Alphabets Quotes

His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered. ~ Charles Dickens

To All My Mariners in One

Forget the many who talk much, say little, mean less and matter least
Forget we live in times when broadcasts of Tchaikovsky's 5th
precede announcements of the death of tyrants.
Forget that life for governments is priced war cheap but kidnap high
Our seamanship is not with such.
From port to port we learn that "depths last longer than heights",
that years are meant to disappear like wakes,
that nothing but the sun stands still.
We share the sweeter alphabets of laughter and the slower languages of pain.
Common as coal, we find in one another's eyes
the quiet diamonds that are worth the world.
Drawn by the song of our keel, who are we but horizons coming true?
Let others wear their memories like jewelry
We're of the few who work apart so well,
together when we must.
We speak cathedrals when we speak and
trust no promise but the pure supremacy of tears.
What more can we expect?
The sea's blue mischief may be waiting for its time and place,
but still we have the stars to guide us,
we have the winds for company.
We have ourselves.
We have the sailor's faith that not even dying can divide us. ~ Samuel Hazo

What makes Helvetica more beautiful is the word "Helvetica" as a logotype in its typeface. It just makes the rest of the alphabets effective. ~ Shawn Lukas

For the first time in his life, Midhat wished he were more religious. Of course he prayed, but though that was a private mechanism it sometimes felt like a public act, and the lessons of the Quran were lessons by rote, one was steeped in them, hearing them so often. They were the texture of his world, and yet they did not occupy that central, vital part of his mind, the part that was vibrating at this moment, on this train, rattling forward while he struggled to hold all these pieces. As a child he had felt some of the same curiosity he held for the mysteries of other creeds - for Christianity with its holy fire, the Samaritans with their alphabets - but that feeling had dulled while he was still young, when traditional religion began to seem a worldly thing, a realm of morals and laws and the same old stories and holidays. They were acts, not thoughts. He faced the water now along the coast, steadying his gaze on the slow distance, beyond the blur of trees pushing past the tracks, on the desolate fishing boats hobbling over the waves. He sensed himself tracing the lip of something very large, something black and well-like, a vessel which was at the same time an emptiness, and he thought, without thinking precisely, only feeling with the tender edges of his mind, what the Revelation might have been for in its origin. Why it was so important that they could argue to the sword what it meant if God had hands, and whether He had made the universe. Underneath it all was a living u ~ Isabella Hammad

Build a name. Personal branding is all about name building. I don't just mean alphabetical name, but a name that can be spelt in the skills you have and pronounced with the things you do ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning. ~ Loren Eiseley

Proceed, philosophers, teach, enlighten, enkindle, think aloud, speak aloud, run joyously towards the bright daylight, fraternise in the public squares, announce the glad tidings, scatter plenteously your alphabets, proclaim human rights, sing your Marseillaises, sow enthusiasms, broadcast, tear off green branches from the oak trees. Make thought a whirlwind. This multitude can be sublimated. Let us learn to avail ourselves of this vast combustion of principles and virtues, which sparkles, crackles and thrills at certain periods. These bare feet, these naked arms, these rags, these shades of ignorance, these depths of abjectness, these abysses of gloom may be employed in the conquest of the ideal. Look through the medium of the people, and you shall discern the truth. This lowly sand which you trample beneath your feet, if you cast it into the furnace, and let it melt and seethe, shall become resplendent crystal, and by means of such as it a Galileo and a Newtown shall discover stars. ~ Victor Hugo

How had it come about that these particular designs were chosen as our letters? Who decreed what sound would accompany each shape? And how was it decided the manner they would come together to form a word?
'Why is this so?' I demanded to know. ~ Theresa Breslin

Later I will see
there is a poem on the back of each wing. Poems that are not about us,
but are about trees and teacups,
fields and glances. Not about us,
but about the things we hold dear.
The moments we both collect
by living our lives, together and alone. Rearranged alphabets, dream-remnant wonder, the seat of our love. ~ David Levithan

She imagined the trade in meanings as a kind of game, in which tokens shaped like mahjong tiles were exchanged and switched. Signs moved from one world to another, clacked together, made new sequences. A man in Bolshevik Russia became virtually Chinese; a world unfolded from a paper envelope. This game existed in the borderless continent of her father's head. She could see how he concentrated: 'cher' in Russian, 'neve' in Italian, 'snow' in English, until he arrived at the sound 'xue', and then the character: the radical symbol for rain, the strokes for frozen, the little block of marks that revealed the transition from alphabets to ideograms. ~ Gail Jones

New friends may be poems but old friends are alphabets. Don't forget the alphabets because you will need them to read the poems. ~ William Shakespeare

S-U-C-I-D-E
Do You want to end everything with only six alphabets? ~ Laksh Kishore

I am the leader of one country which has two alphabets, three languages, four religions, five nationalities, six republics, surrounded by seven neighbours, a country in which live eight ethnic minorities. ~ Josip Broz Tito

A comparative study will lead to the conclusion that the Phoenician, Aramaic and Greek alphabets were developed from one original. ~ John Courtenay James

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E's, nine thousand T's, and only two hundred Z's. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text. ~ James Gleick

Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don't even have to think about reading once we've learned how to do it. ~ Steven Johnson

