Dictionary Quotes

No word has one specific definition.Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life
-Ms.Conyers of Sarah Dessen's Lock and Key ~ Sarah Dessen

If you're looking for sympathy, you'll find it in the dictionary, somewhere between 'shit' and 'syphilis'. ~ Etienne

In English-speaking countries, the connection between heresy and homosexuality is expressed through the use of a single word to denote both concepts: buggery ... Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (Third Edition) defines "buggery" as "heresy, sodomy. ~ Thomas Szasz

I am an unmarried man, as opposed to a single man. A bachelor, according to the dictionary, is a man who has never been married. An unmarried man is not married at the moment. Many of these terms have fallen into disuse. ~ Raymond Burr

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests. ~ Alice Sebold

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Now a Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as descended from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary; but you and I know what a Jew is - One Who Killed Our Lord. And although there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, it seems that those who neither have the actions nor the gait of Christians, pagan or not, will bust us out, unrelenting dues, for another deuce. ~ Lenny Bruce

Before you are admitted to British citizenship you are not even considered a natural human being.
I looked up the word natural (na'tural) in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary (p. 251); it says: Of or according to or provided by nature, physically existing, innate, instinctive, normal, not miraculous or spiritual or artificial or conventional.... Note that before you obtain British citizenship, they simply doubt that you are provided by nature. ~ George Mikes

Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) records that: The Welch are said to be so remarkably fond of cheese, that in cases of difficulty their midwives apply a piece of toasted cheese to the janua vita [gates of life] to attract and entice the young Taffy, who on smelling it makes most vigorous efforts to come forth. ~ Mark Forsyth

In an old time
there was a king as wise as a dictionary. ~ Anne Sexton

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness ... I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory ... Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping ~ Emil Cioran

I never saw a sky like the sky over Dorrego - so vast, so black, with stars in an infinite array of size and brilliance. Maybe it seemed vast because the Earth didn't get in the way: the countryside around Dorrego is flat, there are no big cities to blot out the stars with their own clouds of gas, their artificial starlight. (Cities have a terrible tendency to try and imitate starlight, you only have to see them from a plane.) …
Before Dorrego, I had always thought of the sky as a black screen on which a handful of scattered stars twinkled vaguely, but were no more enthralling than the ceiling of the Cine Opera. Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for 'infinite'; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren't looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man's need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego. ~ Marcelo Figueras

It wasn't much to most kids. I mean, I was basically getting recognized for being straight dogshit, ignoring that I was straight dogshit, and doing anything in my power just to maintain my dogshittiness. I think on Urban Dictionary that's the definition for insanity - or a Michael Bay film. ~ Eddie Huang

Dess rennon vec lesha ackken ash ren lesha dess, kysm eshar. Fegakke ni laegoy." Treska checked her own little dictionary and then smiled as she translated. "You may look upon me as I look upon you, little bird. I am not shy. ~ Zoey Ellis

The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it 'nonsense' if you like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary! ~ Lewis Carroll

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam. ~ Sylvia Plath

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today ... because there's no space for all of them. ~ Erin McKean

The Constitution guarantees the right of the People to have any person they choose assist them in court. This was the first Constitutional right the lawyers' cartel had to scrap. To this end, the Bar Association, through its member judges, interpreted the word "counsel" in the Sixth Amendment to mean "attorney-at-law" (which is, by definition, a member of their cartel). The word counsel can be found in any dictionary, and its primary meaning is not "attorney-at-law." In fact, it means any person who gives advice. ~ Joseph Befumo

The dictionary is a perfect example of overalphabetization, with its harsh rules and every little word neatly in place. It almost makes me want to go on a diet of grapes and waste away to nothing. ~ Steve Martin

My favourite book is my dictionary. It excites me. Each time I open it, the endless possibilities come tumbling out. It's Alice falling into Wonderland. It's an artist's paint box. It's a new day. ~ Stephen Moore

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city. ~ Cornelia Otis Skinner

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

What you mean to me is something out of the ordinary, cause even a whole of a dictionary won't be able to describe it! ~ Andy Flynn

I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank. ~ Eddie Cantor

None other than the Skeptic's Dictionary points out an obvious and troubling irony: "When spoken by schizophrenics, glossolalia is recognized as gibberish. In charismatic Christian communities glossolalia is sacred and referred to as 'speaking in tongues' or having 'the gift of tongues. ~ John F. MacArthur Jr.

