Quotes About Adjectives

They've a temper, some of them--particularly verbs: they're the proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however I can manage the whole lot of them!

The question is, which is to be master? That's all. They've a temper, some of them. Particularly verbs. Oh, they're the proudest! Adjectives, eh, you can do anything with, but not verbs however.

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.

Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives.

Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'.

Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a passion for detail have attempted to describe the quiet of a great city at night, when a few million people within it are sleeping, or ought to be. They work in the clang of a distant owl car, and the roar of an occasional "L" train, and the hollow echo of the footsteps of the late passer-by. They go elaborately into description, and are strong on the brooding hush, but the thing has never been done satisfactorily.

His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives.

And God knows the strength of an adjective, especially in young and warm countries.

It wasn't fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping—pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective.

some authorities use this canon at that broad level of generality.1 But we mean something more specific. When several nouns or verbs or adjectives or adverbs—any words—are associated in a context suggesting that the words have something in common, they should be assigned a permissible meaning that makes them similar.

You kind of get the same adjectives coming back over again and over again describing millennials. I think the national rhetoric around this generation is unfairly negative.

Ben Yagoda's fine book When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.

But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives.

Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. I think about pearls. Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time.

I lived in Chicago for a few years and got a sense of - kind of that broad-shouldered, windy, um, stern, Midwestern, warm-slash-passive aggressive, wonderful - every adjective I can think of, very cold.

One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.

Since there is no difference of meaning between round, and a round object, it is only custom which prescribes that on any given occasion one shall be used, and not the other. We shall, therefore, without scruple, speak of adjectives as names, whether in their own right, or as representative of the more circuitous forms of expression above exemplified.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says 'bloody,' unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is -----. No doubt in time -----, like 'bloody,' will find its way into the drawing room and replaced by some other word.

Looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.