The Elements of Eloquence Quotes

“John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a “green great dragon.” He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn’t have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.
The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“if you say, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’, you will be considered the greatest poet who ever lived. Express precisely the same thought any other way – e.g. ‘your father’s corpse is 9.144 metres below sea level’ – and you’re just a coastguard with some bad news.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“The alternative, should you, or any writer of English, choose to employ it (and who is to stop you?) is, by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after, to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted invention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander for ever, amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy, and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. ... Clothes and language can be things of beauty, I would no more write without art because I didn't need to than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Most people can improvise in unrhymed dactyls for hours. It's just that you lose all your friends if you do.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“If you're too overcome to even finish your sentence then you must be sincere, you must really mean what you're not saying, you must...I'm sorry. I cannot type. My fingers are crying.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“So popular is alliteration that in the 1960s it actually made a grab for political power. In the 1960s a vast radical youth movement began campaigning to do things for the sole reason that they began with the same letter. Ban the bomb. Burn your bra. Power to the people. For a moment there it seemed as though alliteration would change the world. But then the spirit of idealism faded and those who had manned the barricades went off and got jobs in marketing.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them... These lists are almost universally awkward.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He’s like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

“The lawyer's lucky phrase is 'including but not limited to', which gets you out of the utterly unnecessary trouble that the unnecessary trouble merism got you into in the first place.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“The importance of English word order is also the reason that the idea that you can't end a sentence with a preposition is utter hogwash. In fact, it would be utter hogwash anyway, and anyone who claims that you can't end a sentence with up, should be told to shut. It is, as Shakespeare put it, such stuff as dreams are made on, but it's one of those silly English beliefs that flesh is heir to.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Now some people will tell you that great writing cannot be learnt. Such people should be hit repeatedly on the nose until they promise not to talk nonsense any more.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing, and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“The period is one of the most complicated and concepts of classical rhetoric. Nobody in the ancient world could quite decide what it meant, but they were united in the belief that it was terribly, terribly important.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Requited love is only a pleasing symmetry, and symmetry is a kind of justice.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Who needs sense when you have alliteration?”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Human beings, for some reason or another, like symmetry. You leave a bunch of them next to a jungle for a couple of days and you'll come back to find an ornamental garden. We take stones and turn them into the Taj Mahal or St. Paul's Cathedral.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy, and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.' Matthew 19:24. This verse has always rather worried rich men who tend to ask themselves how much a really damned big needle would cost.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine and is technically known as a progressio. It was a favorite of God and Dickens”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilized society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“If somebody learns how to phrase things beautifully, they might be able to persuade you of something that isn't true.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“It's sad to see Time's toothless mouth laughing the poets to scorn. The stars are all explained and the mist is all measured, and there is no magic left in this dreary world.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Epistrophe is the trope of obsession. It's the trope of emphasizing one point again and again. And it's the trope of not being able to escape that one conclusion, which is one of the reasons that songs are so suited to the idea of obsessive love, political certainty and other such unhealthy ideas. You can't reason in an epistrophic pop song. You can't seriously consider the alternatives, because the structure dictates that you'll always end up at the same point, thinking about the same girl and giving peace a chance.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“The Bible is chock-a-block with such unnecessary but beautiful antitheses. God, whatever his other failings, is a great rhetorician.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase