In the index below, the Words About Words quotations are ordered alphabetically by the first word in the quotation ("noise" words such as "a" and "the" are excluded) and the first few words of each quotation are given, as well as as a link to the list of quotations by the author.

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Above all, a book is a ..." Cynthia Ozick
"Abstract words are ancient coins whose ..." Julian Jaynes
"The accent of one's birthplace remains ..." Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld
"The acid test of a good ..." Bernice Rubens
"The act of sitting down and ..." Carl Honore
"Actions are the first tragedy in ..." Oscar Wilde
"Actually if a writer needs a ..." Ernest Hemingway
"The adjective is the banana peel ..." Clifton Fadiman
"Adjectives are the sugar of literature ..." Henry James
"Administrative dialects seem to have been ..." John Ralston Saul
"The advice of their elders to ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"Affectation is a very good word ..." G. C. Lichtenberg
"Afraid lest he be caught up ..." William Carlos Williams
"After all, when you come right ..." Russell Hoban
"The agitator seizes the word. The ..." Karl Kraus
"Alcohol is barren. The words a ..." Marguerite Duras
"All books are either dreams or ..." Amy Lowell
"All editorial writers ever do is ..." Anonymous
"All good and true book-lovers practise ..." Eugene Field
"All my life I've looked at ..." Ernest Hemingway
"All official institutions of language are ..." Roland Barthes
"All our words from loose using ..." Ernest Hemingway
"All pro athletes are bilingual. They ..." Gordie Howe
"All provincial or bye-phrases come under ..." William Hazlitt
"All slang is metaphor, and all ..." G. K. Chesterton
"All speech, written or spoken, is ..." Robert Louis Stevenson
"All the best stories in the ..." Arthur Christopher Benson
"All the words that I gather, And ..." W. B. Yeats
"All these formulations are important, but ..." Nicholas Lemann
"All words are pegs to hang ..." Henry Ward Beecher
"All writers are thieves; theft is ..." Nina Bawden
"All writing should be selection in ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Also, Sancho, you must not interlard ..." Miguel de Cervantes
"Always do sober what you said ..." Charles Scribner, Jr.
"American is the language in which ..." John Mortimer
"The Americans never use the word ..." Alexis de Tocqueville
"Among the calamities of war may ..." Samuel Johnson
"Among the most fruitful mistakes is ..." Frederic Paulhan
"And every phrase And sentence that ..." T. S. Eliot
"And if, to be sure, sometimes ..." Niccolo Machiavelli
"And this our life, exempt from ..." William Shakespeare
"The angels are so enamoured of ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Another word not (yet) in dictionaries ..." Allan M. Lazarus
"Antiphanes said merrily that in a ..." Plutarch
"Any given word is a bundle, ..." Osip Mandelstam
"Any language is always and forever ..." John McWhorter
"Any man who can write a ..." Raymond Chandler
"An aphorism never coincides with the ..." Karl Kraus
"The aphorism, the apophthegm, in which ..." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Argument, again, is the death of ..." William Hazlitt
"An army of brave new words ..." Leslie Savan
"The art of newspaper paragraphing is ..." Don Marquis
"An art whose medium is language ..." Thomas Mann
"Artists need to be protected from ..." Naomi Klein
"Artists use frauds to make human ..." Kurt Vonnegut
"As a poet and writer, I ..." June Jordan
"As a poet there is only ..." W. H. Auden
"As advertising blather becomes the nation's ..." George F. Will
"As economic and social conditions have ..." John Ralston Saul
"As far as I'm concerned, "whom" ..." Calvin Trillin
"As for style of writing -- ..." Henry David Thoreau
"As for the other part of ..." John Dryden
"As I take up my pen ..." G. C. Lichtenberg
"As our culture changes the language ..." John Algeo
"As sheer casual reading matter, I ..." Albert Jay Nock
"As societies grow decadent, the language ..." Gore Vidal
"As the Internet comes increasingly to ..." David Crystal
"As the language of commercialism has ..." James B. Twitchell
"As we go back in history, ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"As we round the millennium, the ..." Naomi S. Baron
"The assumption that puns are per ..." H. W. Fowler
"At a dinner party one should ..." W. Somerset Maugham
"At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, ..." Studs Terkel
"At painful times, when composition is ..." Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always ..." George Orwell
"Attentiveness is the natural prayer of ..." Nicolas Malebranche
"An author who speaks about his ..." Benjamin Disraeli
"Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter ..." Ellery Sedgwick
"An average English word is four ..." Mark Twain
"The average Southerner has the speech ..." Bill Bryson
"Avoid splitting infinitives." That's the one ..." Geoffrey Nunberg

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Bad language is so much the ..." Paul Fussell
"The bases for historical knowledge are ..." Paul de Man
"The basic rule of human nature ..." Michael Caine
"The basic tool for the manipulation ..." Philip K. Dick
"Battle, n. A method of untying ..." Ambrose Bierce
"Be a little careful about your ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Be who you are! Think for ..." Ken Babstock
"Bear up, brave clerklets, though the ..." Punch
"BEATRICE: Foul words is but foul ..." William Shakespeare
"Beauty in art: the sudden kindled ..." Milan Kundera
"Because in our brief lives we ..." Julian Jaynes
"Because language is the carrier of ..." Louise Bogan
"Before anybody gets too high and ..." David Kipen
"Being an integral aspect of the ..." Victoria Neufeldt
"Being in the dictionary is not ..." Erin McKean
"Believing in the inviolability of the ..." David Crystal
"Belladonna, n. In Italian a beautiful ..." Ambrose Bierce
"The Bellman on the "unmistakable marks" ..." Lewis Carroll
"The best craftsman always leaves holes ..." Dylan Thomas
"The best interviews -- like the ..." Lynn Barber
"The best thing about animals is ..." Thornton Wilder
"The best thing about the English ..." Lynsey Hanley
"Better to write for yourself and ..." Cyril Connolly
"The Betterment of Man is the ..." Garrison Keillor
"Beware the conversationalist who adds "in ..." Robert Morley
"Beyond any shadow of a doubt, ..." Salman Rushdie
"A bibliophile of little means is ..." Pablo Neruda
"A big leather-bound volume makes an ..." Mark Twain
"The biggest cliches often hide deep ..." Bill McKibben
"The bitterest tears shed over graves ..." Harriet Beecher Stowe
"Blows are sarcasms turned stupid: wit ..." George Eliot
"The bold and discerning writer who, ..." Ambrose Bierce
"A book is a mirror: if ..." G. C. Lichtenberg
"A book is a part of ..." Henry Miller
"A book is a version of ..." Salman Rushdie
"A book is like a man—clever ..." John Steinbeck
"A book that furnishes no quotations ..." Thomas Love Peacock
"A book that is shut is ..." Thomas Fuller
"Books and marriage go ill ..." Moliere
"Books are the bees which carry ..." James Russell Lowell
"Books are the compasses and telescopes ..." Jesse Lee Bennett
"Books constitute capital. A library book ..." Thomas Jefferson
"The books one has written in ..." Jean Rostand
"Books that have become classics- books ..." Thomas Bailey Aldrich
"A bore is a man who, ..." Bert Leston Taylor
"Bore, n. A person who talks ..." Ambrose Bierce
"Borrowers of books -- those mutilators ..." Charles Lamb
"The Brahmins say that in their ..." Leo Tolstoy
"Brevity is the sister of ..." Anton Chekhov
"Bright is the ring of words When ..." Robert Louis Stevenson
"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet ..." D. H. Lawrence
"But by "vernacular" I mean far ..." Ralph Ellison
"But don't blame me if some ..." Bill Casselman
"But I have long thought that ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"But in so far as we ..." Aldous Huxley
"But let's be honest: Who cares ..." Jesse Sheidlower
"But my main debt, which may ..." John Updike
"But O, sick children of the ..." W. B. Yeats
"But the effort made by the ..." H. L. Mencken
"But what I have most at ..." Jonathan Swift
"But words are things, and a ..." Lord Byron
"Buy good books, and read them; ..." Lord Chesterfield
"By degrees I made a discovery ..." Mary Shelley
""By God," quod he, "for pleynly, ..." Geoffrey Chaucer
"By speaking, by thinking, we undertake ..." Jose Ortega y Gasset
"By such innovations are languages enriched, ..." Miguel de Cervantes
"By the year 2050 -- earlier ..." George Orwell

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Camerado! This is no book;..." Walt Whitman
"Cancer patients are lied to, not ..." Susan Sontag
"The capacity of human beings to ..." H. L. Mencken
"Carnivores eat flesh and meat; piscivores ..." Richard Lederer
"Certain brief sentences are peerless in ..." Jean Rostand
"Certainly so great growing a population, ..." Thomas Jefferson
"Change in language need not be ..." Richard Lederer
"Change is legitimate and inevitable, for ..." Robert MacNeil
"The chief difference between words and ..." Leo Tolstoy
"Children show scars like medals. Lovers ..." Leonard Cohen
"A children's writer should, ideally, be ..." Joan Aiken
"The circle of the English language ..." J. A. H. Murray
"A classic—something that everybody wants to ..." Mark Twain
"The closer the look one takes ..." Karl Kraus
"Comedy: The least controllable use of ..." John Ralston Saul
"Commas in The New Yorker fall ..." E. B. White
"Common experience is the gold reserve ..." Rene Daumal
"The common faults of American language ..." James Fenimore Cooper
"A community is known by the ..." John Algeo
"The companionship of books is unquestionably ..." William Roberts
"A compliment is something like a ..." Victor Hugo
"Confession, alas, is the new ..." Richard Dean Rosen
"Confusion is a word we have ..." Henry Miller
"Considering Language then as some mighty ..." Walt Whitman
"Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no ..." Archibald MacLeish
"Conversation attained immediate vertical takeoff and ..." Seamus Heaney
"Countless new words are born every ..." Allan Metcalf
"A country can be judged by ..." German Proverb
"The covers of this book are ..." Ambrose Bierce
"The crime of book purging is ..." Max Lerner
"Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic ..." Richard Dawkins
"Curiously enough, it seems to be ..." Paul de Man
"The current flows fast and furious. ..." Virginia Woolf
"Custom is the most certain mistress ..." Ben Jonson

