Gary > Gary's Quotes

“You know how advice is - you only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyways.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.”
― Steinbeck John

“A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.”
― John Steinbeck

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“A traitor may betray himself and do good he does not intend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“I suppose I might just say “If it starts with a capital letter, look it up” and end this chapter right here, but where would be the fun in that?”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“MARTHA. So? He’s a biologist. Good for him. Biology’s even better. It’s less…abstruse. GEORGE. Abstract. MARTHA. ABSTRUSE! In the sense of recondite. (Sticks her tongue out at GEORGE) Don’t you tell me words. —Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“You’re attempting to burrow into the brains of your writers and do for, to, and with their prose what they themselves might have done for, to, and with it had they not already looked at each damn sentence 657 times.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“It’s like endlessly working on one of those spot-the-difference picture puzzles in an especially satanic issue of Highlights for Children.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“LAGUARDIA AIRPORT Hellhole.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“It has, to my great dismay, no enforceable laws, much less someone to enforce the laws it doesn’t have.*1”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“BASED OFF OF No. Just no. “An intentional tremor, with prepositions,” as a friend described it. The inarguably—so don’t argue with me—correct phrase is “based on.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“Or to advertent comic effect, if you’re Groucho Marx: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“There’s nothing to be gained by referring to the playwright Tennessee Williams as “the famous playwright Tennessee Williams.” If a person is famous enough to be referred to as famous, there’s no need to refer to that person as famous, is there. Neither is there much to be gained by referring to “the late Tennessee Williams,” much less “the late, great Tennessee Williams,” which is some major cheese. I’m occasionally asked how long a dead person is appropriately late rather than just plain dead. I don’t know, and apparently neither does anyone else.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“Neither will we discuss the interrobang, because we’re all civilized adults here.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.*30”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“The Celebrated Ending-a-Sentence-with-a-Preposition Story Two women are seated side by side at a posh dinner party, one a matron of the sort played in the old Marx Brothers movies by Margaret Dumont, except frostier, the other an easygoing southern gal, let’s say, for the sake of the visuals, wearing a very pink and very ruffled evening gown. Southern Gal, amiably, to Frosty Matron: So where y’all from? Frosty Matron, no doubt giving Southern Gal a once-over through a lorgnette: I’m from a place where people don’t end their sentences with prepositions. Southern Gal, sweetly, after a moment’s consideration: OK. So where y’all from, bitch?”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“I now have a colleague whose pronoun of choice is “they,” and thus the issue is no longer culturally abstract but face-to-face personal, no longer an issue I’d persuaded myself was none of my business but one of basic human respect I chose—choose—to embrace. (I’m happy to call myself out for stubbornly avoiding the topic till it became personal. One is supposed to be better than that; one often isn’t.)”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“According to the lovely folks at Merriam-Webster, the term “hippie,” in the sense of hirsute member of the counterculture, dates back to 1965, which is a skosh later than I might have guessed. One fun thing about dictionaries is that they’ll provide a date of introduction into written English for just about any word you can think of. This comes in awfully handy when you’re writing period fiction and wish to be era-appropriate, especially in dialogue. Copyediting a novel set during New York’s 1863 Draft Riots, I learned that what we now call a hangover—a term that didn’t pop up till 1894—was known in those earlier days as, among other things, a “katzenjammer.” Note, please, my use of quotation marks just now. I needed them.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“Footnote pop quiz: Why, then, would I hyphenate the likes of “scholarly-looking teenagers” or “lovely-smelling flowers”? Because not all “-ly” words are adverbs. Sometimes they’re adjectives. Really, I’m sorry.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Sixteenth century Flemish painter. The Matthew McConaughey of his era as no one can ever quite remember how to spell his name.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“think of this as the “Jane Austen Did It So It Must Be OK” school of wordsmithery, but it’s not a school I attend. I don’t punctuate like Jane Austen; I feel no compunction to otherwise English like Jane Austen. If our infinitely malleable language gains in expansion, invention, and reinvention, it can also, for the sake of precision and clarity, benefit from occasionally having its screws tightened, and not every centuries-old definition need be retained when a word has, over time, accumulated more meanings than are perhaps useful.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“The English alphabet is comprised of twenty-six letters.” Cue the sirens, because here come the grammar cops. Use plain “comprise” to mean “made up of” and you’re on safe ground. But as soon as you’re about to attach the word “of” to the word “comprise,” raise your hands to the sky and edit yourself. Once you’ve lowered your hands.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“EVERYDAY/EVERY DAY “Everyday” is an adjective (“an everyday occurrence”), “every day” an adverb (“I go to work every day”).”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“And that’s often the problem, isn’t it? In writing and in so many things: that we accept things we’re taught without thinking about them at all.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“A reversal is a total 180.*10 If you do a total 360, you’re facing the same direction as when you began.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“If you can append ‘by zombies’ to the end of a sentence (or, yes, ‘by the clown’), you’ve indeed written a sentence in the passive voice.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style: The UK Edition

“De rigueur. A fancy-schmancy adjective meaning “required or prescribed by fashion”. To misspell it is the ne plus ultra of failed pretention.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“All this said, there’s nothing wrong with sentences constructed in the passive voice – you’re simply choosing where you want to put the sentence’s emphasis – and I see nothing objectionable in, say, The floors were swept, the beds made, the rooms aired out. Since the point of interest is the cleanness of the house and not the identity of the cleaner. But many a sentence can be improved by putting its true protagonist at the beginning, so that’s something to be considered.fn10”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style: The UK Edition