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Adjectives Quotes

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Adjectives Quotes

“Have I told you that you're beautiful?' 'What?' The shift in conversation threw me. 'I might have, but I couldn't remember if I did,' he went on, tugging gently on the strap. 'Then I thought that it wasn't something you could say too often. You're beautiful, Poppy.' My stupid, stupid heart skipped. 'Is that why you decided to wake me up in the middle of the night?' 'You're beautiful.' HIs head tilted, and I gasped at the feel of his lips on the longer scar on my cheek. He kissed that one and then the shorter one, above my eye. 'Both halves, and you should never question why anyone would find you utterly, irrevocably, and distractingly beautiful.' The skipping was back, but I ignored it. 'That is a lot of adjectives.' 'I can come up with more.' 'That won't be necessary,' I advised. 'So, now that you've told me this, you can get off me.' He smiled against my cheek. 'But you're comfortable, Princess.”

“Define bravery if you will. It is not standing for rogue causes that are varnished thick with misused adjectives such as ‘progressive’ or ‘cutting edge’ or ‘woke.’ Bravery is not greed off-the-leash as some sort of pristine form of long-overdue liberation. It is not to rise in raucous defense of some supposedly cherished social movement from the safety of the rear echelon because we’ve embraced a movement that really hasn’t moved us to the front of anything. Bravery is not an act of abjectly denying fact and defying reality because our selfishness has become sufficiently audacious to render both as stifling and the stuff of visionless souls. None of these are bravery. Rather, bravery is marked by the stalwart and resolute determination to acknowledge the cowardice that drives illusions such as these so that we will forever be driven from them.”

“In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me." [Letter to Joan Lancaster, 26 June 1956]”

“At a certain fork in the road of automatization, Europeans chose to have more time, and they work far less than we do and get much longer vacations. We chose to have more stuff, the stuff sold to us through those beckoning adjectives-bigger, better, faster: Jet Skis, extra cars, second homes, motor homes, towering slab TVs, if not the time to enjoy them or to enjoy less commodified pleasures.”

“When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded word, we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don’t quite fit our preferences and presuppositions. In an attempt to simplify, we force the Bible’s cacophony of voices into a single tone and turn a complicated, beautiful, and diverse holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says.”

“I go through the text making sure I haven't used any big words. If I find any fancy adjectives have crept in, I replace them with small words like 'nice' and 'big'. I've liked these words ever since I was told not to use them in English class at school. After that, I check that the sentences are short so as people won't get confused and I shorten all the chapters so they won't get bored. I can't read anything complicated these days, my attention span is too short. Everyone else probably feels the same.”

“I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes, I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.”

“The adjective "political" in "political philosophy" designates not so much the subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of view, I say, "political philosophy" means primarily not the philosophic study of politics, but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy, or the political introduction to philosophy the attempt to lead qualified citizens, or rather their qualified sons, from the political life to the philosophic life.”

“The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.”

“With a few exceptions, Fellini's films have failure and despair running through them: Life continues, but I can't imagine 'Felliniesque' as an exclusively uplifting adjective. Fellini's best films are the ones that distill this essence -- the paradoxical quality of melancholic ecstasy, a surreal, bittersweet vitality -- to perfection.”

“Younger women tend to be busier, wearing more layers and more make-up. I don't know if it's because older women are more confident, or just that we don't care any more. But that pared-down approach is the same with the sentences I write; I take out adjectives and adverbs and keep the description to a minimum.”

“The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.”

“... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of which Want is the mother. "Miserable" covers many; "shabby" most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, "disagreeable" includes them all.”