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Daddy always said that at the ..." Robert Hellenga
"Dear Mister Language Person: What is ..." Dave Barry
"Decadence is a difficult word to ..." Ernest Hemingway
"The declared meaning of a spoken ..." Peter Carey
"Deconstructionism can also be seen as ..." John Ralston Saul
"The deep and unconscious delight in ..." Andrew Wilkinson
"The defence of the English language...has ..." George Orwell
"A definition is the enclosing a ..." Samuel Butler
"Definition of a slogan: a form ..." Richard Usborne
"Depend upon it that if a ..." Samuel Johnson
"Despots play their part in the ..." Victor Hugo
"The development of vocabulary has been ..." Robert K. Barnhart
"Dialect words—those terrible marks of the ..." Thomas Hardy
"Dictionaries are but the depositories of ..." Thomas Jefferson
"Dictionary is a powerful word. Authors ..." Sydney I. Landau
"A Dictionary is an historical monument, ..." Richard Chevenix Trench
"A dictionary without quotations is like ..." James Sledd
"Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in ..." John Ralston Saul
"The difference between the almost right ..." Mark Twain
"The difference between writing for stage ..." Alan Bennett
"A difference of taste in jokes ..." George Eliot
"Differences among languages, like differences among ..." Steven Pinker
"The difficult part in an argument ..." Andre Maurois
"The dignity of the artist lies ..." G. K. Chesterton
"Diplomacy is the art of saying ..." Will Catlin
"Diplomacy is the lowest form of ..." E. B. White
"A diplomat is a person who ..." Caskie Stinnett
"Direct speech is anathema to leaders ..." David Olive
"Disappointment, when it involves neither shame ..." Samuel Johnson
"The discipline of the written word ..." John Steinbeck
"Discretion of speech is more than ..." Francis Bacon
"Discretion of speech is more than ..." Francis Bacon
"Do not appear so scholarly, I ..." Moliere
"Do not dismiss what the old ..." The New Jerusalem Bible
"Do not read, as children do, ..." Gustave Flaubert
"Do not the most moving moments ..." Marcel Marceau
"Do you know that conversation is ..." W. Somerset Maugham
"Don't join the book burners. Don't ..." Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Don't use words too big for ..." C. S. Lewis
"Doublethink means the power of holding ..." George Orwell
"Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with ..." Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
"Dr. X's real name was a ..." Neal Stephenson
"Drawing on my fine command of ..." Robert Benchley
"Due to my general aversion to ..." David Sedaris

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Each year brings new problems of ..." W. H. Auden
"The easiest way to give the ..." George Mikes
"Editing is the same as quarreling ..." Harold Ross
"Editing should be, especially in the ..." James Thurber
"Eleven syllables, many of them of ..." Joseph Chamberlain
"Emerson said that language is fossil ..." Jorge Luis Borges
"English [is] a robust, swarthy tongue, ..." Constance Hale
"English became what it did from ..." Ruth Wajnryb
"The English Bible—a book which, if ..." Thomas Babington Macaulay
"English grammar is so complex and ..." Bill Bryson
"English is a kind of vacuum ..." David Crystal
"English is a language that simply ..." Simon Winchester
"English is a living language, which ..." Robert P. Henry
"English is a stretch language; one ..." William Safire
"English is destined to be in ..." John Adams
"English is dominant in a way ..." John McWhorter
"English is just as much big ..." Randolph Quirk
"English is not a killer language, ..." Ruaridh Nicoll
"The English language as it is ..." Robert Lowth
"The English language has become a ..." Tom McArthur
"The English language hasn't got where ..." Carl Sandburg
"The English language is an arsenal ..." Stephen Fry
"The English language is like a ..." Robert Burchfield
"The English language is nobody's special ..." Derek Walcott
"The English language is not a ..." Sir James Murray
"The English language is the richest ..." P. G. Wodehouse
"English usage is sometimes more than ..." E. B. White
"English, like all languages, is a ..." Robert Claiborne
"The English-speaking world may be divided ..." H. W. Fowler
"Ephemeral English is the living language, ..." Michael Adams
"Erudition, n. Dust shaken out of ..." Ambrose Bierce
"Euphemisms are not, as many young ..." Quentin Crisp
"Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, ..." Pearl S. Buck
"Even the most ardent structuralist would ..." Bill Bryson
"Even the most onomatopoeic words -- ..." Steven Pinker
"Even though society's neologisms are normally ..." Chris Noon
"Every age has a language of ..." Augustus Hare
"Every artist writes his own ..." Havelock Ellis
"Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing ..." H. L. Mencken
"Every autobiography is concerned with two ..." W. H. Auden
"Every book is, in an intimate ..." Robert Louis Stevenson
"Every burned book or house enlightens ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Every great man nowadays has his ..." Oscar Wilde
"Every increase of knowledge, whether real ..." Samuel Johnson
"Every individual ought to know at ..." Joseph Brodsky
"Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum ..." James Baldwin
"Every man feels instinctively that all ..." James Russell Lowell
"Every new word is a new ..." Daniela Fischerova
"Every other author may aspire to ..." Samuel Johnson
"Every other author may aspire to ..." Samuel Johnson
"Every poet knows the pun is ..." Louis Untermeyer
"Every quotation contributes something to the ..." Samuel Johnson
"Every reader finds himself. The writer's ..." Marcel Proust
"Every tense and mood of a ..." John Ralston Saul
"Every word carries its own surprises ..." George A. Miller
"Every word has three explanations and ..." Irish Proverb
"Every word was once a poem. ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Every year there are many thousands ..." Allan Metcalf
"Everybody has a right to pronounce ..." Winston Churchill
"Everybody should eavesdrop once in a ..." Thornton Wilder
"Everyday language is a part of ..." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Everyone has always regarded any usage ..." Evelyn Waugh
"Everyone plays with language or responds ..." David Crystal
"Everyone, including even the metaphysician in ..." H. L. Mencken
"Everything can change, but not the ..." Italo Calvino
"Everything in the world exists to ..." Stephane Mallarme
"Everything is becoming science fiction. From ..." J. G. Ballard
"Everything that we have so far ..." Edward Sapir
"Everywhere I have sought rest and ..." Thomas A Kempis
"An exaggeration is a truth that ..." Kahlil Gibran
"Exercise your words. Try them out ..." William Sloane
"The existence of good bad literature—the ..." George Orwell
"The expression of a man's face ..." Charles Dickens
"The extreme pleasure we take in ..." Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld
"The exuberance that leads human beings ..." Jerry Dunn

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on ..." Aldous Huxley
"A fair realization of the incredible ..." Benjamin Lee Whorf
"Far from being vulgar or frivolous ..." Gary Egan
"A favourite proclamation of alarmists is ..." Robyn Maler
"A feature of the second Elizabethan ..." H. W. Fowler
"The few Latin phrases I am ..." William F. Buckley Jr.
"Few speeches which have produced an ..." Lord Rosebery
"A few years ago I did ..." Nicholson Baker
"Fidelity to the subject's thought and ..." Janet Malcolm
"Finality is not the language of ..." Benjamin Disraeli
"Finding a name for something is ..." Howard Rheingold
"Finding the inappropriate word -- the ..." John Carey
"Fine words butter no ..." British Proverb
"Fine words! I wonder where you ..." Jonathan Swift
"First drafts are for learning what ..." Bernard Malamud
"The first principle of a free ..." Adlai Stevenson
"Fishing baskets are employed to catch ..." Chuang Tzu
"Folks don't like to have somebody ..." Harper Lee
"A fool and his words are ..." William Shenstone
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that ..." Nicholson Baker
"For a large class of cases—though ..." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"For a novelist, a given historic ..." Milan Kundera
"For all of us, grave or ..." George Eliot
"For books are more than books, ..." Amy Lowell
"For books are not absolutely dead ..." John Milton
"For centuries, the English-speaking peoples have ..." Robert Claiborne
"For God, for Country and for ..." James Thurber
"For him who has eyes to ..." Harold D. Lasswell
"For I have neither wit, nor ..." William Shakespeare
"For insight into human affairs I ..." Freeman J. Dyson
"For Jung, etymology carried great significance ..." Russell A. Lockhart
"For last year's words belong to ..." T. S. Eliot
"For me, words on a page ..." Alberto Manguel
"For men use, if they have ..." Sir Thomas More
"For most of us the rules ..." Bill Bryson
"For my own part I think ..." James Boswell
"For of all sad words of ..." John Greenleaf Whittier
"For proverbs are the pith, the ..." John Florio
"For the most part our words ..." John Moore
"For Truth is as impossible to ..." John Milton
"For we which now behold these ..." William Shakespeare
"For what, after all, is a ..." Richard Chevenix Trench
"For whatever is truly wondrous and ..." Herman Melville
"For words are but the images ..." Francis Bacon
"For words are wise men’s counters ..." Thomas Hobbes
"For your born writer, nothing is ..." Catherine Drinker Bowen
"A foreign language is more easily ..." German Proverb
"Formerly we used to canonise our ..." Oscar Wilde
"Free speech is the whole thing, ..." Salman Rushdie
"Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with ..." Norman O. Brown
"French rhetorical models are too narrow ..." Camille Paglia
"The Frenchman is right: "Language is ..." Mahmoud El-Kati
"The frequent use of the bad ..." P. H. Davison
"From my earliest days I have ..." Patrick Campbell
"From now on, ending a sentence ..." Winston Churchill
"From one casual of mine he ..." James Thurber
"From one perspective, a certain irony ..." David Foster Wallace
"From the moment I picked up ..." Groucho Marx
"The fruit grower ... capitalizes the ..." Louis Untermeyer
"Fumbling for a word is everybody's ..." Anthony Burgess
"The future author is one who ..." Thornton Wilder

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"The genius of a democratic people ..." Alexis de Tocqueville
"The German language "speaks Being," while ..." Martin Heidegger
"The Germans have an inhuman way ..." Mark Twain
"Get a few language types together, ..." Patricia T. O'Connor
"The gift of language is the ..." Lewis Thomas
"Give 'em words; Pour oil into their ..." Ben Jonson
"Give me books, fruit, French wine ..." John Keats
"Give the people a new word ..." Willa Cather
"Give your tongue more holidays than ..." Scottish Proverb
"Go, gentlemen, every man unto his ..." William Shakespeare
"God will not take you to ..." The Koran
"Good authors, too, who once knew ..." Cole Porter
"Good communication is stimulating as black ..." Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"Good company and good discourse are ..." Izaak Walton
"Good critical writing is measured by ..." Raymond Chandler
"Good music is very close to ..." Denis Diderot
"A good newspaper, I suppose, is ..." Arthur Miller
"The good parts of a book ..." Ernest Hemingway
"Good shot, bad luck and hell ..." Virginia Graham
"A good story cannot be devised; ..." Raymond Chandler
"A good word is as a ..." The Koran
"The goodness of the true pun ..." Edgar Allan Poe
"Grammar is the logic of speech, ..." Richard Chevenix Trench
"Grammar, with its mixture of logical ..." Marguerite Yourcenar
"Grant me some wild expressions, Heavens, ..." George Farquhar
"Great art speaks a language which ..." Robert Menzies
"The great enemy of clear language ..." George Orwell
"A great many complimentary things have ..." Robertson Davies
"The great mass of human beings ..." George Orwell
"Great people talk about ideas, average ..." Fran Lebowitz
"A great writer creates a world ..." Cyril Connolly
"The greater amount of truth is ..." Edgar Allan Poe
"The greatest difference between the cross-references ..." Edward Mendelson
"The greatest masterpiece in literature is ..." Jean Cocteau
"The greatest thing by far is ..." Aristotle