I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time, I thought the greatest word was 'jejune' and I would throw it into every piece because something about it appealed to me. ~ Tom Wolfe

My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached "China," thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that "china" is Cockney rhyming slang for "mate." People say "my old china," meaning "my old mate," because "china plate" rhymes with "mate. ~ China Mieville

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true. ~ Samuel Johnson

If you look in the dictionary under 'white trash' there's a picture of my family."
from BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, p 37 ~ Michael Flynn

(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.
(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
(c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of 'most complicated book': the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.
(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: 'Einstein is a fool', or 'Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.' Everyone is ~ Paulo Coelho

Where in a medical dictionary does it say a woman cannot handle such things? What is a man's soul made of that a woman's is not? I had no idea my innards were composed of cotton and kittens, while yours are filled with steel and steam-driven parts. ~ Kerri Maniscalco

Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact. ~ Henry Rollins

I opened the coffin.
I was surprised again, although again I shouldn't have been. I was surprised that Dad wasn't there. In my brain I knew he wouldn't be, obviously, but I guess my heart believed something else. Or maybe I was surprised by incredibly empty it was. I felt like I was looking into the dictionary definition of emptiness. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

According to the dictionary, knock has two definitions: "to strike something with a sharp blow," and "to find fault with, a harsh and often petty criticism." Perhaps in human relationships both of these meanings could apply. Almost all men will respond to sincere praise and rebel at harsh and cutting criticisms. ~ Marvin J. Ashton

It strikes me that I need to throw out the dictionary the world gave me about what it means to be a mother, a wife, a person of faith, an artist, and a woman and write my own. ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: "No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English 'religion' or 'religious.' "6 The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India.7 Nor does the Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they meant by faith in a single word or even in a formula, since the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred.8 ~ Karen Armstrong

She said moments like this were like waking up in the middle of the night: You're scared, you're disoriented, and you're completely convinced you're right. But then you stay awake a little longer and you realize things aren't as fearful as they seem."
Excerpt From: David Levithan. "The Lover's Dictionary." iBooks. ~ David Levithan

Misery comes to miser; joy comes to wiser. (A Very Hot Cup of Tea, Empathy)
Juvenile invites, youth tries, adult applies, and the old man dies. (A Straw Man, Empathy)
In everyone, there lives a superhero. (The Medicine Man, Empathy)
Faith is the strongest word in any dictionary. (The Wisdom Beard, Empathy)
I've entered into your feelings; it's your turn now. (Empathy) ~ D.R. Mirror

Pal, if you ever look up the word right in a dictionary, you'll find it's one of the oldest words in the English language. Even so, people have never stopped arguing about what it means. I suspect they always will. ~ Avi

Impossible is in the dictionary of fools ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Fail, it's not in my dictionary. I've got a good dictionary up there and the words 'fail' and 'failure' have been ruled out for years. I don't know what people are talking about who use that word. All I do know is temporary non-success, even if I've got to wait another 20 years for what I'm after, and I try to put that into people, no matter what their object in life. ~ Percy Cerutty

Opinions are not to be learned by rote, like the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a dictionary. They are conclusions to be formed, and formed by each individual in the sacred and free citadel of the mind, and there enshrined beyond the arm of law to reach, or force to shake; ay! and beyond the right of impertinent curiosity to violate, or presumptuous arrogance to threaten. ~ Frances Wright

Taciturn, adj.
There are days you come home silent. You say words, but you're still silent. I used to bombard you with conversational crowbars, but now I simply let the apartment fall mute. I hear you in the room
turning on music, typing on the keys, getting up for a drink, shifting in your chair. I try to have my conversation with those sounds. ~ David Levithan

Duden Dictionary Meaning #4. Wort - Word: A meaningful unit of language / a promise / a short remark, statement, or conversation. Related words: term, name, expession. ~ Markus Zusak

As a mother, you're the world almanac and the encyclopedia and the dictionary and the Bible, all rolled up together. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Darkness is more than a shade of nightfall. It is a feeling as though there has been an eclipse not only within what should be a vibrant life inside you but in all that is good around you. ~ Andrew Kendall

I'm beginning to think a dictionary would have been a far more advantageous birthday gift for you."
"More advantageous than being eaten alive by a giant, carnivorous bunny? Yes, most things fall in that category, I think. ~ William Ritter

The point,' Ms. Conyers continued, is that no word had one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life. ~ Sarah Dessen

Charientism (n.) A rhetorical term to describe saying a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way.

If I knew how to say disagreeable things in an agreeable fashion I most likely would not be spending most of my time siting alone in a room, reading the dictionary. ~ Ammon Shea

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
(on Ernest Hemingway ~ William Faulkner

Shortcoming shouldn't be in Longman's vocabulary. ~ Natalya Vorobyova

As an artist you're looking for universal triggers. You want it both ways. You want it to have an immediate impact, and you want it to have deep meanings as well. I'm striving for both. But I hate it when people write things that sound like they've swallowed a f ... dictionary. ~ Damien Hirst

That right there, what just happened, is called attraction. A-trak-shee-un. Look it up in the dictionary. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

Duden Dictionary Meaning #2
Verzeihung - Forgiveness: to stop feeling anger, animosity, or resentment. ~ Markus Zusak

And Mamma was still asleep. I called it the sleeping sickness because coma is the ugliest word in the entire universe. If I could, I'd erase it from the dictionary, but Old Webster would probably hunt me down. ~ Kimberley Griffiths Little

The word "can't" should be erased from the dictionary. It is an excuse for I don't want to even try. ~ J.M. Brown

I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it. ~ Steven Wright

The word 'Sudra' which means 'Son of prostitute' should not find a place even in the history hereafter. We will not allow it to find a place in the dictionary or encycl ~ Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

All the words you need are to be found in the dictionary. All you have to do is put them in the right order. ~ Emma Darcy

I'm not sure what to call 'Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary.' Nonfiction? Movie/toy fiction? But it is any Lego/'Star Wars' kid's dream. Call it spectacular. ~ Jon Scieszka

From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary of phonetic spellings. ~ Fran Ross

I never understood whether the word 'amnesty' is correct or not. Maybe I am not very intelligent but I checked the dictionary to find the meaning. ~ Kapil Dev

Reckless," he said. "You know, when I first showed up at the Institute, Alec called me reckless so many times that I went and looked it up in the dictionary ~ Cassandra Clare

The word power typically signifies a capacity for action. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us power lies in an 'ability to do or effect something or anything, or to act upon a person or thing'. The person who has power may influence the material or social environment, generally on the basis of possessing high-tech weapons, money, oil, superior intelligence or large muscles. In war, I am powerful because I can blow up your city walls or drop bombs on your airfields. In the financial world, I am powerful because I can buy up your shares and invade your markets. In boxing, I am ,ore powerful because my punches outwit and exhaust yours. But in love, this issue appears to depend on a far more passive, negative definition; instead of looking at power as a capacity to do something, one may come to think of it as the capacity to do nothing. ~ Alain De Botton

Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled "words" two ways on the title page. ~ Bill Bryson

You can look up keening in the dictionary, but you don't know what it means until you hear somebody having their heart ripped out. ~ Bryn Greenwood

I started by looking everything up in a Star Trek dictionary so I knew what I was talking about, but you can't do that because they talk in circles, and half of it doesn't make sense, so you'll just end up driving yourself more insane. ~ Jeri Ryan

I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don't allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday. ~ Maya Angelou

Get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there. p. 591 ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

To observe the world carefully, to write a lot and often, on a schedule if necessary, to use the dictionary a lot, to look up word origins, to analyze closely the work of writers you admire, to read not only contemporaries but writers of the past, to learn at least one foreign language, to live an interesting life outside of writing. ~ Lydia Davis

I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side. ~ Mark Twain

Don't let a dictionary define your life. Whatever friend means to you, that is the correct definition. Whatever joy and peace means to you, that is the correct definition. ~ Sydney Wilhelmy

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.
The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. ~ Richard Dawkins

The dictionary is like a time capsule of all of human thinking ever since words began to be written down. And exploring where words have come from can increase your understanding of the words themselves and expand your understanding of how to use the words, and all of this change happens in your thinking when you read the words. ~ Andrew Clements

I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'. ~ Harlan Ellison

On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It's the neighborhood of colleges and convents. ~ Patrick Modiano

Father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my ~ Alice Sebold

Charles Peirce wrote the definition of University in the Century Dictionary. He called it an institution for purposes of study. They wrote to him that their notion had been that a university was an institution for instruction. He wrote back that if they had any such notion they were grievously mistaken, that a university had not and never had had anything to do with instruction and that until we got over this idea we should not have any university in this country. ~ Max Harold Fisch

According to the Cambridge dictionary, an alpha male is the most powerful and most successful in any group; every man wants to be the male being described in this definition. ~ Ryan King

As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter. That seemed odd. As ~ M.L. Stedman

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next. ~ Grace Paley

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn't know, she would always look it up in the dictionary. ~ Geraldine McCaughrean

At the stomp of boots on grass, I ease my eyes open. Aithinne leans down with a grin. "You didn't die. See? I told you it was easy." She offers me a hand and I take it, rising unsteadily to my feet.

"I've been bitten by some demonic woodland creature. My legs have been shredded by razor-sharp trees. We almost died. Easy? I'm getting you a damn dictionary."

I inspect my bleeding arm. The cut bisects five of the marks Lonnrach made, and I feel inexplicably proud of that. Good. Replace the old, bad memories with new badges. Start over.

"A dictionary," she repeats. "Is that a type of dessert?"

For the love of - "It's a type of book that explains the meaning of words."

"Oh. That sounds terribly dull. I was really hoping for dessert."

I'm hoping to end this rescue with my sanity intact. ~ Elizabeth May

The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. work is the key to success, and hard work can help you accomplish anything. ~ Vince Lombardi Jr.

Fear
My dictionary informs me that the word "fear" comes from the Old English word faer, which is related to the word faerie and means to cast enchantments. Faerie, or fairy, has roots in the word fae or fay, meaning of the Fates, or fate, which in turn is linked to faith, derived from the Latin word meaning to trust ...
He appeared, when I fist sumoned him, tall and stooped, big, hooded, and draped in mists and swathes of gray, from pale to almost black. There was a line between him and me. He walked over the line and stood just behind my left shoulder. He's there now. He stoops and whispers in my ear, "Watch out!" "Don't trust what you're hearing," "Slow down the car down," "Trust the omens!" He is Fear. He warns me of probable danger, and I listen to him because he is always correct.
Fear is your ally! It is your instinct to survive. Worry is a useless thing, it achieves nothing. Resolution is the key to success. ~ Ly De Angeles

I assume you're aware of the definition of the word hypocrite? Because I'm thinking if we looked it up in the dictionary, your picture would be right next to it. ~ Jt Geissigner

The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one - at least, no male person - ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from HER. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker's Almanack. You can put even the Oxford Dictionary to evil purposes by looking up words like - and - . ~ George Orwell

Fawcett also shared with me a passion for words and we would trawl the dictionary together and simply howl and wriggle with delight at the existence of such splendours as 'strobile' and 'magniloquent', daring and double-daring each other to use them to masters in lessons without giggling. 'Strobile' was a tricky one to insert naturally into conversation, since it means a kind of fir-cone, but magniloquent I did manage.

I, being I, went always that little bit too far of course. There was one master who had berated me in a lesson for some tautology or other. He, as what human being wouldn't when confronted with a lippy verbal show-off like me, delighted in seizing on opportunities to put me down. He was not, however, an English teacher, nor was he necessarily the brightest man in the world.

'So, Fry. "A lemon yellow colour" is precipitated in your test tube is it? I think you will find, Fry, that we all know that lemons are yellow and that yellow is a colour. Try not to use thee words where one will do. Hm?'

I smarted under this, but got my revenge a week or so later.

'Well, Fry? It's a simple enough question. What is titration?'

'Well, sir…, it's a process whereby…'

'Come on, come on. Either you know or you don't.'

'Sorry sir, I am anxious to avoid pleonasm, but I think…'

'Anxious to avoid what?'

'Pleonasm, sir.'

'And what do you mean by that?'

'I'm sorry, s ~ Stephen Fry

The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary ~ Dave Kellett

I'm sure people tell you this constantly, but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary, there would be a picture of you." She cracked up a bit and said, "People never tell me that." "I bet they do." She cracked up a bit more. "They don't." "Then you hang out with the wrong people." "You might be right about that." "Because you're incredibly beautiful. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

She would read anything from a dictionary to a treatise on turnips. Print fascinated her, dazed her, made her good for nothing...Kylie Tennant ~ Kylie Tennant

To dispatch one's friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one's own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Commonplace, adj.
... But then I'll walk into the bathroom and find you've forgotten to put the cap back on the toothpaste again, and it will be this splinter that I just keep stepping on. ~ David Levithan

Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Nothing is better for "spiritual advancement" & the detachment of the flesh than a close reading of the "Erotic Dictionary. ~ Remy De Gourmont

Look up the word role in the dictionary and you'll see it means playing a part. That's why I call myself a real model. ~ Shaquille O'Neal

To the night version of her (mother) I owe free-floating anxiety. I am no longer a child in an unsafe home, but anxiety became habit. My brain is conditioned. I worry. I recheck everything obsessively. Is the seat belt fastened, are the reservations correct, is my passport in my purse? Have I done something wrong? Have I said something wrong? I'm sorry - whatever happened must be my fault. Is everyone all right, and if they aren't, how can I step in? That brilliant serenity prayer: God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. To all the children of alcoholics I want to say, Good luck with that. If I don't do it myself, it won't get done (this belief is often rewarded in this increasingly incompetent world). Also, I panic easily. I am not the person you want sitting in the exit row of an airplane. And distrust. Just in general, distrust. Irony.
Irony, according to the dictionary, is the use of comedy to distance oneself from emotion. I developed it as a child lickety-split. Irony was armor, a way to stick it to Mom. You think you can get me? Come on, shoot me, aim that arrow straight at my heart. It can't make a dent because I'm wearing irony. ~ Delia Ephron

The answer lies in the Preface, where he explains, 'Obsolete words are admitted, when they are found in authors not obsolete, or when they have any force or beauty that may deserve revival.'ag Significantly, the epigraph to the finished Dictionary is a passage on this very theme from the second of Horace's Epistles; it celebrates the efforts of the prudent critic who weeds out undignified language and rehabilitates forgotten but elegant words. ~ Henry Hitchings