Feckless Dictionary Quotes

No doubt she'd thought she was doing him a kindness, urging him to kick up his heels and loosen his too-tight cravat and learn to savor careless pleasures. As though he hadn't heard such urgings before, from every feckless acquaintance made uncomfortable by his example of propriety, or every heedless one who sailed through life never noticing that it was vigilant people, the people standing back from the merriment, who stomped out the fiery raisins dropped by others and kept everything from going up in flames. ~ Cecilia Grant

You three have done quite enough today: all of you and your feckless, treacherous god. ~ Janet Morris

You weasel, good-for-nothing, scumbag, swine,
sleazebag, scumbucket, scoundrel, son-of-a-bitch!"
In the midst of everything, we all looked at Rosina,
who smiled sheepishly.
"Sorry. I was reading the Dictionary the other day."
I stared at her with incomprehension. ~ Kelly Batten

Larousse Gastronomique is a veritable dictionary of cooking terms for the French kitchen. If a chef were allowed only one book, this would have to be it. ~ Mario Batali

Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example ~ Robert Lane Greene

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. ~ Steven Wright

Sometimes words just don't get you there ... don't let you say all the stuff from deep in your heart, stuff that no dictionary has a name for. ~ Bill Condon

I would like a dictionary though. A dictionary contains all the books ever written and all the books that will ever be written. That's something isn't it? The words aren't in the right order, of course, but it's still something. ~ Kevin Brooks

In fact," I add, "if George Clooney is ever accepted into the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb, that activity is immediately getting added to my bucket list. "As in, 'Have you ever been George Clooneyed?'" Oliver asks. "Exactly. 'We went for a walk, and then George Clooneyed until around two. Good night. ~ Christina Lauren

Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through the dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric,' a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation,' the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a 'cursory' journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the 'hieroglyph' of his displeasure. ~ Ian McEwan

For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways. ~ W. H. Auden

The problem with the alphabet is that it bears no relation to anything at all, and when words are arranged alphabetically they are uselessly separated. In the OED, for example, aardvarks are 19 volumes away from the zoo, yachts are 18 volumes from the beach, and wine is 17 volumes from the nearest corkscrew. ~ Mark Forsyth

Sound is the vocabulary of nature ... noises are as well articulated as the words in a dictionary ... Opposing the world of sound is the world of music. ~ Pierre Schaeffer

Cantona's expression speaking the whole French dictionary without saying a word. ~ Barry Davies

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

I decide that sometimes definitions are wrong. Even if they're written in a dictionary. Identities aren't always separate and distinct. Sometimes they ARE wrapped up with others. Sometimes, for a few minutes, maybe they can even be shared. And if I am ever fortunate enough to return to Mr. Bender's garden, I wonder if the birds will see that piece of him that is wrapped up in me. ~ Mary E. Pearson

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive. ~ Anthony Burgess

She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

One's freedom is one's love and one's love
is one's undoing, it's all in the dictionary... ~ Duncan McNaughton

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

I didn't like Dali: now, like you, I do. Like you, I began to drink my Coke with a pinch of salt . Like you, I stopped bothering about ironed clothes. Like you, I sit with a dictionary while reading the papers. Like you, I sit on the compound wall after a bath. ~ Sachin Kundalkar

We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect. ~ Mervyn Peake

Zenosyne.

It's actually just after you're born that life flashes before your eyes.

Entire aeons are lived in those first few months when you feel inseparable from the world itself, with nothing to do but watch it passing by.

At first, time is only felt vicariously, as something that happens to other people. You get used to living in the moment, because there's nowhere else to go. But soon enough, life begins to move, and you learn to move with it. And you take it for granted that you're a different person every year,
Upgraded with a different body...a different future. You run around so fast, the world around you seems to stand still. Until a summer vacation can stretch on for an eternity.
You feel time moving forward, learning its rhythm, but now and then it skips a beat, as if your birthday arrives one day earlier every year.

We should consider the idea that youth is not actually wasted on the young. That their dramas are no more grand than they should be. That their emotions make perfect sense, once you adjust for inflation. For someone going through adolescence, life feels epic and tragic simply because it is: every kink in your day could easily warp the arc of your story. Because each year is worth a little less than the last. And with each birthday we circle back, and cross the same point around the sun. We wish each other many happy returns.

But soon you feel the circle begin to tighten, and you realize i ~ The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows

My father had put these things on the table.
I looked at him standing by the sink. He was washing his hands, splashing water on his face. My mamma left us. My brother, too. And now my feckless, reckless uncle had as well. My pa stayed, though. My pa always stayed.
I looked at him. And saw the sweat stains on his shirt. And his big, scarred hands. And his dirty, weary face. I remembered how, lying in my bed a few nights before, I had looked forward to showing him my uncle's money. To telling him I was leaving.
And I was so ashamed. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

Lucky for me, I could easily rely on one of my favorite tactics: acting like a feckless dipshit. ~ C.N. Crawford

When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response - which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up - contains almost all that needs to be said on this point. ~ Christopher Hitchens

She had a rear end as big as an open dictionary and a bad attitude. ~ Elizabeth McCracken

My teacher's mind and my interest in youth has brought me to some renewed conclusions, and I pass them on earnestly to mature persons who are given to assisting young people off the trail. The dictionary has a word for them: iconoclast. It is defined as, "one who attacks cherished beliefs as shames." What if the cherished beliefs that are attacked along the way are true? What if they are the very beliefs that make these boys and girls worthwhile, promising people they are? What if the foundations of their faith are effectively shaken at this crucial period, and they dangle, with no substantial footings to stand on? ~ Marion D. Hanks

There are responses which originate from joy. Intuition can also mean an instant recognition of a truth, sensing that you are doing the right thing in making a choice or decision even if it is not the immediately obvious option, or an experience of knowing the probable outcome just as it is beginning to unfold. The dictionary defines it as immediate unreasoned perception. ~ Sylvia Clare

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

Glint, glisten, glitter, gleam ...
Tiffany thought a lot about words, in the long hours of churning butte. Onomatopoetic , she'd discovered in the dictionary, meant words that sounded like the thing they were describing, like cuckoo. But she thought there should be a word that sounds like the noise a thing would make if that thing made a noise even though, actually, it doesn't, but would if it did.
Glint, for example. If light made a noise as it reflected off a distant window, it'd go glint!And the light of tinsel, all those little glints chiming together, would make a noise like glitterglitter. Gleam was a clean, smooth noise from a surface that intended to shine all day. And glisten was the soft, almost greasy sound of something rich and oily. ~ Terry Pratchett