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"The habitude of pleasing by flattery ..." Walter Savage Landor
"Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay ..." Eric Raymond
"The hard necessity of bringing the ..." Nelson Algren
"He drinks his drinks in a ..." Ogden Nash
"He had sung against all battles, ..." Lord Byron
"He is one of those orators ..." Winston Churchill
"He mobilized the English language and ..." Edward R. Murrow
"He must also be on his ..." Aneurin Bevan
"He spoke with a certain what-is-it ..." P. G. Wodehouse
"He that will write well in ..." Roger Ascham
"He was a poet who trusted ..." J. D. McClatchy
"He was full of cliché, but ..." Chinua Achebe
"He who wants to persuade should ..." Joseph Conrad
"He writes the worst English that ..." H. L. Mencken
"A healthy male adult bore consumes ..." John Updike
"The hearing ear is always found ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Hemingway was a prisoner of his ..." William Burroughs
"Henry Miller is not really a ..." Gerald Brenan
"Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic ..." George Eliot
"Here, where all is new, no ..." Thomas Jefferson
"He's a wonderful talker, who has ..." Moliere
"High among television's defaults was the ..." Todd Gitlin
"The highest stretch of improvement a ..." Laurence Sterne
"His enemies might have said before ..." Sydney Smith
"His life was that of a ..." Henry James
"His name was Shadow, short for ..." Martin Amis
"His very words are instinct with ..." Percy Bysshe Shelley
"An honest man speaks the truth, ..." William Hazlitt
"Honest plain words best pierce the ..." William Shakespeare
"Hope is the thing with feathers— That ..." Emily Dickinson
"How clever you are, my dear! ..." Oscar Wilde
"How hard it is to make ..." Olive Schreiner
"How ironical that it is by ..." Søren Kierkegaard
"However much you knock at nature's ..." Ivan Turgenev
"Human speech is like a cracked ..." Gustave Flaubert
"Humans mop up words like ..." Jean Aitchison
"Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid ..." James Thurber

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"I always write a good first ..." Moliere
"I am a dreamer of words, ..." Gaston Bachelard
"I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved ..." Dylan Thomas
"I am always sorry when any ..." Samuel Johnson
"I am an unrepentant, irremediable word ..." Charles Harrington Elster
"I am being frank about myself ..." Henry Kissinger
"I am convinced that the best ..." Omar Nelson Bradley
"I am no friend, therefore, to ..." Thomas Jefferson
"I am not a literary man...I ..." Sir James Murray
"I am not so lost in ..." Samuel Johnson
"I am not so vain to ..." John Locke
"I am not, by the way, ..." Carol Shields
"I am of the firm belief ..." Beryl Bainbridge
"I am omniverbivorous by nature and ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"I am so coarse, the things ..." C. S. Lewis
"I am still studying verbs and ..." Carl Sandburg
"I ascribe a basic importance to ..." Frantz Fanon
"I avoid talking before the youth ..." Horace Walpole
"I believe that Brecht did nothing ..." Jean Genet
"I believe the road to hell ..." Stephen King
"I believe there is an ethic ..." Alberto Manguel
"I believe there's no proverb but ..." Miguel de Cervantes
"I can understand German as well ..." Mark Twain
"I cannot think of a greater ..." Lord John Russell
"I can't bear art that you ..." D. H. Lawrence
"I can't understand how a man ..." John Ruskin
"I can't understand the term "anti-aging." Ditto ..." Natasha Singer
"I confess that part of the ..." Michael Pollan
"I consider that that "that" that ..." James Thurber
"I did toy with the idea ..." Groucho Marx
"I distrust the incommunicable: it is ..." Jean-Paul Sartre
"I do not hesitate to read ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I do not know the American ..." Charles Dickens
"I do not know which to ..." Wallace Stevens
"I do not object to people ..." Lord Birkett
"I don't have ugly ducklings turning ..." Maeve Binchy
"I don't think any good book ..." Carlos Fuentes
"I don't think it is always ..." Salman Rushdie
"I don't want to talk grammar. ..." George Bernard Shaw
"I don't wish to sign my ..." Oscar Wilde
"I dwell in Possibility-- A fairer House ..." Emily Dickinson
"I fear those big words, Stephen ..." James Joyce
"I feel a kind of reverence ..." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"I fell in love -- that ..." Dylan Thomas
"I finished on Thursday the novel ..." Anthony Trollope
"I get up in the morning ..." Don Marquis
"I go into my library, and ..." Alexander Smith
"I greet you at the beginning ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I had a linguistics professor who ..." Jeff Stilson
"I hate false words, and seek ..." Walter Savage Landor
"I have a weakness for writers ..." Geoffrey Nunberg
"I have always felt rather sorry ..." Ben Macintyre
"I have grown fond of semicolons ..." Lewis Thomas
"I have never met a person ..." Steven Pinker
"I have often felt as though ..." Sigmund Freud
"I have only made this [letter] ..." Blaise Pascal
"I haven't much opinion of words. ..." Ellen Glasgow
"I hope I've done nothing so monosyllabic ..." Christopher Fry
"I invented the colors of the ..." Arthur Rimbaud
"I know a man -- a ..." Charles Stuart Calverley
"I know one husband and wife ..." Vera Brittain
"I know you lawyers can, with ..." John Gay
"I like to collect little curiousities ..." Tom Stoppard
"I like to do all the ..." Oscar Wilde
"I love metaphor the way some ..." William H. Gass
"I love metaphor. It provides two ..." Bernard Malamud
"I might have been tempted to ..." Manchan Magan
"I never go anywhere without packing ..." Michael Pollan
"I never wanted to be a ..." Iris Murdoch
"I perceived that to express those ..." Marcel Proust
"I personally think we developed language ..." Jane Wagner
"I prefer the honest jargon of ..." Jean Rostand
"I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant ..." Cicero
"I read a poem. I do ..." Ted Joans
"I really do inhabit a system ..." Václav Havel
"I regret that you want to ..." Jacques Barzun
"I said there was a society ..." Jonathan Swift
"I see journalists as the manual ..." Marguerite Duras
"I see that everywhere among the race ..." Sophocles
"I should have no objection to ..." Benjamin Franklin
"I should not talk so much ..." Henry David Thoreau
"I sometimes hold it half a ..." Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian ..." Charles I, King of Spain
"I started off my life in ..." David Sedaris
"I still understand a few words ..." Jean Rostand
"I suppose that writers should, in ..." John Mortimer
"I think "taste" is a social ..." John Updike
"I think of words and especially ..." Lesley Dill
"I think people who try to ..." Erin McKean
"I think that the deliberate invention ..." George Orwell
"I think the relationships that survive ..." Douglas Coupland
"I think, for the rest of ..." Carolyn Wells
"I want no more than to ..." George Seferis
"I want the concentration & the ..." Virginia Woolf
"I was always embarrassed by the ..." Ernest Hemingway
"I was angry with my friend: I ..." William Blake
"I was driven into writing because ..." Evelyn Waugh
"I was getting a little nervous ..." Steve Martin
"I will speak daggers to her ..." William Shakespeare
"I wish our clever young poets ..." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"I would dodge, not lie, in ..." Larry Speakes
"I would earnestly ask my sisters ..." Florence Nightingale
"I would rather have as my ..." John Updike
"I would say that the dislike, ..." Walter Redfern
"i. Never use a metaphor, simile, ..." George Orwell
"The idea that the human mind ..." Steven Pinker
"Ideas improve. The meaning of words ..." Guy Debord
"If a people have no word ..." Edgar Z. Friedenberg
"If a poem is not forgotten ..." W. S. Merwin
"If an essential part of Web ..." Tim O'Reilly
"If an iron door could be ..." Charles Dickens
"If Dictionaries are to be the ..." Thomas Jefferson
"If everything is perfect, language is ..." Jean Baudrillard
"If he be so resolved, I can ..." William Shakespeare
"If language is not correct, then ..." Confucius
"If men do not keep on ..." John Updike
"If Miss means respectably unmarried, and ..." Angela Carter
"If my books had been any ..." Raymond Chandler
"If science fiction is the myth ..." Ursula K. Le Guin
"If the essayist is a sculptor, ..." Hendrik Hertzberg
"If the eyes are the windows ..." Josh Wilson
"If the native speakers want to ..." William Safire
"If the secret of being a ..." Remy de Gourmont
"If to talk to oneself when ..." Baltasar Gracian
"If we can "boondoggle" ourselves out ..." Franklin D. Roosevelt
"If we divine a discrepancy between ..." Charles Horton Cooley
"If we use common words on ..." George Eliot
"If when a businessman speaks of ..." Louis B. Lundborg
"If words are to enter men's ..." J.B. Phillips
"If words, as Samuel Johnson said, ..." Hilary Bower
"If you are of the opinion ..." Fran Lebowitz
"If you can't get a job ..." Max Hastings
"If you want a new word ..." Allan Metcalf
"If you want to change the ..." Howard Rheingold
"If you want to tell the ..." Salman Rushdie
"If you want truth to go ..." Charles Spurgeon
"If you were to make little ..." Oliver Goldsmith
"If you're a writer, a real ..." Robertson Davies
"If you've ever heard yourself saying, ..." Erin McKean
"I'll publish, right or wrong: Fools ..." Lord Byron
"The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called ..." Thomas Carlyle
"I'm glad you like adverbs -- ..." Henry James
"I'm not comfortable with the style ..." Geoffrey Nunberg
"I'm replacing some of the timber ..." Hammond Innes
"I'm well aware there is little ..." Lynne Truss
"The image of therapy as a ..." Russell A. Lockhart
"Imagine if you heard your child's ..." Lauren Slater
"Imagine the Lord talking French! Aside ..." Clarence Day
"Impenetrability! That's what *I* say!" ..." Lewis Carroll
"The impertinent compositors have taken it ..." J. R. R. Tolkien
"Impropriety is the soul of ..." W. Somerset Maugham
"In all pointed sentences, some degree ..." Samuel Johnson
"In all speech, words and sense ..." Ben Jonson
"In conversation, the game is to ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In dagger-contests, and the artillery of ..." Jonathan Swift
"in every language even deafanddumb..." e. e. cummings
"In fact, words are well adapted ..." J. B. S. Haldane
"In fast-moving, progress-conscious America, the consumer ..." Daniel J. Boorstin
"In human intercourse the tragedy begins, ..." Henry David Thoreau
"In Ireland, for a few years ..." John Millington Synge
"In language, the ignorant have prescribed ..." Richard Duppa
"In literature the ambition of the ..." George Bernard Shaw
"In Modern English Usage Fowler makes ..." Sir Ernest Gowers
"In most cases a favorite writer ..." Charles Horton Cooley
"In plain truth, lying is an ..." Michel de Montaigne
"In poetry, in which every line, ..." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"In poetry, wonder is coupled with ..." Gaston Bachelard
"In small things as in large ..." H. L. Mencken
"In surveys of lie-perception levels, 75 ..." John Ralston Saul
"In the end, language changes because ..." Jesse Sheidlower
"In the end, though, the meaning ..." Geoffrey Nunberg
"In the United States ... anyone ..." S. I. Hayakawa
"In the works of the better ..." Joseph Brodsky
"In this century the writer has ..." Don DeLillo
"In words as fashions the same ..." Alexander Pope
"In writing biography, fact and fiction ..." Catherine Drinker Bowen
"In writing, you discover interior sonorities ..." Gaston Bachelard
"The individual in his use of ..." Otto Jespersen
"The inflated style is itself a ..." George Orwell
"Inscribe all human effort with one ..." Robert Browning
"Internet users are continually searching for ..." David Crystal
"The ironic individual practices a style ..." Jedediah Purdy
"Irony ... may be defined as ..." Julian Barnes
"Irregularity in grammar seems like the ..." Steven Pinker
"Is there any place where there ..." Kahlil Gibran
"Is there no Latin word for ..." Hilaire Belloc
"Is there not..." William Wordsworth
"It can hardly be a coincidence ..." Douglas Adams
"It cannot in the opinion of ..." Winston Churchill
"It could be said that these ..." Goronwy Rees
"It does not behoove us to ..." Mario Pei
"It has always been accepted, and ..." Horace
"It has always been my practice ..." Edward Gibbon
"It has not been definitively proved ..." Antonin Artaud
"It is a cliche that most ..." Stephen Fry
"It is a curious fact of ..." John Cassidy
"It is a difficulty in writing ..." W. Somerset Maugham
"It is a good rule in ..." P. G. Wodehouse
"It is a sad fact about ..." W. H. Auden
"It is a sad truth, but ..." Oscar Wilde
"It is a safe rule to ..." Alfred North Whitehead
"It is advantageous to an author ..." Samuel Johnson
"It is all too rare today ..." Jim Richard Carrigan
"It is almost a truism to ..." Charles Harrington Elster
"It is almost everywhere the case ..." G. C. Lichtenberg
"It is better to err on ..." Clive James
"It is clearly important to play ..." Walter Redfern
"It is easier to describe the ..." C. S. Lewis
"It is in every case desirable ..." Richard Chevenix Trench
"It is in vain to set ..." Friedrich Waismann
"It is indeed acceptable practice to ..." Richard Lederer
"It is language which speaks, not ..." Roland Barthes
"It is my belief that there ..." Hugo Black
"It is not so much the ..." Eric Hoffer
"It is not the literal past, ..." Brian Friel
"It is nothing to say that ..." Charles Dickens
"It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) ..." Jorge Luis Borges
"It is only by language that ..." Oscar Wilde
"It is only in the country ..." Cyril Connolly
"It is remarkable how often the ..." David Crystal
"It is still not enough for ..." Rene Daumal
"It is strange that there should ..." Samuel Johnson
"It is the enormous and variegated ..." Robert Claiborne
"It is the nature of aphoristic ..." Susan Sontag
"It is the word, blossoming as ..." George Mackay Brown
"It is time for dead languages ..." Natalie Clifford Barney
"It is true that English was ..." Bill Bryson
"It is well within the order ..." Anna Wickham
"It may be that the evolution ..." Lewis Thomas
"It may be that the single ..." John Ralston Saul
"It may be that universal history ..." Jorge Luis Borges
"It may help to think of ..." Allan Metcalf
"It must be frustrating to work ..." Jerry Seinfeld
"It must be remembered, that while ..." Samuel Johnson
"It never bored them to hear ..." E. M. Forster
"It rarely adds anything to say, ..." Paul Goodman
"It takes more time and effort ..." Ivan Illich
"It takes two to speak the ..." Henry David Thoreau
"It wasn't by accident that the ..." Ernest Hemingway
"It were as wise to cast ..." Percy Bysshe Shelley
"It's a damn shame we have ..." Eileen Atkins
"It's apparent that we can't proceed ..." Richard Dean Rosen
"It's good that everything's gone, except ..." Derek Walcott
"It's hard enough to write a ..." Jack Lemmon
"It's not so much that I ..." Andy Rooney
"It's splendid to be a great ..." Gustave Flaubert
"It's very, very easy not to ..." Salman Rushdie
"I've always been fascinated with language, ..." Frank Luntz
"I've come to think of Europe ..." Don DeLillo
"I've found that there are only ..." Raymond Chandler

