Quotes About Subjunctive

I've always had trouble with the subjunctive. I wish that were not the case.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

She's an expert on the subjunctive, as I think you may know.' This brought a sharp reaction from Unterholzer. He was the expert on the subjunctive, and it was intolerable that von Igelfeld should go around picking up–for that was what it amounted to–unauthorised experts on the subjunctive, just because they expressed a–misguided–enthusiasm for his work.

Past subjunctive forms are used when reporting: May/might as well can be translated using the verb poder. When the speaker expresses advice in a mild way (that is, the advice is not emphasized or insisted on), por las mismas can be added (usually preceding the verb poder):

Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality.

I think Oscar Wilde is right when he defines love in De Profundis as giving what one does have and receiving that over which one has no power. To love is to commit oneself to another not without the guarantee that love will be returned, but with the hope that it might be. Love takes place in the subjunctive mood: it may be, it might be, would that it were the case. The logic of love is akin to the logic of grace.

The lesson started. We were to learn the subjunctive, and I found myself wondering whether I could take so kindly to the Portuguese now that I realized how often they seemed to use it. It seemed as if there were going to be a great many things I couldn't possibly say.

A woman gets into a taxi in Boston's Logan airport and asks the driver, 'Can you take me somplace where I can get scrod?' He says, 'Gee, that's the first time I've heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.

Chinese, in contrast, lacks a subjunctive and any other simple grammatical construction that directly expresses a counterfactual.

And if we never slept together or otherwise 'realized' our relationship, I would leave Spain with this gorgeous possibility intact, and in my memory could always ponder the relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.

Y si nunca nos acostábamos ni desarrollábamos nuestra relación, me iría de España con esa preciosa posibilidad intacta, y en el recuerdo siempre podría reflexionar sobre la relación que podría haber mantenido a la favorecedora luz del subjuntivo.

certainty. The urge to switch from subjunctive to indicative is, to paraphrase Alastair Fowler, always a powerful

Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood will one day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?

Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn't you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, "sleep for all"—who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness.

Quality and consistency of conjecture are one good measure of the ambition and the inwardness of any literary biography. The biographer is master of the archive, but also and equally master of the subjunctive mood, of un-certainty, of non-factuality.

I hate all these crazy verbs, using a subjunctive to get what's happened in the future and the past mixed up.

She is not a could have been. Could have beens are women who are not exactly like my mother. For any given mother, for any given person, there are many could have beens, maybe an infinite number. No, this woman standing in front of me is something else, she is the one and only Woman My Mother Should Have Been, and I have found her. Looking for my father, I have found this woman, I have traveled, chronogrammatically, out of the ordinary tense axes and into this place, into the subjunctive mode.

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that her trouble with it is that 'But For the Grace of God' is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. 'But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin's bathroom floor,' so that an indicative transposition like […] she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it's meaningless.

At one point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what was not, could invent an alternative reality. He