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Top Vocabulary Quotes

Browse top 233 famous quotes and sayings about Vocabulary by most favorite authors.

Favorite Vocabulary Quotes

1. "Ironic, is it not, that the great Divinicus Nex cowers in fear from that which should be her fated prey? A decidedly diametric circumstance."What? It's irritating when the monster hunting you has a better vocabulary than your own. Maybe it could do my eulogy?"
Author: AandE Kirk
2. "I don't have enough gross words in my gross vocabulary to describe how gross that gross thought is. Gross."
Author: A.S. King
3. "The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money...Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics."
Author: Adam Bucko
4. "There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth."
Author: Anthony Burgess
5. "Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress..."
Author: Blaise Cendrars
6. "Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.See whether wisdom is just a lot of language."
Author: Carl Sandburg
7. "We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them."
Author: Christopher Reeve
8. "Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed."
Author: Chuck Thompson
9. "The left side of my brain had been shut down like a damaged section of a spinship being sealed off, airtight doors leaving the doomed compartments open to vacuum. I could still think. Control of the right side of my body soon returned. Only the language centers had been damaged beyond simple repair. The marvelous organic computer wedged in my skull had dumped its language content like a flawed program. The right hemisphere was not without some language – but only the most emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo."
Author: Dan Simmons
10. "There are two words that I believe could be completely eradicated from our vocabulary – "I can't." These two words are so definite that they leave absolutely no room for hope. Instead, I suggest we use the phrase, "How can I?"
Author: Daniel Willey
11. "A stack of children's books stood ready by René's bedside, and as Picard had begun the paternal duty of reading his boy to sleep, he had been impressed with his scion's growing vocabulary and seemingly insatiable appetite for narratives. By the time he cracked open the sixth tome of the evening's recitation, he began to question whether it would be unethical to let Crusher use a mild hypospray to hasten the boy's descent into slumber."
Author: David Mack
12. "…I ignore the message from Jenna, who wants to talk about Kayla and what a bitch she is. I think she actually said "witch" in the voicemail, but if that's what she means, I don't see what a difference the vocabulary makes"
Author: Deb Caletti
13. "Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic."
Author: Diane Ackerman
14. "Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds."
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers
15. "People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another."
Author: Erin McKean
16. "Modernism, rebelling against the ornament of the 19th century, limited the vocabulary of the designer. Modernism emphasized straight lines, eliminating the expressive S curve. This made it harder to communicate emotions through design."
Author: Eva Zeisel
17. "Sheriff Gibbs, the vocabulary of the English language is the wonder of the whole world. Chaucer spoke it and Shakespeare and Winston Churchill. With such a precedent, you could possibly make better use of it," said Mrs. Perley."Huh," said Sheriff Gibbs"
Author: Gary D. Schmidt
18. "I am glad that the country world…retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor."
Author: Henry Beston
19. "Case studies of failure should be made a part of the vocabulary of every engineer so that he or she can recall or recite them when something in a new design or design process is suggestive of what went wrong in the case study."
Author: Henry Petroski
20. "Damn Jeremy, you need to work on your vocabulary. So many good names to call me and the best you could come up with is bitch? Give me the salamander before you hurt yourself.""Suck my dick...whore!"
Author: Ilona Andrews
21. "We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention."
Author: Iris Murdoch
22. "I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful."
Author: James Salter
23. "From the corner of my eye I saw her. Of course this chance encounter with Rebecca wasn't serendipitous. (I'm not throwing that word out there to illustrate my broad vocabulary, but rather to show that I am a John Cusack fan)."
Author: Jarod Kintz
24. "Milton's learned vocabulary [...] and his distant perspectives, represent the authoritative unintelligibility of the parents' speech as heard by the child."
Author: John Broadbent
25. "As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane-as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout-there may be no more potent force than religion."
Author: Jon Krakauer
26. "They haven't spoken about it, they haven't said what will we do when we leave here, do you want to come with me, let's work something out, and she knows that this means they will quickly and easily drift apart, into other people's lives, into other people's arms in rooms like this. She is surprised that this doesn't make her feel sad. She listens to the music, she looks around at the things people dropped when they fell asleep or went out of the room, she kisses the boy's arm again and she feels only a kind of sweet nostalgia. She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it's in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowah doowah doowah."
Author: Jon McGregor
27. "Rape culture is a concept of unknown origin and of uncertain definition; yet it has made its way into everyday vocabulary and is assumed to be commonly understood. The award-winning documentary film Rape Culture made by Margaret Lazarus in 1975 takes credit for first defining the concept"
Author: Joyce E. Williams
28. "Closure. That's probably the most unrealistic word in the English vocabulary. It's up there with heartbreak, pain, loss, and abandonment, all these things that you're supposed to get over and mend and heal but really, do you ever get over those moments?"
Author: Katie Kacvinsky
29. "Jeremy and Karl and Elizabeth have known each other since the first day of kindergarten. Amy and Talis are a year younger...Now the five are inseparable; invincible. They imagine that life will always be like this--like a television show in eternal syndication--that they will always have each other. They use the same vocabulary. They borrow each other's books and music. They share lunches, and they never say anything when Jeremy comes over and takes a shower. They all know Jeremy's father is eccentric. He's supposed to be eccentric. He's a novelist."
Author: Kelly Link
30. "So exiled have even basic questions of freedom become from the political vocabulary that they sound musty and ridiculous, and vulnerable to the ultimate badge of shame-'That's so 60's!'-the entire decade having been mocked so effectively that social protest seems outlandish and 'so last century,' just another style excess like love beads and Nehru jackets. No, rebellion won't pose a problem for this social order."
Author: Laura Kipnis
31. "The secret, if one may paraphrase a savage vocabulary, lies in the egg of night."
Author: Loren Eiseley
32. "I was in the car with Trace and heard his side of the conversation with you. Sounded clear enough to me.""Apparently not, cuz I'm not sweet on her. What kind of dumb-ass thing is that to say? I like her, sure, even though she's not the easiest lady to be around.""No?"Jackson didn't seem to hear her. He continued on as he pulled food from the tiny fridge and piled it on the counter. "She has her reasons for being prickly, and I know it.""Those reasons are?""And there isn't a man alive who wouldn't want her. She's about the sexiest thing I've ever seen." He shook his head. "But I'm not sweet> about anything." He scoffed. "That sounds like some adolescent bullshit or something.""You have a very limited vocabulary.""My balls still hurt. It's affecting my brain.""Your brain is located a little low, isn't it?"He paused, then laughed. Shaking a loaf of bread at her, he said, "Good one. I'll have to try to remember this sharp wit of yours."
Author: Lori Foster
33. "My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary."
Author: Margaret Edson
34. "I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something—Being—having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether—if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There's a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence."
Author: Marilynne Robinson
35. "Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest spectacle?—the burning of Rome in Nero's time, for instance? Why, it would merely say, 'Town burned down; no insurance; boy brast a window, fireman brake his neck!' Why, THAT ain't a picture!"
Author: Mark Twain
36. "The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries."
Author: Mark Twain
37. "Cigarette, flipped it on the table, and began on another. "Just like this." That was when Mama finished her soup with a clank, suppressed a cardboard burp, and answered for him. "That Saukerl," she said. "You know what he did? He rolled up all of his filthy cigarettes, went to the market when it was in town, and traded them with some gypsy." "Eight cigarettes per book." Papa shoved one to his mouth, in triumph. He lit up and took in the smoke. "Praise the Lord for cigarettes, huh, Mama?" Mama only handed him one of her trademark looks of disgust, followed by the most common ration of her vocabulary. "Saukerl." Liesel swapped a customary wink with her papa and finished eating her soup. As always, one of her books was next to her. She could not deny that the answer to her"
Author: Markus Zusak
38. "The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified."
Author: Michel Foucault
39. "The world going insane and evil letting slip the birds of war is no excuse for sloppy vocabulary."
Author: P.C. Cast
40. "It was not so much what Vicki did that night: it was what she said. It was not so much her behaviour: it was her vocabulary!"
Author: Patrick Hamilton
41. "Banish the words 'I can't' from your vocabulary. Remember: If 'can't' equals 'won't', 'can' equals 'will.'"
Author: Phyllis George
42. "In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary."
Author: Robert Fitzgerald
43. "The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he -- because he usually doesn't know any Greek -- can't pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It's the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination."
Author: Robertson Davies
44. "Yes," said Cooley. "That is the question, as the Bard might say." "The Bard?" "What's so funny?" said Cooley. "Nothing, sir," I said. "I just didn't know people still used that term." "Well, I'm a people, Burke. Am I not?" "Of course." "If you prick me, do I not bleed, you scat-gobbling, mother-rimming prick?" Occasionally Dean Cooley reverted to a vocabulary more suited to his marine years, but some maintained it was only when he felt threatened, or stretched for time. "Yes, sir," I said."
Author: Sam Lipsyte
45. "A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character."
Author: Sara Sheridan
46. "Risk isn't a word in my vocabulary. It's my very existence."
Author: Slash
47. "One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."
Author: Stephen King
48. "But one look at Wildcard's face, and he knew there was trouble. Problem? he signaled.Wildcard responded with an obscene gesture that more than conveyed his opinion that not only was this a problem, but it was a big problem...."Okay". That was not anywhere near the complete reaming Muldoon imagined "We'll take a different route down.""We could", Wildcard agreed. "But they've got a prisoner.."Oh man, that hurt. Dream op to nightmare...Muldoon gritted his teeth and considered his options."Holy fuck", Wildcard said. "When I tell you that a stupid ass French photog is going to turn this perfect op into a total clusterfuck, what you say sir, is 'Oh, holy fuck'. If this isn't the time to use your full adult vocabulary, Lieutenant, I honestly don't know what is"."
Author: Suzanne Brockmann
49. "This native people he lived with, deep in the jungle—their language had dozens of words for rain. Because it was so common to them, you see. Where they lived, it rained almost constantly. Several times a day. So they had words for light rain, and heavy rain, and pounding rain. Something like eighteen different terms for storms, and a whole classification system for mist." "Why are you telling me this?" His touch skimmed idly down her arm. "Because I'm standing here, wanting to give you a fitting compliment, but my paltry vocabulary fails me. I think what I need is a scientific excursion. I need to venture deep into some jungle where beauty takes the place of rain. Where loveliness itself falls from the sky at regular intervals. Dots every surface, saturates the ground, hangs like vapor in the air. Because the way you look, right now . . ." His gaze caught hers in the reflection. "They'd have a word for it there."
Author: Tessa Dare
50. "...he remembered his uncle saying once how little vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple cliches served his few simple passions and needs and lusts."
Author: William Faulkner
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A Robin said: The Spring will never come,And I shall never care to build again.A Rosebush said: These frosts are wearisome,My sap will never stir for sun or rain.The half Moon said: These nights are fogged and slow,I neither care to wax nor care to wane.The Ocean said: I thirst from long ago,Because earth's rivers cannot fill the main. —When Springtime came, red Robin built a nest,And trilled a lover's song in sheer delight.Grey hoarfrost vanished, and the Rose with mightClothed her in leaves and buds of crimson core.The dim Moon brightened. Ocean sunned his crest,Dimpled his blue, yet thirsted evermore."
Author: Christina Rossetti

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