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Jargon ... is a therapeutic source ..." Walter Nash
"Jargon and slang speak volumes about ..." Gareth Branwyn
"Jargon is the verbal sleight of ..." David Lehman
"Jargon, as always, is in the ..." Marjorie Garber
"Jargon: any technical language we do ..." Mason Cooley
"The job is like having a ..." Victoria Neufeldt
"Jokes are ..." Marshall McLuhan
"A journalist's job is like a ..." Ryszard Kapuscinski
"Jubilance is an explanation for a ..." Allen Walker Read
"Just as a new scientific discovery ..." Northrop Frye
"Just as bad money drives the ..." Ogden Nash

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Kafka could never have written as ..." Alan Bennett
"Keep in mind that a language ..." David Foster Wallace
"Keep thy smooth words and juggling ..." Lord Byron
"The kind of poetry I want ..." James Wright
"A kiss can be a comma, ..." Mistinguett
"Knowledge is a polite word for ..." e. e. cummings

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Language ... change is still going ..." John McWhorter
"Language always tells long stories if ..." Michael Wood
"The language America uses to describe ..." Salman Rushdie
"Language being such a sensitive index ..." David Crystal
"A language can never be properly ..." Joseph Priestley
"Language can only deal meaningfully with ..." George Steiner
"Language cannot be thrust into a ..." Eric Partridge
"Language change is inevitable, continuous, universal ..." David Crystal
"Language does not leave fossils, at ..." Richard Brautigan
"Language exerts hidden power, like a ..." Rita Mae Brown
"Language exists to communicate whatever it ..." C. S. Lewis
"The language faculty, unique to the ..." Andrew Dalby
"Language follows its own path. It ..." Robert McCrum
"Language furnishes the best proof that ..." Ferdinand de Saussure
"Language has been the master tool ..." L. S. Amery
"The language has less to fear ..." Jacques Barzun
"Language in art remains a highly ..." Harold Pinter
"A language is a dialect with ..." Max Weinreich
"Language is a form of human ..." Claude Levi-Strauss
"Language is a living thing that ..." Boyce Rensberger
"Language is a process of free ..." Noam Chomsky
"Language is a skin: I rub ..." Roland Barthes
"Language is a solemn thing, I ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Language is a Trojan horse by ..." Hugh Kenner
"Language is an archeological vehicle . ..." Russell Hoban
"Language is an impure medium. Speech ..." Edward Hirsch
"Language is called the Garment of ..." Thomas Carlyle
"Language is itself the collective art ..." Edward Sapir
"Language is like a river, it ..." Raymond Zhou
"Language is like soil. However rich, ..." Elizabeth Drew
"Language is man's metaphysical ..." Bruno Schulz
"Language is more fashion than science, ..." Bill Bryson
"A language is never in a ..." Arthur Lloyd James
"Language is not an abstract construction ..." Walt Whitman
"Language is not just the spoken ..." Nicholas Wade
"Language is not simply a reporting ..." Benjamin Lee Whorf
"Language is not the passive container ..." Robert K. Logan
"Language is only in part an ..." L. S. Amery
"The language is perpetually in flux: ..." William Strunk and E.B. White
"Language is steeped in metaphors of ..." Diane Ackerman
"Language is the amber in which ..." Richard Chevenix Trench
"Language is the archives of ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Language is the autobiography of the ..." Max Muller
"Language is the dress of ..." Samuel Johnson
"Language is the house of Being. ..." Martin Heidegger
"Language is the main instrument of ..." George Steiner
"Language is the mind's opposable ..." Michael Hawley
"Language is the mother of thought, ..." Karl Kraus
"Language is the only ..." Czeslaw Milosz
"Language itself is as easy to ..." Wendalyn Nichols
"The language mavens always say, "Oh, ..." Muffy Siegel
"Language may have created man, rather ..." Jacques Monod
"The language most likely to continue ..." Samuel Johnson
"Language most shews a man: Speak, ..." Ben Jonson
"Language moves down time in a ..." Edward Sapir
"Language never deceives, if only we ..." Richard Chevenix Trench
"The language of an era is, ..." Dwight Bolinger
"The language of business is not ..." Anita Roddick
"Language ought to be the joint ..." George Orwell
"Language reflects the fearful asymmetry of ..." Richard Lederer
"Language tethers us to the world; ..." Penelope Lively
"Language thou art too narrow, and ..." John Donne
"Language unstable as sand, but poets Strike ..." George Mackay Brown
"Language, particularly language in public, is ..." Charles M. Madigan
"Language, the machine of the poet, ..." Thomas Babington Macaulay
"Language...is a bellwether of the times ..." Anne H. Soukhanov
"Languages change, and we cannot stop ..." Anthony Burgess
"The last thing one discovers in ..." Blaise Pascal
"The law is a profession of ..." David Mellinkoff
"The laws of writing were no ..." Henry Fielding
"Leaf through a dictionary or try ..." Paul Valery
"Learn'd philologists, who chase A panting syllable ..." William Cowper
"The legislators of "correct English," in ..." Steven Pinker
"The lessons taught in great books ..." Anita Brookner
"Let mortals beware Of words, for With words ..." W. H. Auden
"Let the man who is in ..." Michel de Montaigne
"Let the trumpet of the day ..." Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Let us never accept the point ..." Raymond Chandler
"Let's face it, some boys and ..." Arthur Krystal
"Let's face it, writing is ..." William Styron
"Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a ..." Samuel Johnson
"Lexicography is an art vastly more ..." Eric Partridge
"The liberty of the Press is ..." Junius
"Life and language are alike sacred. ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Life has no meaning unless one ..." Paul Gauguin
"Life is a foreign language: all ..." Christopher Morley
"Life is our dictionary. ... I ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The life of [Shakespeare's] plays is ..." Richard Eyre
"Life, as the most ancient of ..." Jonathan Raban
"Life's splendor forever lies in wait ..." Franz Kafka
"Like christening a boat or adjourning ..." Geoffrey Nunberg
"Like everything metaphysical the harmony between ..." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Like many other women, I could ..." Barbara Ehrenreich
"Like other parties of the kind, ..." Lord Byron
"Like South Sea stock, expressions rise ..." James Bramston
"The limits of my language are ..." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"A linguistic system is a series ..." Ferdinand de Saussure
"The linguists, whom one meets everywhere ..." Malcolm Bradbury
"Listening to someone talk isn't at ..." Oriana Fallaci
"Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars ..." W. H. Auden
"Literary criticism can be no more ..." D. H. Lawrence
"Literary imagination is an aesthetic object ..." Gaston Bachelard
"The literary woman, unsatisfied, agitated, desolate ..." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Literature is my Utopia. Here I ..." Helen Keller
"Literature is the expression of a ..." Octavio Paz
"Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, ..." Terry Eagleton
"A living language is like a ..." H. L. Mencken
"Living languages are in a continuous ..." Philip Howard
"Logos, by the force of ubiquity, ..." Naomi Klein
"Long ago in a faraway desert, ..." Alberto Manguel
"Look at almost any passage and ..." Steven Pinker
"Look out how you use proud ..." Carl Sandburg
"The louder he talked of his ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The love of language is the ..." Garrison Keillor
"Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet ..." Mark Twain
"Ludovic had become an addict of ..." Evelyn Waugh
"Lying increases the creative faculties, expands ..." Clare Boothe Luce

