Syntax Quotes - Page 2

• I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk.

  David Foster Wallace

  Believe, Thinking, Interesting

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• Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is syntax, grammar and logical continuity, which together form the carrier-wave of plain sense within which its deeper meanings are broadcast.

  Don Paterson

  Art, Rely Upon, Poetry

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• Destroy the Museums. Crack syntax. Sabotage the adjective. Leave nothing but the verb.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

  Museums, Cracks, Adjectives

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• We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.

  Anne Carson

  Struggle, Mean, Talking

  "The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson". Interview with Sam Anderson, www.nytimes.com. March 14, 2013.

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• My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters.

  Bram Cohen

  Simple, Python, Support

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• A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.

  Fred Brooks

  Men, Dumb, Machines

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• If you want to be a fiction writer, you need to start reading like a fiction writer. To do so, you need to learn about craft so that the next time you pick up a contemporary short story, you're reading it not as an abstraction floating in formaldehyde, existing simply for the theorist's dull scalpel to saw on, but as a concrete thing constructed out of words and shaped by syntax, brought to life by a writer who made several thousand choices, some large, some small, before letting that imperfect beauty, the story, walk on its own two feet.

  John McNally

  Reading, Writing, Two

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• The nice thing about programming at the RDF level is that you can just say, I'll ask for all the books. You can ask for all the shelves. You can ask for a given shelf whether a book was on it. And you're not worrying so much about the underlying syntax.

  Tim Berners-Lee

  Nice, Book, Worry

  Interview with Scott Laningham, www.ibm.com. August 22, 2006.

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• Samuel Beckett is the person that I read the most of - certainly the person whose books I own the most of. Probably 800 or 900, maybe 1,000 books of just Samuel Beckett. By him, about him, in different languages, etc. etc. Notebooks of his, letters of his that I own, personal letters - not to me, but I bought a bunch of correspondence of his. I love his humor, and I'm always blown away by his syntax and his ideas. So I keep reading those.

  John Larroquette

  Notebook, Reading, Ideas

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.

  Fernando J. Corbato

  Use, Levels, Language

  "A Managerial View of the Multics System Development". Talk at the Conference on Research Directions in Software Technology, Providence, Rhode Island, www.multicians.org. October 1977.

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• Avant-garde theatre, with its distrust of the individual (that bourgeois invention), tends to go beyond [character] and the psychological approach in search of a syntax of types and characters which are "deconstructed and post-individual.

  Patrice Pavis

  Character, Theatre, Avant Garde

  Patrice Pavis, Christine Shantz (1998). “Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis”, p.43, University of Toronto Press

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• Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.

  Mason Cooley

  Pain, Names, Ideas

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• I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.

  Marvin Bell

  Coffee, Writing, Brain

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• Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.

  Terry Eagleton

  Odds, Literature, Tone

  "A puritan at play" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2008.

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• Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

  Gordon Allport

  Science, Violation, Idiom

  Gordon Willard Allport (1955). “Becoming; Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality”, p.19, Yale University Press

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• who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you

  e. e. cummings

  Kissing, Attention, Pay

  e. e. cummings (2014). “100 Selected Poems”, p.28, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame

  Allen Ginsberg

  Intelligent, Jumping, Space

  Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”

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• What makes sense is not law, syntax, rules or structure

  Aaron Betsky

  Law, Structure, Make Sense

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• It sometimes happens to me while writing, that I seek a word; mischievous as it is it appears in English, it appears in Arabic, but refuses to come in Hebrew. To some extent I made up my Hebrew. Unquestionably, the influence of Arabic is dominant, my syntax is almost Arabic.

  Sami Michael

  Writing, Hebrew, Sometimes

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• if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and trameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Heart, Differences, Deuces

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1854). “Vanity Fair, etc”, p.92

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• I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.

  Roger Caillois

  Memories, Needs, Analogies

  Roger Caillois (1985). “The writing of stones”, Univ of Virginia Pr

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• Why do you seem so annoyed at what I'm saying?" "Because we're too much like each other. I loathe your face, which is a caricature of mine, I loathe your voice, which is a mockery of mine, I loathe your pathetic syntax, which is my own.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Voice, Annoyed, Too Much

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• Don't you hate code that's not properly indented? Making it [indenting] part of the syntax guarantees that all code is properly indented.

  Guido van Rossum

  Hate, Learning, Guarantees That

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• Composing computer programs to solve scientific problems is like writing poetry. You must choose every word with care and link it with the other words in perfect syntax. There is no place for verbosity or carelessness. To become fluent in a computer lnaguage demands almost the antithesis of modern loose thinking. It requires many interactive sessions, the hands-on use of the device. You do not learn a foreign language from a book, rather you have to live in the country for year to let the langauge become an automatic part of you, and the same is true for computer languages.

  James Lovelock

  Country, Book, Writing

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• It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

  Richard K. Morgan

  Forgiving, Phrases, Weaponry

  Richard K. Morgan (2003). “Altered Carbon”, Del Rey

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