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Syntax Quotes

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Syntax Quotes

“Reason, when understood ontologically, takes on an entirely different meaning from the one conventionally assigned to it. It takes on the extra “dimensions” of emotion, perception, intuition, desire and will. All of these are involved in the intricate nexus for providing sufficient reasons for actions. People who don’t understand our work keep reducing reason to one dimension, which means that our central point that reason is ontological and explains everything – including love, human error, insanity, and everything else that, according to the conventional treatment of reason, has nothing to do with reason – has completely escaped them. Reason, in our system, is both syntactic (structural) and semantic (meaningful). Its semantic aspect is what gives it the capacity to generate all the weird and wonderful things that average people do not associate with reason. They regard reason in strictly syntactic, machinelike terms. That is only one aspect of reason. It has many others.”

ReasonPhilosophyEmotionApolloRationalismSyntaxSemanticsDionysusOntological MathematicsIrrationalism
Book:Base Reality: Ultimate Existence
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“Approaching the Start of Civil Exams Perhaps I was once a young Chinese scholar approaching the start of civil exams, my mind grown weary and sad from seclusion with books on syntax and poetic style. All that I knew were the mist-covered mountains and sweet white blossoms of mountain apples that grew in the valleys of my province. But I had been gone over six years busy with studies in the Heavenly City empty and thin despite my work. I showed my verses to an older poet who told me a truth I longed to believe: all knowledge is futile and barren which does not open the love of your friends.”

LoveTruthFriendshipWorkKnowledgeStyleBooksPoetSweetSadBusyChinesePoeticScholarVersesWearyMountainsMistBarrenSyntaxSeclusionFutileBlossoms
Author:Jim Chapson
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“The sun is but a mere handful of minutes from rising on yet another Christmas morning. And I sit here in the early morning light wrestling with a handful of inordinately stubborn words that refuse to submit to any kind of syntax that might express the richness of my thoughts on this morning. But then I realized that the God of Christmas is infinitely too big for words, and His gift surpasses any syntax man could hope to form to explain it. Therefore, my prayer for you is that the God of Christmas will come to you in a manner beyond words and change your life beyond imagination.”

GodJesusSalvationWordsChristmasGiftRedemptionSyntax
Author:Craig D. Lounsbrough
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“He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation He began to dictate notes for a new novel, "fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing." As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the Imperial Bonapartes....William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his 'dear and most esteemed brother and sister.' To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for 'the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workment who take them in hand.' He was himself the 'imperial eagle.' Taking down the dictation, Theodora [his secretary] felt it to be almost more than she could bear. 'It is a heart-breaking thing to do, though, there is the extraordinary fact that his mind does retain the power to frame perfectly characteristic sentences.”

WritingArtDeathLanguageImaginationCreativityNovelistsNovel WritingDeliriumSyntaxHallucinationSentence Structure
Book:Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography
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“No writer ever knows enough words but he doesn’t have to try to use all that he does know. Tests would show that I had an enormous vocabulary and through the years it must have grown, but I never had a desire to display it in the way that John Updike or William Buckley or William Safire do to such lovely and often surprising effect. They use words with such spectacular results; I try, not always successfully, to follow the pattern of Ernest Hemingway who achieved a striking style with short familiar words. I want to avoid calling attention to mine, judging them to be most effective as ancillaries to a sentence with a strong syntax. My approach has been more like that of Somerset Maugham, who late in life confessed that when he first thought of becoming a writer he started a small notebook in which he jotted down words that seemed unusually beautiful or exotic, such as chalcedony, for as a novice he believed that good writing consisted of liberally sprinkling his text with such words. But years later, when he was a successful writer, he chanced to review his list and found that he had never used even one of his beautiful collection. Good writing, for most of us, consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results. I struggle to find the right word and keep always at hand the largest dictionary my workspace can hold, and I do believe I consult it at least six or seven times each working day, for English is a language that can never be mastered.* [*Even though I have studied English for decades I am constantly surprised to find new definitions I have not known: ‘panoply’ meaning ‘a full set of armor’, ‘calendar’ meaning ‘a printed index to a jumbled group of related manuscripts or papers’. —Chapter IX “Intellectual Equipment”, page 306”

WritingWordsDefinitionsSentencesVocabularyDictionaryJargonSyntaxHow To WriteWording
Book:The World Is My Home: A Memoir
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“Philosophy is that activity by which the meaning of propositions is established or discovered; it is a question of what the propositions actually mean. The content, soul, and spirit of science naturally consist in what is ultimately meant by its sentences; the philosophical activity of rendering significant is thus the alpha and omega of all scientific knowledge. [Moritz Schlick interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein's position]”

ScienceKnowledgeSyntaxWittgensteinLudwig WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
Author:Moritz Schlick
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“I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.”

