Phrases Quotes - Page 14

• What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Oil, Lamps, Opinion

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1920). “Modes and Morals”

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• In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words--liberty, equality, and fraternity--do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals.

  Krzysztof Kieslowski

  People, Liberty, Essentials

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• No doubt other writers have often put a thing more brilliantly, more subtly than even a very cunning artist in words can hope to emulate, a supreme phrase being a bit of luck that only happens now and then. And inasmuch as the condiments and secret travail of human nature are always the same, and that certain psychological moments must ever and ever recur, what more tempting than to pin down such a moment with the blow of a borrowed hammer?

  Ethel Smyth

  Artist, Blow, Doubt

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• The eternal task of song can never be finished in a single lifetime. That is the beauty and fascination of the art. Once you begin to phrase finely, you will feel more joy in the beautiful finish of a beautiful phrase than that caused by the loudest applause of an immense audience. The latter excites for a moment; the former endures forever.

  Nellie Melba

  Beautiful, Song, Art

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• No one who was not by nature a lover of logic, and an extreme precisian in the use of words and phrases, could have written the two "Alice" books.

  Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

  Book, Two, Use

  "The Lewis Carroll Picture Book". Book by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, 1899.

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• Careful listening to current country and western and rock music with the help of an interpreter for coded phrases shows that young people are hearing a constant stream of messages about getting high, feeling good, going on trips, and using drugs of all kinds with all methods.

  Virgil Miller Newton

  Country, Rocks, People

  "The Teenage Drug Epidemic". El Paso Physician, Volume 6, 1983.

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• Prayer, to the patriarchs and prophets, was more than the recital of well-known and well-worn phrases-it was the outpouring of the heart.

  Herbert Lockyer

  Prayer, Heart, Well Known

  Herbert Lockyer (1990). “All the Prayers of the Bible”, p.17, Harper Collins

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• I was obsessed with country music when I was a kid, and it's definitely had a huge influence on the way I write songs. I was always attracted to songs that had a brilliant pun or a clever turn of phrase, but came from a dark, bitter place. As a writer, I've always gravitated towards that feeling.

  Teddy Thompson

  Country, Song, Clever

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• This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.

  Rae Armantrout

  Beautiful, Book, Dark

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• As a child, I probably knew phrases that other children didn't known, like "pitocin drip" or "myocardial infarction." Some kind of knowledge was always in the air. My parents would always talk about science at the dinner table, saying something about this patient or some other patient. So I guess for a nanosecond in early high school, I thought about going into medicine.

  M. Night Shyamalan

  Children, School, Air

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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• There's a phrase you hear in Israel: "We're not Jews, we're Israelis." What that means is that the stereotype we're familiar with here in the States of the Diaspora Jew, i.e. Jews in America or Europe or Russia, etc. does not fit at all with the reality of the homegrown "sabras" of Israel.

  Steven Pressfield

  Mean, Reality, America

  Interview with Will Duquette, www.patheos.com. May 21, 2014.

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• On a more technical level, a story takes a lot of words. And to generate words and phrases and images and so on, that will compel the reader to continue reading - that stand a chance of really grabbing a reader - the writer has to work out of a place of, let's say, familiarity and affection. The matrix of the story has to be made out of stuff the writer really knows about and likes. The writer can't be stretching and (purely) inventing all the time. Well, I can't, anyway.

  George Saunders

  Reading, Work Out, Stories

  Source: und.edu

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• There’s this powerful phrase in the legal world, “Difficult cases make bad law.” The exception is the difficult case. You can’t generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don’t solve any problem because they’re so one of a kind.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Powerful, Law, World

  "The Rumpus Interview With Malcolm Gladwell". Interview with Stephen Elliott, therumpus.net. January 22, 2009.

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• I feel passionately about how I express myself. Language is the greatest motivating force. You can phrase something positively and inspire people to do their best, or negatively and make them feel worried, uncertain, and self-conscious. You can talk at a fast pace and people will get nervous, feel afraid to bring up extraneous thoughts. But those are the very thoughts that might be most important! They might represent that person's best thinking. If you're rushed, you're simply not going to get at that extra level of thinking.

  Frances Hesselbein

  Thinking, Self, People

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• O wretched is the dame, to whom the sound,
  "Your lord will soon return," no phrase brings.

  Charles Robert Maturin

  Wife, Sound, Dames

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• My husband and I speak an ancient language called grammatical English, and the kids speak a strange dialect which is difficult to decode because it is based on only four phrases: 'Huh,' 'I dunno,' 'It's not my turn,' and 'I do everything around here!

  Teresa Bloomingdale

  Children, Husband, Kids

  Teresa Bloomingdale (1982). “Murphy must have been a mother!: (and other laws I live by)”, Doubleday Books

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• I try to write like the writers I admire - I rip them off in form. It comes from George Strait and Merle Haggard records, and country music in general is really good at that, the twisted phrase... So Im always looking for that angle in my own work.

  Brad Paisley

  Country, Rip, Writing

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

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• And I think for a man whose native tongue is Spanish to be able to put together a phrase like 'cultural genocide' just speaks to how bright he is.

  Robert Downey, Jr.

  Men, Thinking, Together

  "Robert Downey, Jr. 'a lot more interesting' when he was on drugs, producer says", www.foxnews.com. May 21, 2015.

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• Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
  All is strange, yet nothing new:
  Endless labor all along,
  Endless labor to be wrong:
  Phrase that Time has flung away;
  Uncouth words in disarray,
  Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
  Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.

  Samuel Johnson

  Views, Poetry, Odes

  Tobias George Smollett, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith (1810). “The Poetical Works of Doctors Smollett, Johnson, and Goldsmith”, p.113

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• There have been times when I reread - or at least leafed through - something because I'd sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite.

  Peter Straub

  Dozen, Copies, Clumsy

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• If you are going to experience the ecstasy of enlightenment, it is not just going to be a phrase. You've got to work during meditation. So back to the navel center!

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Chakra Meditation, Enlightenment

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• I pray you indulge me for a space, for I am going to set out on a speech which may have some duration, but whose theme may be gleaned from its opening phrase: how dare you.

  David Mamet

  Space, May, Speech

  David Mamet (2010). “Boston Marriage”, p.59, Knopf Group E-Books

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• The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Mind, Generations

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• His (Swami Vivekananda) words are great music, phrases in the style of Beethoven, stirring rhythms like the march of Handel choruses. I cannot touch these sayings of his, scattered as they are through the pages of books, at thirty years' distance, without receiving a thrill through my body like an electric shock. And what shocks, what transports, must have been produced when in burning words they issued from the lips of the hero!

  Romain Rolland

  Distance, Hero, Book

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• There's no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I'm performing.

  Renee Fleming

  Thinking, Performing, Performances

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

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