Hyperbole Quotes

The cripple gave him a look. 'I remember that just yesterday you told me I was a cretin and a fool and a disgrace to the memory of my ancestors.'
'Academic hyperbole.' Morg dismissed the complaint with the wave of one hand.'It was merely enthusiastic encouragement, I assure you.'
'Perhaps overenthusiastic would be a more accurate description' muttered the cripple. ~ Karen Miller

I look at him and my body reacts in a way that it never has before, even in the throes of passion. I look at him and I start aching so deep inside it takes all I can to think, to breathe, to speak. He's like the brightest flame and it takes everything in me to resist its call.

I know that if I give in, I'll get burned so deeply, there might be nothing left once I come out the other side.

But, god, I want to step into that flame. ~ D.L. Hess

Some scholars attribute the decline in nicknaming to the evolutionary process that turned folk heroes into entrepreneurs. The truth is: George Herman Ruth, the namely-est guy ever, exhausted our supply of hyperbole. ~ Jane Leavy

Don't tell me Kinshasa, the poorest city in the poorest country in the world, a place where the average per capita income is one goat bell, two bootleg Michael Jackson cassette tapes, and three sips of potable water per year, thinks we're too poor to associate with. ~ Paul Beatty

Reading has shaped me, guided me, reflected me and helped me understand and connect with, and this is not hyperbole, HUMANITY. ~ Annie Spence

Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe. ~ Glenn Greenwald

Indeed ethnography and theory resemble nothing so much as the two arcs
of a hyperbola, which cast their beams in opposite directions, lighting up the
surfaces, respectively, of mind and world. They are back to back, and darkness
reigns between them. But what if each arc were to reverse its orientation, so as to
embrace the other in an encompassing, brightly illuminated ellipse? We would
then have neither ethnography nor theory, nor even a compound of both. What
we would have is an undivided, interstitial field of anthropology. If ethnographic
theory is the hyperbola, anthropology is the ellipse. For ethnography, when it
turns, is no longer ethnography but the educational correspondences of real life.
And theory, when it turns, is no longer theory, but an imagination nourished by
its observational engagements with the world. The rupture between reality and
imagination - the one annexed to fact, the other to theory - has been the source
of much havoc in the history of consciousness. It needs to be repaired. It is surely
the task of anthropology, before all else, to repair it. In calling a halt to the proliferation
of ethnography, I am not asking for more theory. My plea is for a return
to anthropology. ~ Tim Ingold

Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety. ~ Trevor Nunn

Oh, sorry. My excitement must be clouding my ability to judge comedic hyperbole. ~ Daniel Palladino

I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I don't know why they'd decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture.
It could rain in a room this big. ~ Hugh Laurie

I know that the vitriol and hyperbole that exists online, and the anonymity, can be deadly because it's cloaked in negativity and it's brutal sometimes. ~ Adrian Pasdar

Of course on air I use occasional hyperbole to tell a story. ~ Adam Carolla

Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies. ~ George Will

For she soars with the wildest hyperbole when not tagging after the most pedestrian dictum. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Going to marry her? Impossible! You mean a part of her; he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy but trigamy; there is enough of her to furnish wives for the whole parish. One man marry her! - it is monstrous! You might people a colony with her; or give an assembly with her; or perhaps take your morning's walk round her, always provided there were frequent resting places, and you were in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half way and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her; in short, you might do anything but marry her! ~ Sydney Smith

But when I accept the call of creative passion, I am a bold stroke of vermilion, a renegade hyperbole, or the wild fury of jazz violin. The world is a canvas to explore, a blank page to fill, and an arpeggio of waiting experiences. This moving masterpiece called "life" becomes intoxicating when it's lived as if it were art. ~ Jill Badonsky

