Quotes About Definition

Words know that there is always the right word and no other word will do.

you cannot imagine a boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary line.

I don't think feminism, as I understand the definition, implies the rejection of maternal values, nurturing children, caring about the men in your life. That is just nonsense to me.

They say that nameless things change constantly -that names fix them in place like pins. But without a name, a thing isn't quite real either.

Recuerdo vivamente su definición de magia: es "la ciencia y el arte de hacer que un cambio ocurra en conformidad con la voluntad".

I don't get the obsession with strangers, her first husband, Sol, once said to her, and Frances had struggled to explain that strangers were by definition interesting. It was their strangeness. The not-knowing. Once you knew everything there was to know about someone, you were generally ready to divorce them.

what I'd become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilization, right and wrong.

That's one of the things that concerns me - vegan steak or whatever. It is a hard terminology thing, because what are you eating? With beef you know it's a piece of beef.

I don't eat meat, but I don't consider myself a vegetarian.

Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?

eager' and 'anxious' aren't the same, or how 'disinterested' doesn't mean 'uninterested.

Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word "assassination.

Use beautiful to describe a sandwich, and the word means nothing.

The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.

Chi non appartiene a nessun posto specifico non puè tornare, in realtà, da nessuna parte. I concetti di esilio e di ritorno implicano un punto di origine, una patria. Senza una patria e senza una vera lingua madre, io vago per il mondo, anche dalla mia scrivania. Alla fine mi accorgo che non è stato un vero esilio, tutt'altro. Sono esiliata perfino dalla definizione di esilio.

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn't a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we're going to work through these.

Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself, measures his worth, and his humanity.

I am disappointed by this controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces because I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work.

This telegram is a work of art if I say it is.

We believe that marriage, by its very definition, can exist only between a man and a woman. Moreover, study after study - not to mention common sense - show that children fare better in life when raised in a home with a loving father and mother in a stable, committed relationship.

There is a lot of stuff we can't control, but it is completely in our power to decide what the definition of what a good job is. That's up to us.

I've come up with another formulation about style: that it's essentially a manifestation of a certain habitual set of limitations. It's what a composer does NOT do that defines a style.

The folk music definition has changed in this fast music world and musical styles are blending really quickly.