Pronouns Quotes - Page 2

• All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection.

  Joseph Devlin

  Class, Adjectives, Verbs

  Joseph Devlin (2014). “How to Speak and Write Correctly (illustrated): Fully Formatted Version”, p.5, Full Moon Publications

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• The point is that you free the ego. The ego is only a pronoun. It's a Greek first person pronoun, ergo. When you're in Greece you say, Ergo wants to take a bus, and you don't mean your ego wants to take a bus, like some big entity, you only mean I want to take a bus.

  Robert Thurman

  Mean, Ego, Greek

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• They found the corpse in the closet of Alcide's apartment, and they hatched a plan to hide his remains." Eric sounded like that had been kind of cute of us. "My Sookie hid a corpse?" "I don't think you can be too sure about that possessive pronoun." "Where did you learn that term, Northman?" "I took 'English as a Second Language' at a community college in the seventies.

  Charlaine Harris

  Cute, College, Thinking

  Charlaine Harris (2009). “Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set”, p.737, Penguin

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• We are literally linked in a circle, including with nature, as well as with other human beings. Old societies didn't have and still don't have "he" and "she." They don't have gendered pronouns. They don't have a word for nature, because we're not separate from nature.

  Gloria Steinem

  Circles, Wells, Humans

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices.

  Alasdair Gray

  Numbers, Immature, Ordinary

  "Unlikely Stories, Mostly". Book by Alasdair Gray, 1983.

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• [After being corrected by a grammarian for using the feminine pronoun instead of the pseudogeneric masculine:] As you please, but for my part, if I were to express myself so, I should fancy I had a beard.

  Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sevigne

  Fancy, Beard, Feminine

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• I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Song, Writing, Thinking

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• The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. (You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?).

  Herman Melville

  Heart, Men, Thinking

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.4894, Delphi Classics

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• Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.

  Jose Saramago

  Eye, Simple, Two

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• In Buddhist ideology, the conventional self is that which is constructed in a way by the use of the pronoun, and when you realize there is no absolute ego there, no disconnected one, self, or ego, then that actually strengthens your conventional ego. It does so in the sense that then you realize it's a construction, and you can strengthen it in order to help others, or do whatever you're trying to do, it's not like you no longer know who you are. Then you can organize your behavior by using your ego, as it's now the pronoun.

  Robert Thurman

  Buddhist, Helping Others, Self

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.

  Lawrence Wright

  Nashville, Rights, Race

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• The personal pronoun "I" should be the coat of arms of some individuals.

  Antoine Rivarol

  Coats, Arms, Individual

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• The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects - nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs - ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I'm most happy to be a writer.

  Maya Angelou

  People, Together, Nouns

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• And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren't we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Mean, Confusing, Want

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.104, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In the ninth and tenth centuries the Vikings invaded Britain from Scandinavia and settled in large numbers. Their language, which we call Old Norse, was at least partly comprehensible to the English, who did not hesitate to take over hundreds of words from it: skirt, window, scrub, sky, give, hit, kick, scatter, scrape, skill, scowl, score, fellow, want, skin, knife, law, happy, ugly, wrong and even the pronouns they and them.

  Larry Trask

  Law, Knives, Sky

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• I have a funny story to tell about English and how I came to fall in love with the language. I was desperate to fit in and spoke English all the time. Trouble was, in my household it was a no-no to speak English because somehow it is disrespectful to call parents and grandparents "you" - impersonal pronouns are offensive in Vietnamese.

  Andrew Lam

  Falling In Love, Speak English, Grandparent

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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