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Male supremacy is fused into the ..." Andrea Dworkin
"Man acts as though he were ..." Martin Heidegger
"A man coins not a new ..." Ben Jonson
"Man could not have gone to ..." Charlton Laird
"Man does not live by words ..." Adlai Stevenson
"Man does not speak because he ..." Octavio Paz
"Man is a creature who lives ..." Robert Louis Stevenson
"Man is least himself when he ..." Oscar Wilde
"A man is original when he ..." Patrick Kavanagh
"A man who keeps a diary ..." William Allingham
"A man who listens because he ..." Agnes Repplier
"A man writes to throw off ..." Henry Miller
"Man, even man debased by the ..." Octavio Paz
"A man's library is a sort ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Many terms which have now dropped ..." Horace
"Many writers who choose to be ..." Gore Vidal
"The mark of a true politician ..." Richard M. Nixon
"Marriage isn't a word- it's a ..." King Vidor
"Mary Kay is one of the ..." Spider Robinson
"Mastery of the art and spirit ..." Mark Twain
"Mathematics may be defined as the ..." Bertrand Russell
"McKean's Law: Any correction of the ..." Erin McKean
"Meaning is muddied by politicians who ..." Peter Ellingsen
"Memorize all the rules you like, ..." Barbara Lombardo
"Men ever had, and ever will ..." Horace
"Men have always detested women's gossip ..." Erica Jong
"Men over forty are no judges ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Meritocracy, impressionism, and formalism were all ..." Marjorie Garber
"Metaphor evokes both conscious and subconscious ..." Robert Grudin
"The metaphor is perhaps one of ..." Jose Ortega y Gasset
"Metaphoric truth is the primary substance ..." Michael C. Haley
"Metaphors have a way of holding ..." Orson Scott Card
"Methinks the human method of expression ..." Virginia Woolf
"Might, could, would—they are contemptible ..." George Eliot
"The minute a phrase becomes current, ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"The misery of having no time ..." George Gissing
"Miss Blimber was dry and sandy ..." Charles Dickens
"Miss, n. A title with which ..." Ambrose Bierce
"Modern English is the Wal-Mart of ..." Mark Abley
"Modern war needs modern ..." William Safire
"A molehill man is a pseudo-busy ..." Fred Allen
"The moment a word or phrase ..." John Ralston Saul
"Money, which represents the prose of ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The more the pleasures of the ..." Plato
"The mortality of all inanimate things ..." William Dean Howells
"Most bad books get that way ..." Stephen Vizinczey
"The most dangerous word in any ..." Tennessee Williams
"The most durable thing in writing ..." Raymond Chandler
"The most important single thing in ..." William Jovanovitch
"Most new words simply disappear, like ..." Jean Aitchison
"Most of our expressions are metaphorical ..." G. C. Lichtenberg
"Most of us are less aware ..." John McWhorter
"Most of us who turn to ..." George Eliot
"Most old bums start out as ..." Al Sharpton
"The most ordinary word, when put ..." Robert Bresson
"Most people have a furious itch ..." W. Somerset Maugham
"Most people have ears, but few ..." Lord Chesterfield
"Most people, no doubt, when they ..." Suzanne Lafollette
"The most poetical of all scholastic ..." W. H. Auden
"Most rock journalism is people who ..." Frank Zappa
"Most words come into being naturally. ..." Allan Metcalf
"Most writers in the course of ..." Evelyn Waugh
"MOTH [aside to COSTARD]: They have ..." William Shakespeare
"Mr. Meagles, who never by any ..." Charles Dickens
"The music than can deepest reach, And ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Musicologists and linguists had proposed a ..." Aniruddh Patel
"Must! Is must a word to ..." Elizabeth I, Queen of England
"My books are water; those of ..." Mark Twain
"My culture and my language have ..." James Kelman
"My father spent the last 20 ..." Evelyn Waugh
"My father still reads the dictionary ..." Arthur Scargill
"My general theory since 1971 has ..." William Burroughs
"My God! The English language is ..." Philip Roth
"My great-grandfather used to say to ..." Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
"My last words? "Life is no ..." Kurt Vonnegut
"My life is full of jealousies ..." Willa Cather
"My mind now expects to take ..." Nicholas Carr
"My most important discovery has been ..." Amy Wallace
"My opposition [to interviews] lies in ..." James Thurber
"My premise is that puns illuminate ..." Walter Redfern
"My spelling is Wobbly. It's good ..." A. A. Milne
"My words fly up, my thoughts ..." William Shakespeare
"Myth is an attempt to narrate ..." D. H. Lawrence
"Myth is the hidden part of ..." Italo Calvino

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Narrowed-down by her early editors and ..." Adrienne Rich
"Nations are not born, but made. ..." Christopher Looby
"Neither is a dictionary a bad ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A neologism is the only kind ..." Marjorie Garber
"Neology, far from being a separable ..." Victoria Neufeldt
"Never explain -- your friends do ..." Elbert Hubbard
"Never forget that if you don't ..." Arthur Brisbane
"Never lend books -- nobody ever ..." Anatole France
"Never resist a sentence you like, ..." Jean Baudrillard
"Never will I forget my naive ..." Donna Tartt
"New expressions don't arise because people ..." Jesse Sheidlower
"A new word is like a ..." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"New words are the birth certificates ..." Cullen Murphy
"New words, and lately made, shall ..." Horace
"The newspaper is the natural enemy ..." Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
"A nickname is the heaviest stone ..." William Hazlitt
"The nineteenth century planted the words ..." Eric Hoffer
"No doubt I shall go on ..." Alexander Trocchi
"No doubt if I worked on ..." Richard Gillman
"No language is rude that can ..." Aubrey Beardsley
"No man but a blockhead ever ..." Samuel Johnson
"No one can be as calculatedly ..." Paul Gallico
"No one can write a best ..." W. Somerset Maugham
"No one is ever capable of ..." Ben Elton
"No one lives in this room..." Adrienne Rich
"No one means all he says, ..." Henry Adams
"No one over thirty-five is worth ..." Cyril Connolly
"No race can prosper till it ..." Booker T. Washington
"No statement about God is simply, ..." David Jenkins
"No word can be judged as ..." I. A. Richards
"The noises of the human race ..." J. R. Firth
"A nonce word (from the 16th-century ..." David Crystal
"Nonsense, in fact, is a very ..." Thomas De Quincey
"Not that curbing jargon is likely ..." Geoffrey Nunberg
"Nothing can be more depressing than ..." Victor Hugo
"Nothing can be so clearly and ..." Fred W. Householder
"Nothing contributes more to produce a ..." Aristotle
"Nothing has yet been said that ..." Terence
"Nothing is more despicable than a ..." Francois de Fenelon
"Nothing is often a good thing ..." Will Durant
"Nothing so fretful, so despicable as ..." Lord Byron
"The notion that anything is gained ..." H. L. Mencken
"The novel does not seek to ..." Salman Rushdie
"The novel is born from the ..." Carlos Fuentes
"The novel, in its best form, ..." Sir John Frederick William Herschel
"A novelist must preserve a childlike ..." W. Somerset Maugham
"Now the whole dizzying and delirious ..." Julie Burchill
"Nowadays the real danger to dead ..." David Grylls
"Nowadays, we're more and more focused ..." Susan Butler
"Nullius in verba (Words alone are ..." Horace
"Numerous local causes, such as a ..." Noah Webster

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"O the orator's joys!..." Walt Whitman
"O, let my books be then ..." William Shakespeare
"O, what a tangled web we ..." J.R. Pope
"The O.E.D. is coming face to ..." James Gleick
"Obscurity is the refuge of ..." Robert A. Heinlein
"An obsession with polite or correct ..." John Ralston Saul
"Obsolete, adj. No longer used by ..." Ambrose Bierce
"Of all cold words of tongue ..." Arthur Guiterman
"Of all social institutions, language is ..." Ferdinand de Saussure
"Of all the ways of acquiring ..." Walter Benjamin
"Of all the words that exist ..." Mario Pei
"The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds ..." W. H. Auden
"Oh! it is absurd to have ..." Oscar Wilde
"Oh, the sentence! The shuddering, sinuous, ..." Karen Elizabeth Gordon
"Old books that have ceased to ..." Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
"The old repeat themselves and the ..." Jacques Bainville
"The old-fashioned grammarian certainly has much ..." Sir Ernest Gowers
"On one occasion when [my primary ..." Noel Coward
"On television, charm is the heart ..." Neil Postman
"Once I lost a preposition. It hid, ..." Morris Bishop
"Once or twice recently I have ..." Thomas Hardy
"One always tends to overpraise a ..." E. M. Forster
"One cannot but be impressed by ..." Robert Burchfield
"One does not inhabit a country; ..." E. M. Cioran
"One forgets words as one forgets ..." Evelyn Waugh
"One merit of poetry few persons ..." Voltaire
"One of our defects as a ..." Theodore Roosevelt
"One of the greatest gifts adults ..." Carl Sagan
"One of the most important and ..." C. S. Lewis
"One of the most influential linguistic ..." Nathan Bierma
"One ought, every day at least, ..." Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
"One reason writers write is out ..." Cynthia Ozick
"One sheds one's sicknesses in books—repeats ..." D. H. Lawrence
"The one stream of poetry which ..." G. K. Chesterton
"One way of looking at speech ..." Harold Pinter
"Only amateurs say that they write ..." Edna Ferber
"The only books that influence us ..." E. M. Forster
"Only connect! That was the whole ..." E. M. Forster
"The only language men ever speak ..." Maria Montessori
"Only presidents, editors, and people with ..." Anonymous
"Only when the writer relinquishes the ..." Alberto Manguel
"Open the dictionary and feast on ..." Anu Garg
"Opinionated writing is always the most ..." Gavin Lyall
"The opposite of talking isn't listening. ..." Fran Lebowitz
"Oratorical success does not ensure political ..." William Safire
"Oratory is dying; a calculating age ..." Keith Hancock
"Ordinary language is totally unsuited for ..." Bertrand Russell
"The originators of new words ... ..." Jane Farrow
"Our idea of boredom -- ennui, ..." James Gleick
"Our language can be seen as ..." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"Our language is a rich one, ..." Simon Winchester
"Our language, or any civilised language, ..." T. S. Eliot
"Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, ..." F. H. Bradley
"Our poets make poems out of ..." Max Muller
"Our words have wings, but fly ..." George Eliot
"Ours is the age of substitutes: ..." Eric Bentley
"Out of the slimy mud of ..." T. S. Eliot
"Outside of a dog, a book ..." Groucho Marx
"Over the years I've discovered that ..." Richard Lederer

