Vowels Quotes

“Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee

“If a picture paints a thousand words, then a naked picture paints a thousand words without any vowels....”
― Josh Stern, And That’s Why I’m Single

“Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his own best knuckle ball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down - not even the pitcher, much much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing.”
― Jerry Spinelli

“A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
Someday I shall tell of your mysterious births:
A, black velvety corset of dazzling flies
Buzzing around cruel smells,
Gulfs of shadow; E, white innocence of vapors and of tents,
Spears of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of Queen Anne's lace;
I, purples, spitting blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in drunken penitence;
U, waves, divine shudderings of green seas,
The calm of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of furrows
Which alchemy prints on wide, studious foreheads;
O, sublime Bugle full of strange piercing sound,
Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels;
- O the Omega, the violet ray of her Eyes!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“A, Black, E, white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
Someday I shall tell of your mysterious births:
A, black velvety corset of dazzling flies
Buzzing around cruel smells,
Gulfs of shadow; E, white innocence of vapors and of tents,
Spears of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of Queen Anne's lace;
I, purples, spitting blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in drunkin penitence;
U, waves, divine shudderings of green seas,
The calm of pastures dotted with animals, the pece of furrows
Which alchemy prints on wide, studious foreheads;
O, sublime Bugle full of strange piercing so und,
Silences crossed by Worlds nad by Angels:
- O the Omega, the violet ray of her Eyes!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“In English-language speech, we spend five times as much time producing vowels as consonants. In singing, that ratio can hit two hundred to one.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

“In any case, e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve, so we cannot conclude that a hominid with a restricted vowel space had little language.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“We also composed using what we called vowel movement - very important for songwriters. The sounds that work. Many times you don't know what the word is, but you know the word has got to contain this vowel, this sound. You can write something that'll look really good on paper, but it doesn't contain the right sound. You start to build the consonants around the vowels. There's a place to go ooh and there's a place to go daah. And if you get it wrong, it sounds like crap. It's not necessarily that it rhymes with anything at the moment, and you've got to look for the rhyming word too, but you know there's a particular vowel involved.”
― Keith Richards, Life