WritingReasonBitsReaderShotsMetaphorCleverStealingTargetTransitionThievesTerrifiedAccusedArrowsPlagiarismRobberySyntaxSeamlessAluminumBeing AccusedCrossbows
Author:Joseph Epstein
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“If Henry James were still with us, he'd not only approve of Paris, He Said, he could have written it himself, though without his serpentine syntax. It's a delicious treat, studded with wise and beautifully observed detail, that places side by side those perpetually fascinating antagonists, the eager, casual American and the meticulous, pleasure-driven French. Christine Sneed knows everyone's intimate secrets and her book is lively, amusing, and, ultimately, kind to pretty much all of them.”

IfsKnowsKindSaidStillsBookSidesPleasureSecretWiseWrittenTreatsDetailsDrivenParisIntimateFascinatingDeliciousCasualAmusingLivelyAntagonistSyntaxMeticulousChristine
Author:Rosellen Brown
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“Bush is almost always clear when he's speaking cruelly. For example, when the subject is the punitive infliction of great pain, there is no problem with his syntax, grammar, or vocabulary, even if he happens to be lying. ... On the other hand, our president is extraordinarily tongue-tied when he's trying, off the cuff, to sound a note of idealism, magnanimity or -- especially -- compassion.”

IfsTryingProblemHandsHappensPainLyingSoundPresidentCompassionClearSubjectsExampleNotesTongueTiedIdealismVocabularyNo ProblemGrammarMagnanimitySyntaxCuffsTongue TiedInfliction
Author:Mark Crispin Miller
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“Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?”

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

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

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

CharacterIndividualTypeApproachTheatreInventionPsychologicalPostsDistrustBourgeoisAvant GardeSyntax
Book:Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis
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“This is what happens when the discourse of publishing, defined and driven by spoken and written language, is talked about in exactly the same vocabulary and syntax as any widgetmaking industry. Books are reformulated as 'product' - like screwdrivers or flea-bombs or soap - and the majority of writers are perceived as typists with bad attitudes.”

BookHappensLanguageAttitudeWrittenProductsIndustryMajorityDrivenDefinedBombsPublishingDiscourseVocabularySoapFleasBad AttitudeSyntaxWritten LanguageScrewdrivers
Author:Suzette Haden Elgin
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“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”

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

IfsWantNeedsWritingMadeTwoStoriesChoicesReadingNextWalksFictionSawsFeetThousandPicksContemporaryCraftsDullShort StoryImperfectConcreteNext TimeFloatingAbstractionFiction WritersTheoristsSyntaxScalpels
Author:John McNally
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“We're so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don't realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet... It's what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I'm saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored.”

WayRunningRealizingHalfImagineProduceTelevisionCamerasMagazinesVisualsImagine ThatLensesImageryAlphabetBillboardsSyntax
Author:Adam Fuss
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“What I had thought were signs of a broken educational system - the seemingly random placement of commas, the spastic syntax, the obnoxious overuse of quotation marks, the goofy misspelling of 'Jouralism' - were actually signs of the New Instantaneousness. 'Instant Jouralists' cannot be concerned with punctuation and grammar and spelling. That stuff just 'slows you down.' To be an 'Instant Jouralist,' you have to write as if you were being pursued by a cheetah across the Serengeti.”

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

ThinkingWantNeedsTryingSometimesEffectsEmotionalStrangeSentencesSpeedDecadesGesturesDelayTry AgainClicksIntriguedMiltonSyntax
Author:Matthew Zapruder
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“The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Even worse is the notion that writers should provide an example of how to live. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for me. But I do not want to become Virginia Woolf. That is not why I read her.”

WantShouldKindHandsCommunityWrittenRocksExampleWalkingOne DayModelsBraveryNotionSentencesLakesLiving My LifeVirginiaSampleSweatersSyntaxSociologicalWoolf
Author:Richard Rodriguez
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