Adjectives Quotes

I know the answer to the question now, by the way: why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It came from my inner editor, the part of me that forces the wordy writer in me to dump ninety percent of all modifiers: Ask both questions again, minus the adjectives.
"Why do things happen to people?"
Just because. ~ Chris Crutcher

We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc.

That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on.

But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least -two- sets of interactions in time. ...

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behaviour in relationship with other things and with the speaker.

It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions). ~ Gregory Bateson

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives ~ Alfred De Musset

So long as our untried senses and our naïve heart recognize themselves and delight in the universe of qualifications, they flourish with the aid and at the risk of the adjective, which, once dissected, proves inadequate, deficient. We say of space, of time, and of suffering that they are infinite; but infinite has no more bearing than beautiful, sublime, harmonious, ugly.... Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing - each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture - pryrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness. ~ Emil M. Cioran

You make it a production. Slam doors. Knock things over. Scream. But I just leave. Even if I'm still standing there, I leave. I am refusing you. I am denying you. I am an adjective that is quickly turning into a noun. ~ David Levithan

Bad sign when the thought of your x-girlfriend sends you reeling in a search for new adjectives to describe stupidity and thoughtlessness? ~ Dov Davidoff

I have always felt that putting emotions into words was an exercise in futility, they're often more complex than words can manage and it seems often impossible. And like an injustice to the emotions, like I will never have explained them well enough and it will just feel incomplete and wrong. Also I'm pretty sure you made me do this before heh.

All of that said, I shall do my best to manage this. You are incredibly passionate. Straightforward. Funny. I feel like such a god damn idiot spouting random adjectives but I don't know what else to do. O.O You are those things though and I love them. You see the world in a way I feel I can understand at least somewhat, a way many don't. You embrace things others try to stifle. You aren't ashamed of being yourself and yourself is wonderful. Kind and compassionate. You sure helped me and I think I helped you too, we connected on some issues even if our issues weren't the same. We... ugh, I can't do it, I can't distill something as complex, intricate, beautiful, amazing as YOU into mere words. But you are who you are and you stole my heart and I don't mind. I like it. I love you. Can't go wrong with someone that loves music and wants to have lotr snuggle fests!

I'm here darlingness. I just kept trying and trying to find the right words. It's difficult. NOT because I have anything less than the utmost massive lovelberry tree gem pie for you. It's just... emotions, y'know? They're hard to explain. o.o ~ Devouree

In a sane world, love and sex would not divide by gender. We could love like and unlike beings, love them for a variety of reasons. The battered adjectives for homosexuality
queer, lesbian, gay
would disappear and we would only have people making love in different ways, with different body parts. We are too far gone with overpopulation to insist that procreation be an immutable part of desire. Desire needs only itself, not the proof of a baby. We would do well to baby each other instead of making all these unwanted babies that no one has time to nurture or to love.
At this point in my life, I am blessed by my friendships with women. I make no distinction between my gay and straight women friends. I hat the very terms, feeling that any of us could be anything
if we were to unlock the full range of possibilities within. ~ Erica Jong

The English language has been thrust upon Americans. And it is wrong. As static and immobile as are the English, just so ever-moving are Americans. Here is a huge country. Not a mere island. Naturally people move. And they need a moving language. A language that can interpret American life. Nouns and adjectives won't express American life. They are too weak, too immobile. But verbs, adverbs, prepositions and the like, ah, they are moving, just as Americans. Obviously we cannot suddenly junk the English language and adopt some other tongue. English is too connotative, too close to us. Our problem is to adapt the English language to American needs. To make it move with us Americans. That is the problem
to write things as they are, not as they seem. our aim must be not to explain things, but to write the thing itself, and thereby in itself be self explanatory. ~ Gertrude Stein

F-word. It substituted for adjectives, nouns, and verbs. It was used, for example, to describe the cooks: "those f - ers," or "f - ing cooks"; what they did: "f - ed it up again"; and what they produced. David Kenyon Webster, a Harvard English major, confessed that he found it difficult to adjust to the "vile, monotonous, and unimaginative language." The language made these boys turning into men feel tough and, more important, insiders, members of a group. Even Webster got used to it, although never to like it. ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