In How Fiction Works, James Wood says,

A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction - from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to "know" them; . . . they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us.
Wood is correct, in part, but the ongoing question of character likability leaves the impression that what we're looking for in fiction is an ideal world where people behave in ideal ways. The question suggests that characters should be reflections not of us, but of our better selves.
Wood also says, "There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character." I can attest to this difficulty, though with perhaps less hyperbole. I have, indeed, found several other tasks harder over the years. Regardless, characters are hard to create because we need to develop people who are interesting enough to hold a reader's attention. We need to ensure that they are some measure of credible. We need to make them distinct from ourselves (and, in the best of all words, from those in our lives, unless of course there is a need to settle scores). Somehow they need to be well developed enough to carry a plot, or carry a narrative without a plot, or endure the tribulations we writers tend to throw at them with alacrity. It's no wonde ~ Roxane Gay

Perhaps MacKinnon should reflect on these suggestions that the censorship issue is not so simple-minded, so transparently gender-against-gender, as she insists. She should stop calling names long enough to ask whether personal sensationalism, hyperbole, and bad arguments are really what the cause of sexual equality now needs. ~ Ronald Dworkin

But I would not say a word until I could set aside all I know or believe about nations, war, leaders, the governed and the ungovernable; all I suspect about armor and entrails. First I would freshen my tongue, abandon sentences crafted to know evil--wanton or studied; explosive or quietly sinister; whether born of a sated appetite or hunger; of vengeance or the simple compulsion to stand up before falling down. I would purge my language of hyperbole, of its eagerness to analyze the levels of wickedness; ranking them, calculating their higher or lower status among others of its kind.
Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts. ... I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say--no words stronger than steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become.
And I have nothing to give either--except this gesture, this thread thrown between your humanity and mine: I want to hold you in my arms and as your soul got shot out of its box of flesh to understand as you have done, the wit of eternity; it's gift of unhinged release through the darkness of its knell. ~ Toni Morrison

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

Hyperbole is the common currency of political debate. ~ Raul Ramos Y Sanchez

He loved her in a subtle kind of way. It wasn't the kind of love you see in movies, with swelling music and giant gestures and running through the streets to catch a departing train. It wasn't the kind of love that Byron or Shakespeare wrote about, with flowery language and hyperbole and iambic pentameter. It was still and deep, like water that you might mistake for shallow if you just watched the surface. It was entirely his, not dependent on her own feelings for him, and it would still be there whether she, or him, or everyone else on the world disappeared. It was a subtle kind of love, but it was true. ~ Jake Christie

There's nothing worse than a smartass who pretends not to understand hyperbole. ~ Steven Brust

I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer. ~ Marshall McLuhan

In the past, as now, [Hollywood] was a stamping ground for tastelessness, violence, and hyperbole, but once upon a time it turned out a product which sweetened the flavor of life all over the world. ~ Anita Loos

There have been times when I felt that I might die of loneliness. People sometimes say they might die of boredom, that they're dying for a cup of tea, but for me, dying of loneliness is not a hyperbole. When I feel like that, my head drops and my shoulders slump and I ache, I physically ache, for human contact - I truly feel that I might tumble to the ground and pass away if someone doesn't hold me, touch me. I don't mean a lover - this recent madness aside, I had long since given up on any notion that another person might love me that way - but simply a human being. The scalp massage at the hairdresser, the flu jab I had last winter - the only time I experience touch is from people whom I am paying, and they are almost wearing disposable gloves at the time. I'm merely stating the facts. ~ Gail Honeyman

Any time you make an analogy to horrific people in history, Mussolini or Hitler, people say, 'Oh, you're exaggerating, you're talking about, it's hyperbole.' Maybe it is ... But I would say is that if you are not concerned that democracy could produce bad people, I don't think you're really thinking this through too much. ~ Rand Paul

This is not hyperbole. It is possible for the average professor to have been taught by leftists, grown up in a left-leaning city, read only left-leaning books, entertained by leftists in pop culture and became a professor without holding a job outside academia. How can we expect these professors to adequately explain what people who oppose them believe? ~ Lee Doren

There is less gray area there, less doubt. There is a security in being some thing all the way. Our culture, too, encourages this way of being - exaggeration, for example, is the key to advertising success in the United States. But hyperbole also seems a big part of Iranian culture, as well. ~ Porochista Khakpour

