Quotes About Adjectives

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.

If there are a couple of adjectives people use to describe me, anger is usually in there. I've never taken that as criticism. It's the way I naturally communicate. But I'm not faux-angry, like Lewis Black, or angry like a gun-toting crazy person. I'm just angry in a mild way - it's not like I'm going to do anything about it.

Guard against this tendency of adjectives to march in pairs. They love to do it but it destroys all finer cadences.

The beloved's features too were standardized in certain adjectives of color and shape and likened to natural objects, fruit and flowers especially. As a result, ingenuity in finding fresh ways to follow the pattern was required in addition to actual poetic powers. The challenge was great and it accounts for the quantity of verbal lovemaking in the blue, addressed to the remote or non-existent tribes of Celias and Delias.

When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list - even if it's a mental list that you make - of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.

Thus the British Empire came into existence; and thus - for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork - sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes.

For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.

I like clean ladies and nice ladies.

How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.

The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective — scalding coffee and tremulous fear are the sorts of thing you will find throughout. Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing.

The adjectives and derivatives based on woman's distinctions are alien and derogatory when applied to human affairs; "effeminate"--too female, connotes contempt, but has no masculine analogue; whereas "emasculate"--not enough male, is a term of reproach, and has no feminine analogue. 'Virile'--manly, we oppose to 'puerile'--childish, and the very world 'virtue' is derived from 'vir'--a man.

For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.

had been Mirandized. And a perfectly good adjective had been made into a verb.

I thought that prejudicial adjectives and liberal clichés in the reportorial copy undercut the power of the facts.

I've really tried to strip my writing of as many adjectives and adverbs as I possibly can.

Don't leave out the key adjectives in there. Kill one low-ranked, disappointing brother in order to save the long-lost hero with a bright future. That makes the equation a bit easier.

A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction--besides unexpected interludes--has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.

It was here in Mayfair, that adjectives such as gracious elegant sophisticated and sublime trip off the tongue like coins into a parking meter.

The idea of forming people out of grammatical clauses seems so fantastical at the start that you hide your terror in a smokescreen of elaborate sentence making, as if character can be drawn forcibly out of the curlicues of certain adjectives piled ruthlessly on top of one another. In fact, character occurs with the lightest of brushstrokes. Naturally, it can be destroyed lightly too.

It was during this time that Archie learned the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all his life.

That's the alchemy of adjectives: boiling down an excess of ideas to the essence of a thing. We want the words to be precise and evocative. If we pick our adjectives carefully, any description can surprise.