When we put words together - adjective with noun, noun with verb, verb with object - we start to talk to each other. ~ Donald Hall

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say. ~ Ezra Pound

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. ~ Isabel Allende

If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives, and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description. ~ Henry Cabot Lodge

The adjectives that are in the book ["Win"] - passion, persuasion, persistence, perfection, prioritization, being people-centered - none of them are as important as principles. Without principles, the language will fail. ~ Frank Luntz

I had always thought that the 'good,' and the 'bad' and the 'violent' did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference. ~ Sergio Leone

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. ~ Yann Martel

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally. ~ George Orwell

Ophelia said, Isn't there even one for you?They're all adjectives, they make me feel modified (Eve Babitz) ~ Lili Anolik

Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader. ~ William Zinsser

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. ~ Virginia Woolf

Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents. ~ Mary Oliver

There is no sadness and no cruelty in that gaze; it is a gaze without adjectives, it is only, completely, a gaze which neither judges you nor appeals to you; it posits you, implicates you; makes you exist. But this creative gesture is endless; you keep on being born, you are sustained, carried to the end of a movement which is one of infinite origin, source, and which appears in an eternal state of suspension. ~ Roland Barthes

Thanks to the Polgars the adjective 'men's' before events and the 'affirmative action' women's titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms. ~ Garry Kasparov

Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective-women's bank, women's music, women's studies, women's caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics. ~ Gloria Steinem

I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming. ~ Carl R. Rogers

Since there is no difference of meaning between round, and a round object, it is only custom which prescribes that on any given occasion one shall be used, and not the other. We shall, therefore, without scruple, speak of adjectives as names, whether in their own right, or as representative of the more circuitous forms of expression above exemplified. ~ John Stuart Mill

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose. ~ Dick Schaap

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry. ~ W. H. Auden

I was a little excited but mostly blorft. "Blorft" is an adjective I just made up that means 'Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.' I have been blorft every day for the past seven years. ~ Tina Fey

I have a plethora of adjectives like "luminous" and "extraordinary" tucked away for my consideration. Phrases like "you don't belong here" to comfort and enrage me, to take home at 5 a.m.
Like a man in a strip club might know where I belong. ~ Fen Wilde

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. ~ Joseph Heller

If words had cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only the conventional phrases. ~ Willa Cather

The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding. ~ Benjamin Lee Whorf

Shane met him owing to the storybooks she studied to discover what attributes made one princessly - this wasn't technically a word, but she felt there should be equity in adjectives if not in life. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

Although all new talkers say names, use similar sounds, and prefer nouns more
than other parts of speech, the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives varies
from place to place (Waxman et al., 2013). For example, by 18 months, Englishspeaking infants speak far more nouns than verbs compared to Chinese or Korean
infants. Why?
One explanation goes back to the language itself. The Chinese and Korean
languages are "verb-friendly" in that verbs are placed at the beginning or end of
sentences. That facilitates learning. By contrast, English verbs occur anywhere in
a sentence, and their forms change in illogical ways (e.g., go, gone, will go, went).
This irregularity may make English verbs harder to learn, although the fact that
English verbs often have distinctive suffixes (-ing, -ed) and helper words (was, did,
had) may make it easier (Waxman et al., 2013). ~ Kathleen Stassen Berger

Hyperbolic Suggestion is - as one might infer from the term's literal interpretation - a method of suggestion induced upon the subject (or subjects), in question, through the blatant and immoderate invocation of hyperbole. Simply stated, excessive exaggeration induces a trance upon the recipient, rendering him or her remarkably susceptible to suggestion. Thus, through the use of a multitude of descriptive adjectives and superlatives, neural mechanisms and pathways are overloaded, as canals and bypasses are burrowed into the thick of the gray matter. The dendrites are, through this process, tuned to a predetermined frequency by which the seeds of suggestion can be sown. When this occurs, the subject becomes incredibly compliant to any orders given at a certain tone of voice. In some cases, orders need not be given. The subject's attitudes might well be so affected by the hyperbole as to affect his natural tendencies...Emmanuel silently wondered if there existed a perfect combination of words or phrases that could somehow - as in the case of Hyperbolic Suggestion - subvert even the most stubborn of wills. Then again, maybe it wasn't so much the words as it was how they were spoken: if he achieved exactly the most desirable intonation, rhythm, timing, pitch and pronunciation in his speaking, would his verbal appeals somehow make greater inroads in garnering their consent? There had to be some optimal combination of aspirated consonants, diphthongs, facial expressions and inflect ~ Ashim Shanker

