Syntax Quotes

“Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation A

“Philosophy is that activity by which the meaning of propositions is established or discovered; it is a question of what the propositions actually mean. The content, soul, and spirit of science naturally consist in what is ultimately meant by its sentences; the philosophical activity of rendering significant is thus the alpha and omega of all scientific knowledge.

[Moritz Schlick interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein's position]”
― Moritz Schlick

“Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet

“…After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death

“She walks to a table
She walk to table

She is walking to a table
She walk to table now

What difference does it make
What difference it make

In Nature, no completeness
No sentence really complete thought

Language, like woman,
Look best when free, undressed.”
― Wang Ping

“Approaching the Start of Civil Exams

Perhaps I was once a young Chinese scholar
approaching the start of civil exams,
my mind grown weary and sad from seclusion
with books on syntax and poetic style.

All that I knew were the mist-covered mountains
and sweet white blossoms of mountain apples
that grew in the valleys of my province.

But I had been gone over six years
busy with studies in the Heavenly City
empty and thin despite my work.

I showed my verses to an older poet
who told me a truth I longed to believe:
all knowledge is futile and barren
which does not open the love of your friends.”
― Jim Chapson

“I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.”
― Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum

“A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general description, a Biker.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation He began to dictate notes for a new novel, "fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing." As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the Imperial Bonapartes....William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his 'dear and most esteemed brother and sister.' To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for 'the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workment who take them in hand.' He was himself the 'imperial eagle.'

Taking down the dictation, Theodora [his secretary] felt it to be almost more than she could bear. 'It is a heart-breaking thing to do, though, there is the extraordinary fact that his mind does retain the power to frame perfectly characteristic sentences.”
― Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography

“When you decide to put your business online it is a little bet tricky step for novice computer users because they want to keep data safe & secure.
This problem developed from companies which did not take security seriously”
― Mohamed Saad

“They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The slalom race of syntax!”
― Laurent Binet, La Septième Fonction du langage

“Words are precious vessels that carry within them meaning sufficiently stalwart to transform lives and alter the course of nations. And because of the commanding power that is housed within them, I prefer to say one word filled with its meaning than utter a thousand others that I have emptied of their meaning.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Florid language frequently leads to merry lovemaking when accompanied by the correct diction, syntax, and timing.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Too often words are used to envelope pithy and rank agendas in the garments of justice, piety and all things good. And the worst of it is not that I have fooled others through this abuse of syntax. Rather, the worst of it is that I’ve fooled myself.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It’s not saying something that’s been said a million times before. It’s saying something that’s been said in a way that feels as if it was missed a million times before.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough