Quotes About Adjectives

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

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.

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

And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

Amazing, powerful, inspirational - those adjectives might make me sound like a fawning fan, but REWORK is that useful. Be prepared for a new feeling of clarity and motivation.

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives

I'm OK with being called plus size, I'm OK with being called fat. If someone is shouting that I'm fat in the street in a derogatory way, then obviously I'm not OK with that, but I'm comfortable using the adjective fat to describe myself, because I am fat.

I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference.

Use only those adjectives that call forth the qualities of the object; avoid adjectives that label or explain. Words like lovely, old, wonderful, noteworthy or remarkable are explanatory labels; they do not suggest sense impressions. Adjectives like bug-eyed, curly, bumpy, frayed or moss-covered, on the other hand, are descriptive.

Swedes, Germans and Britons, when tested in a similar manner, do the same, selecting positive adjectives to describe their own culture.

It's horrible, she said. He looked at her in surprise. Horrible? Wasn't that odd? He hadn't thought that for years. For him the word "horror" had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror made terror a cliché. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")

According to Müller, during this time language still was not capable of expressing anything that required conceptual thought. It contained no abstract nouns, such as beauty, or any adjectives, such as beautiful, because such words generalized concepts from direct observations. Thus, he claimed that the earliest languages consisted entirely of nouns that referred to substantial objects and verbs describing actions.17

The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.

You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong; verbs and nouns.

Such a fatigue of adjectives, a drone of alliterations, a huffing of hyphenated words hurdling the meter like tired horses. Such a faded upholstery of tears, stars, bells, bones, flood and blood†a thud of consonants in tongue, night, dark, dust, seed, wound and wind.

the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as i would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations;

They came one at a time or in shy small groups. I remember when sea-kindly showed up, a sentimental favorite, followed by desiccated and massive. Brusque appeared all by itself, which seemed apt; merry and boisterous arrived together. This would be a good time to ask for your patience if I use an adjective too many now and again—even now, some years on, they're still returning. I'm just so glad to see them.

At first I thought common nouns were hardest hit, coffee and doorway and so on, but it soon became clear that the missing were mostly adjectives.

If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, "I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives," you'd probably get a pretty strange look;