There was one panicked moment. He picked a book from the wall, and the shapes inside, all the letters, were friends to him; but as he settled before them and began to mouth and mutter them, waiting for them to sound as words in his head, they were all gibberish. He grew frantic very quickly, fearing that he had lost what it was he had gained.t pieced it together into a different language. Shekel was dumbstruck at the realization that these glyphs he had conquered could do the same job for so many peoples who could not understand each other at all. He grinned as he thought about it. He was glad to share.
He opened more foreign volumes, making or trying to make the noises that the letters spelled and laughing at how strange they sounded. He looked carefully at the pictures and cross-referenced them again, tentatively he concluded that in this lanugage, this particular clutch of letters meant 'boat' and this other set 'moon'.
....he reached new shelving and opened a book whose script was like nothing he knew. He laughed, delighted at its strange curves.
He moved off further and found yet another alphabet. And a little way off there was another.
For hours he found intrigue and astonishment by exploring the non-Ragamoll shelves. He found in those meaningless words and illegible alphabets not only an awe at the world, but the remnants of the fetishism to which he had been subjected before, when all books had existed for him as those did now, only as mute objects ~ China Mieville

THE CHRISTIAN ALPHABETS
A = AMEN
B = BAPTISM
C = CHRISTIAN
D = DISCIPLE
F = FELLOWSHIP
G = GOD
H = HOLY SPIRIT
I = INSPIRATION
J = JESUS CHRIST
K = KINGDOM
L = LOVE
M = MODERATION
N = NEW BIRTH
O = OBEDIENCE
P = PRAYER
Q = QUIET TIME
R = RIGHTEOUSNESS
S = SALVATION
T = TESTIMONY
U = UNDERSTANDING
V = VISION
W = WISDOM
X = XMAS
Y = YEA & AMEN
Z = ZION
BY : ADEWALE OSUNSAKIN ~ Osunsakin Adewale

If the elements are the alphabets of chemistry, then the compounds are its plays, its poems, and its novels. ~ Peter Atkins

The Allatians believe that they have a writing system superior to all others. Unlike books written in alphabets, syllabaries, or logograms, an Allatian book captures not only words, but also the writer's tone, voice, inflection, emphasis, intonation, rhythm. It is simultaneously a score and a recording. A speech sounds like a speech, a lament a lament, and a story re-creates perfectly the teller's breathless excitement. For the Allatians, reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.

But there is a cost to the beauty of the Allatian book. Because the act of reading requires physical contact with the soft, malleable surface, each time a text is read, it is also damaged and some aspects of the original irretrievably lost. Copies made of more durable materials inevitably fail to capture all the subtleties of the writer's voice, and are thus shunned.

In order to preserve their literary heritage, the Allatians have to lock away their most precious manuscripts in forbidding libraries where few are granted access. Ironically, the most important and beautiful works of Allatian writers are rarely read, but are known only through interpretations made by scribes who attempt to reconstruct the original in new books after hearing the source read at special ceremonies. ~ Ken Liu

Snakes can have dozens of young at a time, and so they are often symbols of fertility. They resemble vegetation, especially roots, in their form and often in the green and brown of their skins. The undulating form of a snake also suggests a river. A point of muscular tension passes through the body of a snake and drives the animal forward, like a moment moving along a continuum of days and years. Like time itself, a snake seems to progress while remaining still. In addition, the body of a snake also resembles those marks with a stylus, brush, or pen that make up our letters. Ornamental alphabets of the ancient Celts and others were often made up of intertwined serpents. It could even be that the tracks of a snake in sand helped to inspire the invention of the alphabet. The manner in which snakes curl up in a ball has made people associate them with the sun. ~ Boria Sax

Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One ~ Jared Diamond

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat. ~ Norman Lock

I thought I'd go home and reread Sue Grafton. It's been a while since I last read the one about the topless dancer who gets poison injected into one of her implants."
"'D' Is For Cup."
"Right. Bern, you know what I wish? I wish she didn't have to stop at twenty-six. When the alphabet's used up, what happens to Kinsey?"
"Are you kidding? She goes straight into doublé letters. 'AA' Is For drunks, 'BB' Is For Gun, 'CC' Is For Rider. There was a whole list in Publishers Weekly a few months back. 'PP' Is For Golden Showers, 'ZZ' Is For Topp- I can't remember them all, but it looks as though she can go on forever."
"Bern, that's wonderful news."
"You'll be reading about Kinsey fifty years from now," I told her. "'AAA' Is for Motorists, 'MMM' Is for Scotch Tape. You'll never have to stop. ~ Lawrence Block

Abyssinias
"I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: A huge four-footed limestone form
Sits in the desert, sinking in the sand.
Its whiskered face, though marred by wind and storm,
Still flaunts the dainty ears, the collar band
And feline traits the sculptor well portrayed:
The bearing of a born aristocrat,
The stubborn will no mortal can dissuade.
And on its base, in long-dead alphabets,
These words are set: "Reward for missing cat!
His name is Abyssinias, pet of pets;
I, Ozymandias, will a fortune pay
For his return. he heard me speak of vets
O foolish King! And so he ran away. ~ Henry N. Beard