Fluent Quotes - Page 4

• After a lifetime of nods, frowns and stoic smiles, they were both fluent in emotional shorthand.

  Jamie Ford

  Emotional, Lifetime, Stoic

  Jamie Ford (2011). “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet”, p.80, Allison & Busby

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• TooDamn-Funky: It's a start, ok. Been thinking bout the boyz. 'member last year my bro did that immersion thing in Venezuela? Kciker5525: Where he learned to speak Spanish??? TooDamn-Funky: Yeah! u go for 2 weeks talk nothing but Spanish u come back fluent. Kicker5535: ...???? TooDamn-Funky: Well this is like a guy immersion program! Kicker5525: So...what. I'm going 2 b fluent in GUY? TooDamn-Funky: Exactly! u will c what they talk about alone. U will c how they r with each other. U will c how they THINK!! AND WHEN IT'S DONE YOU'LL BE ABLE TO WRITE A GUY GUIDE BOOK!! Kicker5525: U r deranged.

  Kate Brian

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

  Anthony Marra

  Four, Fists, Language

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• I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

  Amy Hempel

  Mother, Baby, Grief

  Amy Hempel, Rick Moody (2007). “The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel”, p.40, Simon and Schuster

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• What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind.

  Sylvia Plath

  Horse, Wind, Knives

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “The Colossus”, p.10, Faber & Faber

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• I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport.

  William Gibson

  Airports, People, Citizens

  Interview with Eric Holstein and Raoul Abdaloff, www.actusf.com. March 2008.

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• The popular prophets have underestimated how strange the truth can be. The human brain, that 'perfect instrument,' that 'fabulous electronic dance,' can be our open sesame to an infinitely richer life than we have believed possible. The fluent, liberating, creative, healing attributes of the altered states can be incorporated into consciousness. We are just beginning to realize that we can truly open the doors of perception and creep out of the cavern.

  Marilyn Ferguson

  Healing, Doors, Perfect

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• the old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion; and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent.

  Ellen Glasgow

  May, Today, Emotion

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• Guess who's running for president? Jeb Bush. Jeb was governor of Florida and he speaks fluent Spanish, which raises the question: What language did his brother speak? What was that?

  David Letterman

  Running, Brother, Florida

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• I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of ... shall we say, power.

  Alan Lightman

  Exercise, Thinking, Permit

  Alan Lightman (2012). “Mr g: A Novel About the Creation”, p.25, Vintage

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• This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

  George Gissing

  War, Writing, Mean

  "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft". Book by George Gissing. Summer, § VII, p. 89, 1903.

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• New Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is fluent in Chinese. In a short period of time the Republicans have come quite a long way. The last Republican president wasn't even fluent in English.

  David Letterman

  Long, Presidential, Chinese

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• The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months.

  Tim Ferriss

  Children, Work, Research

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• Even though Cammie is fluent in fourteen languages and capable of killing a man seven different ways with her bare hands, she has no idea what to do when she meets an ordinary boy who thinks she's an ordinary girl.

  Ally Carter

  Girl, Boys, Men

  Ally Carter (2007). “I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You”, Hyperion

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• One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound's Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It's epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you'd be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French-he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who's not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something.

  Richard Misrach

  Photography, Moving, Reading

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