To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time. ~ Gregory Bateson

By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world. ~ John Banville

Beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't ~ George Orwell

If you need three adjectives to describe something, then you've probably chosen the wrong something. ~ Roger Rosenblatt

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems-especially wonderful tough monosyllables like "gasp" and "cry." Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless. ~ Donald Hall

I spot a small cleft on his chin that should be awarded with a whole new set of definitions and adjectives. ~ A.A. Gupte

I have been called 'Bongshell' the day I stepped into showbiz. So, any adjective coming my way, I take it positively. Sometimes it's also entertaining, but I don't feel bad about it. I'm a proud woman. ~ Bipasha Basu

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'. ~ Franz Kafka

It had been wonderful and magical and all the adjectives that people use to describe "making love. ~ Laurelin Paige

Lord Carlston was not a man to be contained, even in adjectives. ~ Alison Goodman

I sometimes use the word "fat," as I consider it to be an accurate descriptor of some curvy gals, including me. I believe using "fat" in a nonpejorative way helps destigmatize and inure us to the word as the insult it's become, and gets us used to seeing it as it was meant to be used: As a neutral descriptor. I use the words curvy, plus-size, zaftig, plump, larger, and bigger in the same spirit. Some of these words may make you bristle at first, but they are not meant negatively but solely as adjectives. ~ Elle Chase

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. ~ Jacques Barzun

‪If the overuse of adjectives is frowned upon in writing, why are expletives - the ones commonly used as adjectives - embraced? ~ Carmen DeSousa

She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives. ~ Michael Chabon

The intellectualist philosopher who wants to hold words to their precise meaning, and uses them as the countless little tools of clear thinking, is bound to be surprised by the poet's daring. And yet a syncretism of sensitivity keeps words from crystallizing into perfect solids. Unexpected adjectives collect about the focal meaning of the noun. A new environment allows the word to enter not only into one's thoughts, but also into one's daydreams. Language dreams. ~ Gaston Bachelard

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. ~ David Cross

I dropped a word from the string of negative adjectives that had trailed behind me like tin cans behind the village idiot. Unappreciated, unloved, unmarried. But no longer unpublished. ~ Francine Prose

Frankly I've never really subscribed to these adjectives tagging me as an 'icon', 'superstar', etc. I've always thought of myself as an actor doing his job to the best of his ability. ~ Amitabh Bachchan

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction. ~ Ezra Pound

When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded word, we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don't quite fit our preferences and presuppositions. In an attempt to simplify, we force the Bible's cacophony of voices into a single tone and turn a complicated, beautiful, and diverse holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says. ~ Rachel Held Evans

Reg coughed repressively.Habit had made of the standard nouns and adjectives in his own vocabulary something merely conventional,like italics or points of exclamation.He sometimes found Laurie's conversation highly obscene,and would have voiced his disapproval to anyone he had liked less. ~ Mary Renault

The question that arises as we use all these adjectives and adverbs to describe our physicians as we approach a Supreme Court nominee is where are we in America when we decide that it's legal to kill our unborn children? ~ Tom Coburn

A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls. Think of yourselves as pearls. We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives. ~ Margaret Atwood

As a form of body language, when the mind is receptive to the sensory experience, writing speaks the truth about all thoughts and feelings. Now I don't want to be misunderstood here because this isn't a special talent or skill. It's present in all of us. The trick is to discover it, cultivate it and translate it from an internal state to an expressive sensuality. It is truly a creative impulse that unconsciously expresses emotions and can also arouse emotion in the person reading the book. The beauty and harmony of the writer never gets old and there are as many new things to learn each day, as there are varieties of adjectives, nouns and verbs in the world. It is the ultimate way to communicate with your reader. ~ Karl Wiggins