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Painful though it is, the best ..." John Kenneth Galbraith
"The palest ink is better than ..." Chinese Proverb
"People can be forgiven for overrating ..." Steven Pinker
"People say that life is the ..." Logan Pearsall Smith
"People think that I can teach ..." Matthew Arnold
"A people who are prosperous and ..." William Graham Sumner
"People who are unwilling to try ..." William Safire
"People who make puns are like ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"People who write obscurely are either ..." Peter Medawar
"Peremptory and unreasoned pronouncements as to ..." Fitzedward Hall
"The perfect dictionary, the all-encompassing dictionary ..." Jonathon Green
"A perfectly healthy sentence, it is ..." Henry David Thoreau
"Perhaps half of technological and education ..." Julian Morgan
"Perhaps in a book review it ..." Stephen Vizinczey
"Perhaps of all the creations of ..." Lytton Strachey
"Perhaps we should not be too ..." Richard W. Bailey
"A person who can write a ..." Jane Austen
"Persuasion is the resource of the ..." Edward Gibbon
"The pidgin talk the youthful use Bypasses ..." Ogden Nash
"A platitude is simply a truth ..." Stanley Baldwin
"Playing bop is like playing Scrabble ..." Duke Ellington
"Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, ..." Hebrew Bible
"Pleonasm, n. An army of words ..." Ambrose Bierce
"A poem begins with a lump ..." Robert Frost
"Poems ... make us love this ..." Garrison Keillor
"The poet . . . like ..." Babette Deutsch
"Poetry happens when short-circuits of sense ..." Bruno Schulz
"Poetry is an expression, through human ..." Stephane Mallarme
"Poetry is not a turning loose ..." T. S. Eliot
"Poetry is not an art or ..." Joseph Brodsky
"Poetry is one of the destinies ..." Gaston Bachelard
"Poetry is the language in which ..." Christopher Fry
"Poetry is the natural language of ..." Madame de Stael
"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of ..." William Wordsworth
"Poetry is the universal language which ..." William Hazlitt
"Poetry should surprise by a fine ..." John Keats
"Poets . . . are literal-minded ..." Archibald MacLeish
"Poets may boast, as safely vain, ..." Edmund Waller
"A poet's work is to name ..." Salman Rushdie
"Political language—and with variations this is ..." George Orwell
"Political language, as used by politicians, ..." Harold Pinter
"Political writing is almost universally bad ..." Daniel Koffler
"The politician is trained in the ..." Edward R. Murrow
"A politician's words reveal less about ..." George F. Will
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think ..." Ernest Hemingway
"Pop language is, most obviously, verbal ..." Leslie Savan
"Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; ..." George Steiner
"The postmodern reply to the modern ..." Umberto Eco
"Pound (that rat) says somewhere that ..." David Remnick
"The power and correct rules of ..." Baldesar Castiglione
"Prayer is not asking. It is ..." Mohandas K. Gandhi
"Precision of communication is important, more ..." James Thurber
"A preoccupation with words for their ..." Raymond Chandler
"The prescriptivists warn against splitting infinitives ..." Jack Lynch
"A president, however, must stand somewhat ..." J. R. Pole
"The Press is at once the ..." William Stead
"The primacy of the word, basis ..." Nadine Gordimer
"The principle office of history I ..." Tacitus
"The private detective of fiction is ..." Raymond Chandler
"The problem with defending the purity ..." James Nicoll
"The problems of society will also ..." Njabulo Ndebele
"The professors laugh at themselves, they ..." Catherine Drinker Bowen
"Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is ..." George Orwell
"The proof of poetry was that ..." Matthew Pearl
"Proper names are poetry in the ..." W. H. Auden
"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, ..." Ernest Hemingway
"Prose on certain occasions can bear ..." Walter Savage Landor
"The prose poem is an effective ..." James Tate
"Psychobabble is . . . a ..." Richard Dean Rosen
"Public opinion contains all kinds of ..." Georg Hegel
"Public speaking is done in the ..." Ursula K. Le Guin
"The publication of the last instalment ..." Jim McCue
"A pun does not commonly justify ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"A pun is itself a second ..." Walter Redfern
"A pun is not bound by ..." Charles Lamb
"Punning is the natural act of ..." Robert Greenman
"Puns are little plays on words ..." Dave Barry
"A punster is a person who ..." Ron Wolfe
"Pure English tends to focus on ..." Robert Gorrell
"Purism, whether in grammar or in ..." Thomas Hardy
"Purists behave as if there was ..." Jean Aitchison
"The purpose of Newspeak was not ..." George Orwell
"The purpose of oral stories is ..." Dan Yashinsky

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"A quasi-Darwinian approach to English might ..." Richard M. Hogg
"Questions of language are indeed the ..." Bronislaw Malinowski

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Radio news is bearable. This is ..." Fran Lebowitz
"Rap is like a slave song ..." Alonzo Westbrook
"The rapidity with which new verbs ..." H. L. Mencken
"Rationalization: A transitive verb meaning to ..." John Ralston Saul
"Read what you like, because you ..." Holbrook Jackson
"Read your own compositions, and when ..." Samuel Johnson
"Reading implies time for reflection, a ..." Paul Virilio
"Reading is not a duty, and ..." Augustine Birrell
"Reading is seeing by ..." Herbert Spencer
"Reading is sometimes an ingenious device ..." Sir Arthur Helps
"Reading makes a full man, meditiation ..." Benjamin Franklin
"The reason why we have two ..." Zeno of Citium
"Remember that you are a human ..." George Bernard Shaw
"Remember the waterfront shack with the ..." Peggy Noonan
"Resentment of jargon comes from several ..." Marjorie Garber
"Revolutionary new technologies, powering commerce, have ..." Ben Macintyre
"The right word may be effective, ..." Mark Twain
"The road to hell is paved ..." Philip Roth
"Roget's Thesaurus is, in my view, ..." Simon Winchester
"The root of the disadvantage of ..." Andrew Wilkinson
"Rule 1: Be cautious, careful, and ..." Judge Lance Ito
"RUMOUR: Open your ears; for which ..." William Shakespeare

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Sam Goldwyn said, "How'm I gonna ..." Dorothy Parker
"Sarcasm I now see to be, ..." Thomas Carlyle
"The satirist who writes nothing but ..." Anthony Trollope
"Schools ... are rich domains for ..." Richard W. Bailey
"Science and technology multiply around us. ..." J. G. Ballard
"Science in the modern world has ..." G. K. Chesterton
"The science of language has large ..." Walt Whitman
"Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He ..." Ernest Hemingway
"The sea speaks a language polite ..." Carl Sandburg
"Seated one day at the dictionary ..." Ogden Nash
"Seeing then that truth consisteth in ..." Thomas Hobbes
"Self-help books are making life downright ..." Florence King
"The self-styled intellectual who is impotent ..." Eric Hoffer
"A sentence may be defined as ..." Christopher Morley
"A sentence parser requires many kinds ..." Steven Pinker
"A sentence should read as if ..." Henry David Thoreau
"Sentence structure is innate but whining ..." Woody Allen
"A serious writer is not to ..." Ernest Hemingway
"Shakespeare distinguished himself from his contemporaries ..." Alexandra Alter
"Shakespeare is one of the last ..." Charles Lamb
"A sharp tongue is the only ..." Washington Irving
"She could give herself up to ..." Jean Rhys
"She could never heartily bring her ..." Charles Lamb
"Shifts in terms have an unfortunate ..." Steven Pinker
"Short words are best and the ..." Winston Churchill
"A sick man that gets talking ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"The significance of language for the ..." Friedrich Nietzsche
"The silence often of pure innocence Persuades ..." William Shakespeare
"Since I've become a central banker, ..." Alan Greenspan
"Since Man from beast by Words ..." Alexander Pope
"Since the concepts people live by ..." Russell R.W. Smith
"The single and shortest definition of ..." John Ralston Saul
"A single word even may be ..." Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Sit in sun. Sun goes behind ..." Nicholson Baker
"The skill of writing is to ..." Edwin Schlossberg
"Slander-mongers and those who listen to ..." Plautus
"Slang ... is the wholesome fermentation ..." Walt Whitman
"Slang is ... a pile of ..." Anthony Burgess
"Slang is a language that rolls ..." Carl Sandburg
"Slang is a linguistic luxury, it ..." Otto Jespersen
"Slang is the poetry of everyday ..." S. I. Hayakawa
"Slang is, at least, vigorous and ..." John Galsworthy
"So loud each tongue, so empty ..." Charles Churchill
"So now they have made our ..." Edmund Spenser
"A society in which adults are ..." Beatrix Campbell
"A soft answer turneth away wrath: ..." Hebrew Bible
"Some books are to be tasted, ..." Francis Bacon
"Some men are like musical glasses; ..." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Some new words sound like fingernails ..." R. Thomas Berner
"Some of the best slang emerges ..." H. L. Mencken
"Some of the tendencies visible in ..." H. L. Mencken
"Some writers continue to insist that ..." Bill Bryson
"Someone was drawing water and my ..." Helen Keller
"Sometimes I have my doubts of ..." Robert Frost
"Sometimes, social changes, including new words, ..." Antonio R. Samson
"Space and force pervade language. Many ..." Steven Pinker
"Speak clearly, if you speak at ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Speak fair, and think what you ..." Proverb
"Speak the speach, I pray you, ..." William Shakespeare
"Speakers can, in principle, invent and ..." Andrew Smith
"Speakers of English love words: individual ..." Covey MacGregor
"The speaking in a perpetual hyperbole ..." Francis Bacon
"A special kind of beauty exists ..." Gaston Bachelard
"Specialized meaninglessness has come to be ..." Aldous Huxley
"Speech is civilization itself. The word, ..." Thomas Mann
"A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, ..." Peggy Noonan
"Speech is power: speech is to ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Speech is the telephone network, the ..." J. R. Firth
"Speeches in our culture are the ..." John Kenneth Galbraith
"Spilling your guts is exactly as ..." Fran Lebowitz
"The Spirit [of Christmas Past] signed ..." Charles Dickens
"Stability in language is synonymous with ..." Ernest Weekley
"Standard American English, a sort of ..." Michael Adams
"Stories happen only to those who ..." Paul Auster
"The stroke of the whip maketh ..." Apocrypha.
"The strong vivid slang word cannot ..." Walter Raleigh
"The struggle of literature is in ..." Italo Calvino
"The style of an author should ..." Edward Gibbon
"Style, for example, is not -- ..." Arthur Quiller-Couch
"Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined ..." Mark Twain
"Such is the role of poetry. ..." Jean Cocteau
"Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to ..." Henry James
"The supply of words in the ..." Lech Walesa
"The surest way to make a ..." Robert Benchley
"Swearing achieves the same catharsis one ..." Richard Dooling
"A sweeping statement is the only ..." Patrick Kavanagh
"The symbolic view of things is ..." Hugo Ball
"Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints- ..." Harry Mathews
"Syntax is a faculty of the ..." Paul Valery

