Syntax Quotes - Page 4

• Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them.

  Edwin H Friedman

  Moving, Communication, Emotional

  Edwin H. Friedman (2013). “Friedman's Fables”, p.13, Guilford Press

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• Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.

  Lincoln Kirstein

  Dance, Vocabulary, Color

  Lincoln Kirstein (1970). “Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks”, p.5, Courier Corporation

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• Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence

  Adrienne Rich

  Sleep, Dark, Thinking

  Adrienne Rich (2011). “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010: Poems 2007–2010”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company

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• There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

  Dorothy Parker

  Best Years Of Your Life, Study, Stealing

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• Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

  Raymond Chandler

  God, Writing, Eye

  Letter to Edward Weeks, 18 Jan. 1947, in F. MacShane Life of Raymond Chandler (1976) ch. 7

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• Mr Robert Montgomery's genius [is] far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax? [His] readers must take such grammar as they can get and be thankful.

  Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild

  Being Thankful, Genius, Grammar

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• To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds.

  Terence McKenna

  Giving, Political, Mind

  "History Ends in Green". Terence McKenna's eight-hour lecture at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, www.youtube.com. 1989.

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• I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.

  Dennis Ritchie

  Language, Uncertain, Declaration

  Linux Focus Interview, www.linuxfocus.org.

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• The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.

  Michel Foucault

  Broken, Silence, Constitution

  Michel Foucault, Keith Hoeller, Ludwig Binswanger, Jacob Needleman (1984). “Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry”

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• Milton on speed. I am going to need about a decade to think about that. That delay in syntax, the putting off of the click of the sentence into itself, is something that has always intrigued me. I love the emotional effect of it, and never want it to be merely a gesture. Sometimes I try it and it doesn't work, so I have to put the poem aside, and try again, more simply and more strange.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Emotional, Thinking, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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