The only sort of descriptive adjective or catch phrase for my music would be 'eclectic.' ~ Moby

Lo!" I said. "I arrived at Camp Half-Blood as Lester Papadopoulos!"
"A pathetic mortal!" Calypso chorused. "Most worthless of teens!"
I glared at her, but I didn't dare stop my performance again. "I overcame many challenges with my companion, Meg McCaffrey!"
"He means his master!" Calypso added. "A twelve-year-old girl! Behold her pathetic slave, Lester, most worthless of teens!"
The policeman huffed impatiently. "We know all this. The emperor told us."
"Shh," said Nanette. "Be polite."
I put my hand over my heart. "We secured the Grove of Dodona, an ancient Oracle, and thwarted the plans of Nero! But, alas, Meg McCaffrey fled from me. Her evil stepfather had poisoned her mind!"
"Poison!" Calypso cried. "Like the breath of Lester Papadopoulos, most worthless of teens!"
I resisted the urge to push Calypso into the flower bed.
Meanwhile, Leo was making his way towards the bulldozer under the guise of an interpretive dance routine, spinning and gasping and pantomiming my words. He looked like a hallucinating ballerina in boxer shorts, but the blemmyae politely got out of his way.
"Lo!" I shouted. "From the Oracle of Dodona we received a prophecy - a limerick most terrible!"
"Terrible!" Calypso chorused. "Like the skills of Lester, most worthless of teens!"
"Vary your adjectives," I grumbled, then continued for my audience: "We travelled west in search of another Oracle, along the way fighting many fearsome foes! The Cyc ~ Rick Riordan

Commentating, illustrating, description-giving
Adjective expert. Analyzing, surmising,
Musical, myth-seeking people of the universe ...
This is yours! ~ T La Rock

It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word. ~ Zadie Smith

My pet peeve and my goal in life is to somehow get an adjective for 'integrity' in the dictionary. 'Truthful' doesn't really cover it, or 'genuine.' It should be like 'integritus.' ~ Rashida Jones

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech. ~ Clifton Fadiman

The pieces didn't really coordinate and could be described in no other way than 'eclectic', but once labeled 'eclectic', valuable mismatches generally become fantastically stylish. Very similar to the way adding cash value to 'crazy' results in a whimsical 'eccentric'; you have to buy more flattering adjectives. ~ Mandy Ashcraft

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation. ~ Mark Twain

It is amazing to observe how many psychologists and psychiatrists have accepted this sort of propaganda, and have come to believe that homosexual males and females are discretely different from persons who respond to natural stimuli. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds. ~ Alfred Kinsey

I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference. ~ Simon Schama

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective. ~ Mark Twain

I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them. ~ Violette Leduc

Adjectives are used as nouns ("greats," "notables"). Nouns are used as verbs ("to host"), or they are chopped off to form verbs ("enthuse," "emote"), or they are padded to form verbs ("beef up," "put teeth into"). This is a world where eminent people are "famed" and their associates are "staffers," where the future is always "upcoming" and someone is forever "firing off" a note. Nobody in America has sent a note or a memo or a telegram in years. Famed diplomat Condoleezza Rice, who hosts foreign notables to beef up the morale of top State Department staffers, sits down and fires off a lot of notes. Notes that are fired off are always fired in anger and from a sitting position. What the weapon is I've never found out. ~ William Zinsser

Quootla had a suffix, -utl, that could be glued to the end of anything - nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, small rodents - and meant the word itself plus its opposite, simultaneously. It didn't always translate into Goreddi. Time/no-time almost made sense; blue/orange or fall/rise or dog/whatever-the-opposite-of-dog-is were perfectly intelligible in Quootla but boggling to nearly everyone else. ~ Rachel Hartman

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by. ~ Mark Twain

Prepositions are painful, articles are arduous, adjectives are wild overachievements. ~ Isaac Marion

Amazing, powerful, inspirational - those adjectives might make me sound like a fawning fan, but REWORK is that useful. Be prepared for a new feeling of clarity and motivation. ~ Kathy Sierra

They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives. ~ C.S. Lewis

All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection. ~ Joseph Devlin

I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments. ~ Isabel Allende

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ... ~ Julio Cortazar

I go through the text making sure I haven't used any big words. If I find any fancy adjectives have crept in, I replace them with small words like 'nice' and 'big'. I've liked these words ever since I was told not to use them in English class at school. After that, I check that the sentences are short so as people won't get confused and I shorten all the chapters so they won't get bored. I can't read anything complicated these days, my attention span is too short. Everyone else probably feels the same. ~ Martin Millar

It wasn't fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping - pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective. ~ John Casey

I think it should be done over, Buddy. …Please make peace with your wit. It's not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and your adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit?

I've been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like 'This one is wonderfully constructed,' and 'The conversation between the two cops is terrific.' So I'm hedging. I'm not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don't you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn't that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn't sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgement. It worries me enough. But I'm also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you. ~ J.D. Salinger

Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs. ~ A.B. Guthrie Jr.

Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework. ~ Angela Davis

I do so like all-encompassing words. Verb, adjective, noun. Yes, you are shitted. ~ Kim Harrison

Nick found Gabriel in his bedroom, sitting cross-legged on his bed, surrounded by textbooks. Headphones trailed from his ears, and his pencil tapped in time with whatever he was listening to. He either didn't notice Nick standing at the door, or he deliberately wasn't looking up.

Nick wanted to shove him off the bed and kick him in the face.

Not aggressive, my ass.

Gabriel finally looked up and yanked the headphones free.

"So I have to leave you alone, but you get to stand there like a freaky stalker?"

Oh, good. New adjectives. Nick told his heartbeat to chill out. He pushed Gabriel's door open. "I need to talk to you about something."

Gabriel stared at him. Nick could read the debate on his face: screw with Nick or just play it easy.

He went with the latter. His pencil dropped into the spine of his trig textbook. "Okay. Talk."

"If you grabbed someone by the wrist, could you set their skin on fire without anyone knowing you were doing it?"

Gabriel's eyebrows went up. "Not exactly what I thought you'd want to talk about."

Nick didn't have an answer for that. He kept his gaze steady and waited.

"Look, Nicky . . ." Gabriel hesitated. "Whatever I did to piss you off, just - "

"Forget it." Nick was halfway out his door before Gabriel slid off the bed to grab his arm.

"Stop," said his twin. "I'll answer your question, all right?"

~ Brigid Kemmerer

In writing I try to pare down the descriptive bits. If I feel that I could say something in as few words as possible, then I would rather do it than to go on padding. One should describe sufficiently to give the reader a sense of what one feels, but not at the same time overwhelm the reader in any way. For example, I feel that if you use lots of adjectives they have a mutually cancelling effect. If you can describe a scene well enough, without having to use far too many words, I would rather do so. ~ Arthur Yap

Millennials are often portrayed as apathetic, disinterested, tuned out and selfish. None of those adjectives describe the Millennials I've been privileged to meet and work with. ~ Chelsea Clinton

The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps. ~ Angela Carter

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. ~ Omari Hardwick

His voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking ~ George R R Martin

The face that looked back was narrow, and although it was not beautiful, it was not ugly. I am nondescript, she thought. Nondescript features with shoulder-length dark hair. Hmm. She opened the robe and looked critically at her body. Lots of adjectives beginning with the letter S are appropriate here, she thought grimly. Short. Scrawny. Small breasts. Skinned knees (although presumably those were only temporary). ~ Daniel O'Malley

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence. ~ Kenneth Koch

I will give you my definition of a nation, and you can add the adjective 'Jewish.' A Nation is, in my mind, an historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion held together by a common enemy. Then, if you add to that the word 'Jewish' you have what I understand to be the Jewish nation. ~ Theodor Herzl

So there were two worlds: the perceived world, a dimension of adjectives, equations and brush strokes, a surface dazzling with our efforts to render it, but ultimately bearing only our own reflections; and the impenetrable world, the plumbless dark full of latent particles, the primordial cauldron which, like a mother, gives us our being but is a lifelong riddle. ~ Bia Lowe

Whoever has power takes over the noun - and the norm - while the less powerful get an adjective. ~ Gloria Steinem