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Talent alone cannot make a writer. ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A talent for drama is not ..." Gore Vidal
"Talking is like playing the harp; ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Talking is the disease of ..." Ben Jonson
"Technology...appears to have entered the language ..." Jonathon Green
"Television is actually closer to reality ..." Camille Paglia
"Tell me how much a nation ..." John Ciardi
"Ten persons who speak make more ..." Napoleon I
"Thanks to words, we have been ..." Aldous Huxley
"That is a good book which ..." A. Bronson Alcott
"That is what all poets do: ..." George Bernard Shaw
"That man's silence is wonderful to ..." Thomas Hardy
"That old lady who, on borrowing ..." Eric Partridge
"That the suppression of certain kinds ..." Frank Kermode
"That the weather clerk really makes ..." H. C. G. von Jagemann
"That woman speaks eighteen languages and ..." Dorothy Parker
"That's one thing I like about ..." Raymond Chandler
"The sole raison d'etre of a ..." Milan Kundera
"The theater, which is in no ..." Antonin Artaud
"Their talk was endless, compulsive, and ..." Douglas Coupland
"Then fear not, if 'tis needful, ..." Lord Byron
"Then you should say what you ..." Lewis Carroll
"There are a great many hyphens ..." Woodrow Wilson
"There are books so alive that ..." Marina Tsvetaeva
"There are certain books in the ..." W. E. B. Du Bois
"There are certain things in which ..." Jean de La Bruyere
"There are few efforts more conducive ..." Edith Hamilton
"There are little constellations of language ..." Margaret Atwood
"There are only two forces that ..." Mark Twain
"There are pessimists and optimists in ..." Susan Butler
"There are three infallible ways of ..." Mark Twain
"There are three reasons for becoming ..." Quentin Crisp
"There can be no 'correctness' apart ..." C. C. Fries
"There can be no doubt that ..." Václav Havel
"There can never be a moment ..." Wilhelm von Humboldt
"There is a difference between a ..." Elie Wiesel
"There is a long history in ..." Carl Jung
"There is a satisfactory boniness about ..." Anthony Burgess
"There is also this benefit in ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is an instinctive mistrust of ..." Robert Graves and Alan Hodge
"There is much to be said ..." Oscar Wilde
"There is never finality in the ..." Alexander Cockburn
"There is no acceptable term for ..." Anthony Burgess
"There is no believing a word ..." The Duke of Wellington
"There is no complete language, no ..." Voltaire
"There is no doubt something gross ..." Anthony Burgess
"There is no greater impediment to ..." Thomas Reid
"There is no longer any such ..." E. L. Doctorow
"There is no longer any such ..." E. L. Doctorow
"There is no such thing as ..." Mark Twain
"There is no such thing as ..." Elias Canetti
"There is no use indicting words. ..." Samuel Beckett
"There is nothing more mysterious than ..." Jean Baudrillard
"There is nothing you can say ..." Mark Twain
"There is one subject of philosophical ..." Samuel Johnson
"There is one thing that matters— ..." Logan Pearsall Smith
"There is only one thing in ..." Oscar Wilde
"There is something uncanny about these ..." Anonymous
"There is the fear, common to ..." Barbara Ehrenreich
"There is the fear, common to ..." Barbara Ehrenreich
"There is virtually nothing a would-be ..." David James Duncan
"There may be other reasons for ..." Samuel Johnson
"There should be a law that ..." Oscar Wilde
"There should be less talk; a ..." Mother Teresa
"There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings ..." Dante Alighieri
"There were a number of other ..." Alice McDermott
"There, sir, and attack upon my ..." Richard Sheridan
"There'll come a day when the ..." Guy Vanderhaege
"There's a helluva distance between wisecracking ..." Dorothy Parker
"There's language in her eye, her ..." William Shakespeare
"There's not much to be said ..." William Zinsser
"There's probably no such thing as ..." Michael Wood
"These words dropped into my childish ..." Harriet Beecher Stowe
"They are marvelous, those English monosyllables. ..." Salvador de Madariaga
"They are the children of many ..." George Seferis
"They never open their mouths without ..." Thomas B. Reed
"They spell it Vinci and pronounce ..." Mark Twain
"They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. ..." Lillian Hellman
"A thing said walks in immortality If ..." Pindar
"The things I like best in ..." Lewis Thomas
"Think before you speak is criticism's ..." E. M. Forster
"Think of words as instruments characterized ..." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"This helpless smoke of words doth ..." William Shakespeare
"This invasion of one's mind by ..." George Orwell
"This is an age of intellectual ..." Benjamin Haydon
"This is not a book. This ..." Henry Miller
"This is not a novel to ..." Dorothy Parker
"This is one of the disadvantages ..." Samuel Johnson
"This shows the limitations of the ..." Russell Smith
"This then is Style. As technically ..." Arthur Quiller-Couch
"This will permit me to warn ..." William F. Buckley Jr.
"A thorn branch in a drunkard's ..." The Bible
"Those expressions are omitted which can ..." Thomas Bowdler
"Those of us who are trying ..." William Zinsser
"Those of us who toil in ..." David B. Guralnik
"Those of us who write dictionaries ..." Geoffrey Nunberg
"Those who prefer their English sloppy ..." Dorothy L. Sayers
"Those who sniff decay in every ..." Bill Bryson
"Those who talk on the razor-edge ..." Logan Pearsall Smith
"Those who want to fight usage ..." Michel de Montaigne
"Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the ..." William Shakespeare
"Though history teaches us much about ..." Anne H. Soukhanov
"Though our comparison might be bold, ..." William Whewell
"Thought itself needs words. It runs ..." Ugo Betti
"A thousand moral paintings I can ..." William Shakespeare
"Throughout history, attempts to micromanage casual ..." George H. W. Bush
"Throughout the world if it were ..." Sir Thomas Wyatt
"Throughout the world people play word ..." Herb Kohl
"The through-train of words with white-hot ..." W. R. Rogers
"Thus Belial, with words clothed in ..." John Milton
"Thus it seemed to us that ..." Faith Popcorn
"Thus the American, on his linguistic ..." H. L. Mencken
"Thus, my Lord, will our language ..." Samuel Johnson
"Thy books should, like thy friends, ..." William Wycherley
"Time changes all things: there is ..." Ferdinand de Saussure
"Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's ..." Lord Byron

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"'Tis strange -- but true; for ..." Lord Byron

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"To a historian libraries are food, ..." Barbara Tuchman
"To a man or woman who ..." Richard Lederer
"To a philosopher all news, as ..." Henry David Thoreau
"To a teacher of languages there ..." Joseph Conrad
"To be fair, English is full ..." Bill Bryson
"To be occasionally quoted is the ..." Alexander Smith
"To be well informed, one must ..." Aldous Huxley
"To grasp the meaning of the ..." Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"To listen closely and reply well ..." Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld
"To me a book is a ..." Aleister Crowley
"To require that men should use ..." John Locke
"To rescue from oblivion even a ..." Victor Hugo
"To resist jargon is to protest ..." Marjorie Garber
"To see the Summer Sky..." Emily Dickinson
"To talk without thinking is to ..." English Proverb
"To translate, one must have a ..." Paul Goodman
"To try to write love is ..." Roland Barthes
"Today the discredit of words is ..." John Berger
"Today we all speak, if not ..." Octavio Paz
"Today's language is the result of ..." Lewis Thomas
"Today's Telegraph readers hate new words ..." Craig Brown
"Too much agreement kills a ..." Eldridge Cleaver
"Top politicians generally have an arm's-length ..." Julian Barnes
"Trademarked terms are the verbs of ..." John Battelle
"Tradition! We scarcely know the word ..." Dorothy Day
"Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I ..." Ursula K. Le Guin
"The trouble with writing a book ..." Groucho Marx
"The true call of the desert, ..." Freya Stark
"The true charm of pedestrianism does ..." Mark Twain
"True eloquence I find to be ..." John Milton
"The true use of Shakespeare or ..." Harold Bloom
"A truly great book should be ..." Robertson Davies
"A truly unexpurgated collection of slang ..." J. E. Lighter
"The truth is rarely pure and ..." Oscar Wilde
"Truth is simply a compliment paid ..." Richard Rorty
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but ..." Mark Twain
"Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful ..." Lao Tsu
"Trying to gain a critical perspective ..." Robert M. Adams
"Twas but my tongue, 'twas not ..." Euripides

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"An unconditional right to say what ..." Hugo Black
"The unconscious is the ocean of ..." Italo Calvino
"Underlying the truth about dialects and ..." John McWhorter
"The uniqueness of each person's language ..." Randolph Quirk
"The universal principle of etymology in ..." Giambattista Vico
"Unless wariness be used, as good ..." John Milton
"Unlike French -- credited with a ..." Graeme McRanor
"The unluckiest insolvent in the world ..." Christopher Morley
"Until it is kindled by a ..." Henry Miller
"Until we learn the use of ..." Walter de la Mare
"Unusual and new coined words are ..." Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Usage is the only test. I ..." W. Somerset Maugham
"Use what language you will, ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"A verbal art like poetry is ..." W. H. Auden
"The very vagueness of "surge" might ..." Paul Farhi
"Viewed freely, the English language is ..." Walt Whitman
"The vocabularian often strands himself on ..." Sheridan Warner Baker
"The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and ..." C. S. Lewis
"Voice developed in the trees, gesture ..." J. R. Firth

