Alphabet Quotes - Page 6

• You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents - each man to see what the other looked like.

  Beryl Markham

  Dog, Loneliness, Book

  Beryl Markham (2015). “West With The Night”, p.182, Hachette UK

  39 Copy quote

  Show source

• As if this whole thing isn't confusing enough, election officials announced this week that the alphabet on the ballot will begin with the letter R, then W, then Q. You know, even Sesame Street is laughing at California now.

  Jay Leno

  California, Laughing, Confusing

  7 Copy quote

• A child is nothing like a racing car. . . . Souping up babies doesn't work that way. The child is what she is. There is a certainirreducible if elusive core. Pushing, pulling, stretching, and shrinking will not really change it. There may be spectacular interim results. The baby may say the alphabet before she walks, master two-times or even ten-times table at three. In the long run, however, this forced precocity tends to be irrelevant. . . . Whatever gains there are become unimportant. The losses can be irrevocable.

  Stella Chess

  Running, Baby, Children

  4 Copy quote

• All I want is that Americans still be able to read the alphabet in a hundred years. I am not very ambitious.

  Gore Vidal

  Years, Ambitious, Want

  8 Copy quote

• I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

  George Orwell

  Jobs, Latin, School

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1986). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: The road to Wigan Pier”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ah...' Park said, pained. 'What?' 'Those are alphabetized.' 'It's okay. I know the alphabet.' 'Right.' He looked embarrassed. 'Sorry.

  Rainbow Rowell

  Sorry, Parks, Said

  Rainbow Rowell (2016). “The Rainbow Rowell YA Collection”, p.207, St. Martin's Griffin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers.

  Harold Innis

  Writing, Expression, Oral Tradition

  Harold Innis (1999). “The Bias of Communication”, p.50, University of Toronto Press

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Alphabet Juice is the book Roy Blount was born to write, which considering his prodigious talent, is saying a lot. Did you know that the word LAUGH is linguistically related to chickens and pie? This is the book that any of us who urgently, passionately love words-to read them, roll them over the tongue and learn their life stories while laughing and eating chicken and pie-were lucky enough to be born to read.

  Cathleen Schine

  Book, Writing, Pie

  4 Copy quote

• Got more milky syllables than alphabet cereals.

  Keith Murray

  Rap, Cereal, Hip Hop

  7 Copy quote

• Character starts with the alphabet. Letters: words: sentences Character is a function of language—a collection of errors and deviations that resonate with certain behaviors. As with every other element in fiction, it is a record of a writer’s decisions.

  Noy Holland

  Character, Errors, Decision

  4 Copy quote

• I haven't seen someone so overmatched since Mike Tyson tried to recite the alphabet.

  Dennis Miller

  Football, Tyson, Mike

  18 Copy quote

• I read someplace that I used to make B-pictures. Hell, they were a lot farther down the alphabet than that . . . but not as far down as R and X. I think any man who makes an X-rated picture ought to be made to take his own daughter to see it.

  John Wayne

  Mother, Daughter, Men

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

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.

  Edgard Varese

  Music, Dream, Mean

  "Classic Essays on Twentieth-century Music: A Continuing Symposium". Book by Richard Kostelanetz, 1996.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge.

  Donald E. Westlake

  New York, War, Cities

  Donald E. Westlake (2017). “What's So Funny?”, p.22, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.

  Lucy Corin

  Book, Parent, Fatherhood

  4 Copy quote

• His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.

  Charles Dickens

  Nature, Stars, Letters

  Charles Dickens (1871). “The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Other Pieces”, p.114

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The gitano is the most distinguished, profound and aristocratic element in my country, the one that most represents its Way of being and best preserves the fire, the blood and the alphabet of Andalusian and universal truth.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Country, Fire, Blood

  19 Copy quote

• Any alphabet book for children where 'P is for Patti' Smith and 'X is for the women whose names we don't know' is something I can recommend, especially when the book is as well written, representationa lly diverse and vividly illustrated as this one.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Children, Book, Names

  4 Copy quote

• Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Education, Children, Disappointment

  Fran Lebowitz (2003). “Metropolitan Life ; Social Studies: Social studies”

  61 Copy quote

  Show source

• In many Muslim countries, witchcraft is not only on the books as a crime, but is commonly prosecuted. In 2009, for example, Saudi Arabia convicted a man for carrying a phone booklet with characters in an alphabet from his native Eritrea, which the police interpreted as occult symbols. He was lashed three hundred times and imprisoned for more than three years.

  Steven Pinker

  Country, Book, Character

  "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". Book by Steven Pinker, October 4, 2011.

  33 Copy quote

  Show source

• Numerical logistic is that which employs numbers; symbolic logistic that which uses symbols, as, say, the letters of the alphabet.

  Francois Viete

  Numbers, Use, Letters

  7 Copy quote

• A scholar like myself who is not a Sinologist and yet ventures the proposition that Chinese languages should be rewritten in the Greek alphabet (or "Romanized", to use the current term) is treading on uncharted territory (for him) and does so at his peril.

  Eric A. Havelock

  Greek, Chinese, Use

  "Chinese Characters and the Greek Alphabet". Sino-Platonic Papers, Issue no. 5, sino-platonic.org. December 1987.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The internet's a creepy thing, especially if you have kids. It says something very creepy about the fact that I use the same machine to masturbate with as I use to teach my kid the alphabet.

  Greg Giraldo

  Kids, Creepy, Machines

  "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn". TV Series, www.imdb.com. 2002-2004.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have my faithful rhyming dictionary that sits up there on my desk, but I have to tell you, there are very few new rhymes that I didn't think of. I often just go right through the alphabet in my head when I'm looking for a rhyme.

  Mary Ann Hoberman

  Thinking, Faithful, Rhyming

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.

  Chris Abani

  Book, Shelves, Monica

  4 Copy quote