later (and now, when I reread them) the shudder was the same, but I know, by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love- it is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the word shame that accompanied it in the beginning. Those parentheses and quotation marks are the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded."
Author: Jean Genet

15. "If I were stepping down from the bus at the rich end of town instead of the trailer park, I wouldn't have to watch every word I said to make sure it wasn't slang for an orgasm."
Author: Jennifer Echols

16. "Wanneer je als mens sterk geworteld bent, zoals mijn ouders dat waren, kan migratie werken als een zaag en een levenslang trauma veroorzaken. Ik ben meer als de waterplanten in het moerasland, het lowland dat ik in mijn boek beschrijf. Mijn wortels hebben geleerd in het water te dwarrelen, beweeglijk te zijn. Migratie betekent voor mij geen ontworteling meer."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

17. "I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it.I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America."
Author: Kiese Laymon

18. "Sure am glad I'm not royalty," I muttered. "I wouldn't want to have to bump uglies with someone I can't stand. On a regular basis. And no one else.""Ow!" I exclaimed, trying to yank my fingers from Trent but finding them caught. Then I colored, realizing what I'd said. "Oh… sorry," I stammered, meaning it. "That was insensitive."Trent's frown turned into a sly smirk. "Bump uglies?" he said, eyes on the table behind me. "You are a font of gutter slang, Rachel. We must do this again."
Author: Kim Harrison

19. "I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn't seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently."
Author: Luke Rhinehart

20. "Every dictionary contains a world. I open a book of thieves' slang from Queen Anne's reign and they have a hundred words for swords, for wenches, and for being hanged. They did no die, they danced on nothing. Then I peek into any one of my rural Victorian dictionaries, compiled by a lonely clergyman, with words for coppices, thickets, lanes, diseases of horses and innumerable terms for kinds of eel. They gave names to the things of their lives, and their lives are collected in these dictionaries – every detail and joke and belief. I have their worlds piled up on my desk."
Author: Mark Forsyth

21. "The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet"."
Author: Mary Roach

22. "'Detroit 1-8-7' - the numbers are police slang for murder - is filmed in that blue-collar Michigan city, providing a flavor of authenticity. Detroit offers a unique visual landscape that tells the story of the city and what it's been through."
Author: Michael Imperioli

23. "As a pauper, the obvious destination for James Tilly Matthews was the Bethlem Hospital, already long known in popular slang as Bedlam. The principal public asylum in London, it had accepted dangerous and insane paupers as 'objects of charity' for centuries, and was proud of the claim that it had never turned anyone away."
Author: Mike Jay

24. "Sin does not always drive us to drink; more often it drives us to exhaustion. Tiredness is equally as debilitating as drunkenness. Burnout is slang for an inner tiredness, a fatigue of our souls. Jesus came to forgive us all of our sins, including the sin of busyness. The problem with growth in the modern church is not the slowness of growth but the rushing of growth."
Author: Mike Yaconelli

25. "When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing."
Author: N.D. Wilson

26. "I write in American slang."
Author: Norman Spinrad

27. "Hobos' (a slang term that combines the words 'hope' and 'bowl of beans given to me for free by a woman who then initiated intercourse')"
Author: Patton Oswalt

28. "On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]"
Author: Peter O'Donnell

29. "It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay."
Author: Raymond Chandler

30. "A truly enlightened attitude to language should simply be to let six thousand or more flowers bloom. Subcultures should be allowed to thrive, not just because it is wrong to squash them, because they enrich the wider culture. Just as Black English has left its mark on standard English Culture, South Africans take pride in the marks of Afrikaans and African languages on their vocabulary and syntax. New Zealand's rugby team chants in Maori, dancing a traditional dance, before matches. French kids flirt with rebellion by using verlan, a slang that reverses words' sounds or syllables (so femmes becomes meuf). Argentines glory in lunfardo, an argot developed from the underworld a centyry ago that makes Argentine Spanish unique still today. The nonstandard greeting "Where y'at?" for "How are you?" is so common among certain whites in New Orleans that they bear their difference with pride, calling themselves Yats. And that's how it should be."
Author: Robert Lane Greene

31. "Augen sind Hände, die man lebenslang nicht wäscht; so behalten sie die schmutzige Gewohnheit, alles anzurühren."
Author: Robert Musil

32. "I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories."
Author: Ron Rash

33. "Donna: You really believe in all that stuff, don't you?Wilfred Mott (Bernard Cribbins): It's all over the place these days. If I wait here long enough...Donna: I don't suppose you've seen a little blue box.Wilfred: Is that slang for something?Donna: I mean it. If you ever see a little blue box, flying up there in the sky, you shout for me, Gramps. Oh you just shout.Wilfred: You know, I don't understand half the things you say these days.Donna: Nor me.Wilfred: Fair do's. You've had a funny old time of it lately -Doctor Who"
Author: Russell T Davies

34. "Poncho was in a red mood slanging with rage and needed to cook himself out of it , while shoving handfuls of salted peanuts down his gullet and slurping ice cold Fanta"
Author: Saira Viola

35. "Marijuana enhances our mind in a way that enables us to take a different perspective from 'high up', to see and evaluate our own lives and the lives of others in a privileged way. Maybe this euphoric and elevating feeling of the ability to step outsidethe box and to look at life's patterns from this high perspective is the inspiration behind the slang term "high" itself."
Author: Sebastian Marincolo

36. "Would you like tickets for tonight's tour? (Andrei)Like another hole in my head. (Esperetta)That's American slang for ‘no thank you. (Francesca)Strange. When I was in New York it was slang for ‘no fucking way.' (Andrei)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

37. "I remember the very day, sometime during the first two weeks of my five-year amorous sojourn in Brutland, when I was made privy to one of the most arcane of their utterings. The time was ripe for that major epiphany, my initiation into the sacred knowledge—or should I say gnosis?—of that all-important, quintessentially Brutish slang term, the word that endless hours of scholastic education by renowned mentors, plus years of scrupulous scrutiny into scrofulous texts, had disappointingly failed to impart to me, leaving me with that deep sense of emptiness begotten by hemimathy; the time was finally ripe for me to be transported by the velvety feel of the unvoiced palato-alveolar fricative, the élan of the unpronounceable and masochistically hedonistic front open-rounded vowel, and, last but not least, the (admittedly short) ejaculatory quality of the voiced velar stop: all three of them combined together to form that miraculous lexical item, the word shag."
Author: Spiros Doikas

38. "Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never."
Author: Stephen King

39. "I like slang words, straight to the point. I like words of wisdom, straight to the heart."
Author: Toba Beta

40. "Karhiders discuss sexual matters freely, and talk about kemmer with both reverence and gusto, but they are reticent about discussing perversion - at least they were with me. Excessive prolongation of the kemmer period, with permanent hormonal imbalance toward the male or the female, causes what they call perversion; it is not rare; three or four percent of adults may be physiological perverts or abnormals - normals, by our standard. They are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies, the Karhidish slang for them is halfdeads. They are sterile."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

41. "The Dauthless have the wierdest slang. Pansycake, Nose...is there a term for The Candor?""Of course."Uriah grins."Jerks"
Author: Veronica Roth

42. "Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently chrystallize."
Author: Walt Whitman

43. "The slang "you ain't seen nothing yet" is completely apropos in regards to instrumentation for marine bioacoustics research."
Author: Whitlow W.L. Au

44. "Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace."
Author: William Safire

45. "If you use a colloquialism or a slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better."
Author: William Strunk Jr.

Slang Quotes Pictures