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Waiting for the German verb is ..." Flann O'Brien
"The war has used up words; ..." Henry James
"War talk by men who have ..." Mark Twain
"Washington makes words. Where other cities ..." Susan Trausch
"The Watergate coinage was followed by ..." William Safire
"The Watergate tapes are the most ..." Steven Pinker
"We all perform amazing linguistic feats ..." Jay Ingram
"We are lonesome animals. We spend ..." John Steinbeck
"We are lonesome animals. We spend ..." John Steinbeck
"We are told that because it ..." John McWhorter
"We call language a terrorist organization ..." John Collins
"We can act *as if* there ..." William James
"We can best help you to ..." Virginia Woolf
"We cannot stop language from changing, ..." John McWhorter
"We cannot write off that imagery ..." Audrey Thompson
"We each of us possess, in ..." Logan Pearsall Smith
"We have a deep-rooted delight in ..." Bill Bryson
"We have a great amount of ..." David Mamet
"We have always had storytellers and ..." John Buchan
"We have insisted that we need ..." John Ralston Saul
"We have needed to define ourselves ..." Selma James
"We have no words for speaking ..." G. C. Lichtenberg
"We have really everything in common ..." Oscar Wilde
"We hear about constitutional rights, free ..." Frank Hague
"We in our haste can only ..." Donald Bain
"We Irish are too poetical to ..." Oscar Wilde
"We live at the level of ..." Ellen Gilchrist
"We live in a world ruled ..." J. G. Ballard
"We live, unluckily perhaps, in a ..." Lyman Bryson
"We might hypothetically possess ourselves of ..." Adrienne Rich
"We might remind ourselves that criticism ..." T. S. Eliot
"We must be free or die, ..." William Wordsworth
"We must use words as they ..." Ivy Compton-Burnett
"We need words to keep us ..." Michael Ignatieff
"We never say so much as ..." Eric Hoffer
"We next went to the school ..." Jonathan Swift
"We often forgive those who bore ..." Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld
"We open our mouths and out ..." Penelope Lively
"We read in slow, long motions, ..." Alberto Manguel
"We see variability in every tongue, ..." Charles Darwin
"We seem but to linger in ..." Henry David Thoreau
"We step into the future with ..." Dan Yashinsky
"We talk about the tyranny of ..." Charles Dickens
"We will have to repent in ..." Martin Luther King, Jr.
"We will have to repent in ..." Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Wealth is so much the greatest ..." Lord Melbourne
""Well," said Owl, "the customary procedure ..." A. A. Milne
"We're descriptive, not prescriptive. I'm not ..." John Simpson
"We're very hip-hop. We're into trends ..." Jill Spiegel
"What a delicate and rare and ..." Christopher Morley
"What a good thing Adam had. ..." Mark Twain
"What a heavy oar the pen ..." Gustave Flaubert
"What can be said at all ..." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"What changes in language are being ..." Neil Postman
"What chiefly lies behind [slang] is ..." H. L. Mencken
"What has influenced my life more ..." W. Somerset Maugham
"What I like in a good ..." Logan Pearsall Smith
"What is the difference between unethical ..." Vilhjalmur Stefansson
"What makes literature interesting is that ..." Jonathan Miller
"What makes the newspaper something to ..." Umberto Eco
"What more do I need to ..." Newt Gingrich
"What progress we are making. In ..." Sigmund Freud
"What remains invariable is the pleasure ..." Alberto Manguel
"What shall be said? for words ..." Algernon Charles Swinburne
"What strange impulse is it that ..." Jan Freeman
"What the devil to do with ..." Paul Goodman
"What we're looking for is something ..." Erin McKean
"What’s a’ your jargon o’ the ..." Robert Burns
"Whatever happened to public speaking and ..." Marjorie Garber
"Whatever harsh criticisms may be passed ..." Oscar Wilde
"Whatever thou hast to say, be ..." Laurence Sterne
"What's most exciting, though, is not ..." Karen Elizabeth Gordon
"When a gentleman is disposed to ..." William Shakespeare
"When a language creates—as it does—a ..." Christopher Ricks
"When a man gets up to ..." Pauline Frederick
"When a man has anything of ..." Charles Dickens
"When a scientist considers all the ..." Steven Pinker
"When all things are equal, translucence ..." James Thurber
"When I cannot see words curling ..." Virginia Woolf
"When I feel inclined to read ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"When I have tense relations with ..." Boutros Boutros-Ghali
"When I hear the hypercritical quarreling ..." Henry David Thoreau
"When I heard the word "stream" ..." James Joyce
"When I read Shakespeare I am ..." D. H. Lawrence
"When I think over what I ..." Seneca
"When I use a word," Humpty ..." Lewis Carroll
"When I was 12 I was ..." Gabriel García Márquez
"When I was a child I ..." Susan Daitch
"When I was growing up, one ..." Charles Harrington Elster
"When it comes to housework the ..." Katharine Whitehorn
"When old words die out on ..." Rabindranath Tagore
"When one man dies, one chapter ..." John Donne
"When one man speaks to another ..." Voltaire
"When people cease to complain, they ..." Napoleon I
"When poets stopped telling stories, they ..." Dana Gioia
"When political ammunition runs low, inevitably ..." Adlai Stevenson
"When the eyes say one thing, ..." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"When two Englishmen meet, their first ..." Samuel Johnson
"When we look at our [Dictionary.com] ..." Barbara Ann Kipfer
"When we see men grow old ..." Samuel Johnson
"When we speak, in gestures or ..." Alain
"When we talk with somebody, we ..." Janet Malcolm
"When written in Chinese the word ..." John F. Kennedy
"When you sell a man a ..." Christopher Morley
"Whence the authority of dictionary-makers to ..." David Foster Wallace
"Whenever men with book learning used ..." Graciliano Ramos
"Whenever the literary German dives into ..." Mark Twain
"Whenever we come upon one of ..." Mark Twain
"Where do words come from? From what ..." Venus Khoury-Ghata
"Where in English we are concerned ..." Del Close
"Where the common people take pleasure ..." G. C. Lichtenberg
"Where there is no exaggeration there ..." Oscar Wilde
"Wherever the relevance of speech is ..." Hannah Arendt
"Whether West Indian creole, the idioms ..." Constance Hale
"Which else would have been lost ..." Thomas Pynchon
"While slang may be condemned by ..." Mario Pei
"Who among us has not, in ..." Charles Baudelaire
"Who often, but without success, have ..." Charles Churchill
"Who will consider that no dictionary ..." Samuel Johnson
"Whoever writes English is involved in ..." George Orwell
"The whole subject of linguistic investigation ..." William Dwight Whitney
"Whom are you? he asked, for ..." George Ade
"Why did I write? what sin ..." Alexander Pope
"Why is it that our tongue, ..." Michel de Montaigne
"Why is it that reality, when ..." Simone Weil
"Why is language change so important? ..." Neil Randall
"Will you ... choose me, You English ..." Edward Thomas
"Windbags can be right. Aphorists can ..." James Fenton
"Wisdom comes in 10 parts, 9 ..." Scottish Proverb
"A wise man hears one word ..." Yiddish Proverb
"A wise soul once declared that ..." David Brooks
"Wit is educated ..." Aristotle
"With half an hour's reading in ..." William Osler
"With sixty staring me in the ..." James Thurber
"With the writer, line takes precedence ..." Jean Cocteau
"My view is, without deviation, without ..." Hugo Black
"Without words to objectify and categorize ..." Ruth Hubbard
"Women like silent men. They think ..." Marcel Achard
"Women speak because they wish to ..." Jean Kerr
"The word "belief" is a difficult ..." Carl Jung
"The word "civilization" to my mind ..." Henry Miller
"The word "conservative" is used by ..." Norman Tebbit
"A word carries far—very far—deals destruction ..." Joseph Conrad
"A word in a dictionary is ..." Anthony Burgess
"A word is a bud attempting ..." Gaston Bachelard
"A word is dead..." Emily Dickinson
"A word is not a crystal, ..." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"The word is the Verb, and ..." Victor Hugo
"The word jargon, when used to ..." Marjorie Garber
"The word makes men free. Whoever ..." Ludwig Feuerbach
"Word meanings are like stretchy pullovers, ..." Jean Aitchison
"The word of man is the ..." Arthur Schopenhauer
"The word of the moment is ..." Philip Norman
"Word scholars may want to hold ..." Richard Dooling
"The word snob belongs to the ..." Logan Pearsall Smith
"The word which gives the key ..." Henry Miller
"The word which you keep between ..." Arabic Proverb
"A word, in a word, is ..." Steven Pinker
"The word-coining genius, as if thought ..." Virginia Woolf
"Words -- so innocent and powerless ..." Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," ..." Pauline Kael
"Words ... are innocent, neutral, precise, ..." Tom Stoppard
"Words aptly cull'd and meanings well ..." George Crabbe
"Words are a mirror of their ..." John Ayto
"Words are always getting conventionalized to ..." W. B. Yeats
"Words are chameleons, which reflect the ..." Learned Hand
"Words are dwarfs, but examples are ..." Swiss-German Proverb
"Words are ideas fraught with particular ..." Richard Lederer
"Words are imitations, and we are ..." Aristotle
"Words are like bees, they have ..." German Proverb
"Words are like leaves; and where ..." Alexander Pope
"Words are made for a certain ..." Rene Daumal
"Words are not a medium in ..." I. A. Richards
"Words are not as satisfactory as ..." Samuel Butler
"Words are sounds of the ..." Chinese Proverb
"Words are the bugles of social ..." Charles Handy
"Words are the meeting points at ..." I. A. Richards
"Words are the physicians of a ..." Aeschylus
"Words are the soul's ambassadors, who ..." James Howell
"Words are the tools of thought, ..." A. P. Herbert
"Words are to be taken seriously. ..." Toni Cade Bambara
"Words are undervalued as a means ..." Arthur Miller
"Words are, of course, the most ..." Rudyard Kipling
"Words begin as description. They are ..." Susan Brind Morrow
"Words can have no single fixed ..." David Lehman
"Words convey the mental treasures of ..." Anonymous
"Words fascinate me. They always have. ..." Eddie Cantor
"Words follow words, sense seems to ..." William Wordsworth
"Words have no language which can ..." Hafiz
"The words in his mouth were ..." Book of Common Prayer
"Words just say what you want ..." A. L. Kennedy
"Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are ..." James Baldwin
"Words may be false and full ..." Thomas Shadwell
"The words of a dead man..." W. H. Auden
"The words of a living language ..." Morris Bishop
"The words of the Constitution . ..." Felix Frankfurter
"Words of the world are the ..." Wallace Stevens
"The words of the world want ..." Gaston Bachelard
"Words ought to be a little ..." John Maynard Keynes
"Words should be an intense pleasure, ..." Evelyn Waugh
"Words should be scattered like seed; ..." Seneca
"Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, ..." T. S. Eliot
"Words that are saturated with lies ..." George Steiner
"Words that weep, and Tears that ..." Abraham Crowley
"Words today are like the shells ..." Cyril Connolly
"Words well up freely from the ..." Wilhelm von Humboldt
"The words which express our faith ..." Henry David Thoreau
"Words, as is well known, are ..." Joseph Conrad
"Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that ..." Joseph Joubert
"Words, whenever they cannot directly ally ..." C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards
"Work on good prose has three ..." Walter Benjamin
"The workings of language are as ..." Steven Pinker
"The world does not speak. Only ..." Richard Rorty
"The world is but a word. Were ..." William Shakespeare
"Worry about words, Bobby. Your grandmother ..." A. P. Herbert
"Would you convey my compliments to ..." Raymond Chandler
"Would you to fame a promised ..." Horace
"Write till your ink be dry, ..." William Shakespeare
"Write with nouns and verbs, not ..." William Strunk and E.B. White
"A writer and nothing else: a ..." John K. Hutchens
"A writer expresses himself in words ..." H. W. Fowler
"A writer is unfair to himself ..." Marianne Moore
"The writer probably knows what he ..." William Golding
"The writer probably knows what he ..." William Golding
"A writer who writes, "I am ..." Maurice Blanchot
"The writer, in the eyes of ..." John Mortimer
"Writers aren't supposed to be life ..." John Ralston Saul
"The writer's language is to some ..." Paul de Man
"The writer's problem is, how to ..." Thomas Hardy
"Writers today must navigate the shifting ..." Constance Hale
"Writing a book of poetry is ..." Don Marquis
"Writing a novel is actually searching ..." John Irving
"Writing about travels is nearly always ..." Malcolm Muggeridge
"Writing became such a process of ..." Sharon O'Brien
"Writing books is the closest men ..." Norman Mailer
"Writing is like getting married. One ..." Iris Murdoch
"Writing is very improvisational. It's like ..." Margaret Atwood
"Writing, for her, was an agonizing ..." E. B. White
"A written word is mummified until ..." Otto Jespersen

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Ye knowe ek that in forme ..." Geoffrey Chaucer
"Yes, take it all around, there ..." Mark Twain
"Yesterday's neologisms, like yesterday's jargon, are ..." Marjorie Garber
"Yet I have no hesitation in ..." Thomas Jefferson
"You campaign in poetry. You govern ..." Mario Cuomo
"You can pick out actors by ..." Michael Wilding
"You can stroke people with ..." F. Scott Fitzgerald
"You can tear a poem apart ..." Dylan Thomas
"You can't write about people out ..." Katherine Anne Porter
"You cram these words into mine ..." William Shakespeare
"You enter, while studying [the Historical ..." Nicholson Baker
"You have seen that kind of ..." Mark Twain
"You have such strong words at ..." George Eliot
"You have surely noticed the curious ..." Paul Valery
"You must not blame me if ..." Henry David Thoreau
"You shall know a word by ..." J. R. Firth
"You should study the Peerage, Gerald. ..." Oscar Wilde
"You try to tell me anything ..." Mark Twain
"You will notice, though, that I ..." Willard R. Espy
"Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. ..." Salman Rushdie
"Your social class is still most ..." Paul Fussell

[ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ]

"Zounds! I was never so bethump'd ..." William Shakespeare