Adjectives Quotes

• Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor; but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.

  

  William Lewis Safir
  • Unique
  • Individual
  • Elements

• I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.

  

  Stephen Graham Jones
  • Writer
  • Figure
  • Adjectives

• When we refer to 'the biblical approach to economics' or the biblical response to politics' or 'biblical womanhood,' we're using the Bible as a weapon disguised as an adjective.

  

  Rachel Grace Held
  • Bible
  • Weapons
  • Biblical

• Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.

  

  Joseph Heller
  • Hands
  • Letters
  • Adverbs

• Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer's claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a frenzy of words and suspect it hides a paucity of feeling.

  

  Irving Howe
  • Words
  • Feeling
  • Feelings

• When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.

  

  P. G. Wodehouse
  • May
  • Girl
  • Mean

• What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

  

  Anne Carson
  • World
  • Words
  • Small

• The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.

  

  William Strunk, Jr.
  • Weak
  • Built
  • Nouns

• A mathematician is a magician who converts adjectives into nouns: continuous into continuum, infinite into infinity, infinitesimal into location, 0D into point, 1D into line, curved into geodesic.

  

  Bill Gaede
  • Infinite
  • Mathematician
  • Magician

• Rather, very, little, pretty - these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one, and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then.

  

  William Strunk, Jr.
  • Important
  • Trying
  • Blood

• 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.

  

  Tracy Chevalier
  • Writing
  • Care
  • Sentences

• A relativist is an individual who doesn't know the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

  

  Bill Gaede
  • Individual
  • Differences
  • Adverbs

• A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the Modifier's Madness. A lot of adjectives working overtime.

  

  Sufjan Stevens
  • Musician
  • Madness
  • Chatter

• Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

  

  Ezra Pound
  • Stress
  • Speech
  • Objectivity

• They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs.

  

  Lewis Carroll
  • Temper
  • Adjectives
  • Verbs

• Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives.

  

  Alfred de Musset
  • Abuse
  • Adjectives
  • Romanticism

• Adjectives are the curse of America.

  

  Rita Mae Brown
  • America
  • Curse
  • Adjectives

• The adjective is the enemy of the noun and the adverb the enemy of damn near everything else. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language.

  

  Alfred Bertram Guthrie
  • Language
  • Adjectives
  • Adverb

• I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • Book
  • Lost
  • Terrible