Syllables Quotes - Page 2

• Our historical bequest is sublime. I have inherited a fragmented but highly creative
  exile and, since 1948, a home. I don't know that I want to settle there. I prefer the
  creative spur of exile. () But wherever I am I shall be Jewish, and that sound will
  inform every syllable I write. I am blessed with a long ancestry of wisdom, prophecy,
  and promise, a line of overwhelming creative achievements, courage, humor, and,
  above all, a dogged and chronic permanence, the greatest legacy of all.

  Bernice Rubens

  Blessed, Home, Writing

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• In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Equality, Facts, Nonsense

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (1996). “Only Words”, p.109, Harvard University Press

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• From the body of the unborn essence arises the sphere of light, and from that sphere of light arises wisdom. From the wisdom arises the seed syllable and from the seed syllable arises the complete Mandala, the deity and the retinue.

  Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

  Light, Essence, Spheres

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• FINANCE, n. The art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager. The pronunciation of this word with the i long and the accent on the first syllable is one of America's most precious discoveries and possessions.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Art, Discovery, America

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.67, 谷月社

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• A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses

  John Milton

  Memories, Men, Names

  1634 Comus, A Mask, l.204-8.

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• Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.

  Helen Keller

  Children, Distance, Fall

  Helen Keller (2003). “The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition”, p.81, Modern Library

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• We've got the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble when it comes to crime in this country. The FBI says burglary and robbery cost U.S. taxpayers $3.8 billion annually. Securities fraud alone costs four times that. And securities fraud is nothing to the cost of oil spills, price-fixing, and dangerous or defective products. Fraud by health-care corporations alone costs us between $100 billion and $400 billion a year. No three-strikes-and-you're-out for these guys. Remember the S&L scandal? $500 billion.

  Molly Ivins

  Country, Years, Oil

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• You and I are standing this very second at the meeting place of two eternities: the vast past that has endured forever, and the future that is plunging on to the last syllable of recorded time. We can't possible live in either of those eternities - no, not even for a split second. But, by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and our minds. So let's be content to live the only time we can possible live: from now until bedtime.

  Dale Carnegie

  Future, Past, Two

  Dale Carnegie (2012). “The Leader In You”, p.136, Simon and Schuster

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• The stream sings a subdued music, a scarcely audible lilt, faint and fluid syllables not quite said. It slips away into its future, where it already is, and flows steadily forth from up the canyon, a fountain of rumors from regions known to it and not to me.

  John Daniel

  Rivers, Rumor, Environmental

  John Daniel (2009). “The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature”, p.67, Counterpoint

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• Jesus! it is the name which moves the harps of heaven to melody. Jesus! the life of all our joys. If there be one name more charming, more precious than another, it is this name. It is woven into the very warp and woof of our psalmody. Many of our hymns begin with it, and scarcely any, that are good for anything, end without it. It is the sum total of all delights. It is the music with which the bells of heaven ring; a song in a word; an ocean for comprehension, although a drop for brevity; a matchless oratorio in two syllables; a gathering up of the hallelujahs of eternity in five letters.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Song, Jesus, Ocean

  Charles Spurgeon (2016). “Morning and Evening”, p.158, Discovery House

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• We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.

  Octavio Paz

  Real, Air, Doors

  Octavio Paz's Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 8, 1990.

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• Spy' is such a short ugly word. I prefer 'espionage.' Those extra three syllables really say something.

  Howard Tayler

  Spy, Three, Ugly

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• Some women get divorces on the grounds of incompatibility; others, on just the first two syllables.

  Evan Esar

  Divorce, Two, Firsts

  Evan Esar (1961). “Humorous English: a guide to comic usage, jocular speech and writing, and witty grammar”

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• I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus, that I never altered one syllable of God's Word against my conscience, nor would do this day, if all that is in earth, whether it be honor, pleasure, or riches, might be given me.

  William Tyndale

  Jesus, Honor, Records

  "Foxe's Book of Martyrs". Book by John Foxe, March 20, 1563.

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• I tried to make sense of the Four Books,
  until love arrived,
  and it all became a single syllable.

  Yunus Emre

  Book, Four, Make Sense

  Yunus Emre (1989). “The Drop that Became the Sea: Lyric Poems of Yunus Emre”, Shambhala Publications

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• It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Stars, Children, Distance

  "Transcript for the Piece Audio version of A Wizard of Earthsea: A Big Read Documentary". www.prx.org.

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• To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place. In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Book, Fall, Humility

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• When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.

  Jodi Picoult

  Simple, Expectations, Comfort

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “Handle with Care: A Novel”, p.208, Simon and Schuster

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• When he frowned again, she was fairly sure that the nomenclature did not please him, and she found herself wishing she had been birthed to other syllables.

  J.R. Ward

  Wish, Nomenclature, Found

  J.R. Ward (2011). “Lover Unleashed: A Novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood”, p.80, Penguin

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• My laboratory,' I said, experimentally, drawing out each syllable. 'Why is it that saying it like that always makes me want to follow it with 'mwoo-hah-hah-hahhhhh'? ' 'You were overexposed to Hammer Films as a child?' - Harry Dresden & Bob the Skull, Changes, Jim Butcher

  Jim Butcher

  Children, Skulls, Drawing

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• The Brain - is wider than the Sky - For - put them side by side - The one the other will contain With ease - and You - beside - The Brain is deeper than the sea - For- hold them - Blue to Blue - The one the other will absorb - As Sponges - Buckets - do - The Brain is just the weight of God - For - Heft them - Pound for Pound - And they will differ - if they do - As Syllable from Sound.

  Emily Dickinson

  Blue, Sea, Sky

  Emily Dickinson (2009). “The Pocket Emily Dickinson”, p.101, Shambhala Publications

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• For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next...They are set up on the course of their existence, and the faster they climb towards its zenith, the more they hasten towards the point where they exist no more.

  Saint Augustine

  Giving, Zenith, Way

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• I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.

  Louise Erdrich

  Ice, Ears, Fists

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• Five syllables," Apollo said, counting them on his fingers. "That would be real bad.

  Rick Riordan

  Real, Would Be, Apollo

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• I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal." And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable fell duskly upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Voice, Dwelling, Departed

  Edgar Allan Poe (1857). “The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe: Poems and tales. Eureka, an essay on the material and spiritual universe”, p.294

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