Satellites can see your thoughts, but not through rock,' is like something they might say. In John William's case, it was conscious hyperbole and therefore commentary. At one level, it was reefer-inspired. It was partly for fun. It was other things, too-but not derangement. I give no credence to the interpretation, and I knew him better than anybody. ~ David Guterson

Sir John's confidence in his own judgment rose with this animated praise, and he set off directly for the cottage to tell the Miss Dashwoods of the Miss Steeles' arrival, and to assure them of their being the sweetest girls in the world. From such commendation as this, however, there was not much to be learned; Elinor well knew that the sweetest girls in the world were to be met with in every part of England, under every possible variation of form, face, temper and understanding. ~ Jane Austen

Cake is the only thing that matters. ~ Allie Brosh

Hyperbole has been part of elections since the days of John Adams, and there's nobody better than Joe Biden to give us a little hyperbole, as we all know. ~ Stephen Pagliuca

Love songs are nothing without exaggeration. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

(She catches sight of herself in the mirror. Go in fear of hyperbole) ~ Ann Lauterbach

I live in a constant state of hyperbole. ~ Eden Sher

Remember what he said about my picture: I'm lovely and it made him do double cartwheels. Remember also that he's prone to hyperbole, so don't take everything he says literally. ~ Juliet Ayres

Hyperbole is an excellent red flag on the route to real wisdom. ~ Caroline Webb

There is no need for hyperbole. I did NOT dump you. I peeled your mask off like a banana peel, did not like what was inside, and tossed it in the trash. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Love's language is hyperbole, but whispered,
sibilant similes and promises sotto voce.
It's easy to imagine you've misheard, ~ Richard Hoffman

The speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but love. ~ Francis Bacon

In the distance, I see a frightful storm brewing in the form of un-tethered government debt. I choose the words -frightful storm' - deliberately to avoid hyperbole. Unless we take steps to deal with it, the long-term fiscal situation of the federal government will be unimaginably more devastating to our economic prosperity than the subprime debacle and the recent debauching of credit markets that we are working right now so hard to correct. ~ Richard W. Fisher

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole. ~ Ron Chernow

She knew she oughtn't to scold but she couldn't bear such a hyperbole. People couldn't live without food and air or shelter and money. Romantic love was an extra, nice if it came along, but definitely superfluous to the main requirements of existence. ~ Margot Livesey

The feminist movement as we have come to know it in recent decades is fundamentally a "con." ... As it is considered treasonous to criticise a sister feminist, no standards of accuracy or honesty are ever enforced. Hyperbole and deceit thus become the formula for success, "peer review" playing no role in reining in misinformation. Any would-be feminist who raises scholarly objections to the rampant misinformation is branded an 'enemy of women' and is drummed out of the movement. ~ Robert Sheaffer

this integration of Jefferson and Jesus is in many ways how members of the evangelical right can oppose abortion yet ignore the needs of disenfranchised members of society, how they can rage against sexual revolutions and offer little critique on economic greed or mass consumption, and how they can keep labor unions and government in check while not doing the same to Wall Street, insurance companies, and other big American businesses. Of course, much of today's evangelical political doctrine has become so radical, so driven by fear and hyperbole that it's more or less a parody of the doctrines of Thomas Jefferson and Jesus, a culture where the poor in spirit are not blessed, they are marginalized and expected to care for themselves. ~ Matthew Paul Turner

The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
[…]
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the 'true spirit' of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only ~ Mark Fisher

Chefs are fond of hyperbole, so they can certainly talk that way. But on the whole, I think they probably have a more open mind than most people. ~ Anthony Bourdain

We need to replace hyperbole with a reasonable, informed discussion about how to reinvent the federal budget with more transparency and better accountability. ~ Mike Quigley

I'll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness. ~ Frances Mayes

It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet. ~ Lytton Strachey

Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

There is a place for hyperbole and I believe it's the back jacket of books ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The Americans are just more enthusiastic and more likely to engage in hyperbole. ~ John Cleese

Actually, no," Shallan said. "I'm just fond of hyperbole."
"I'm not," he said. "It's a real bastard to spell"
"Kabsal! ~ Brandon Sanderson

I never thought people actually woke up the way I did that morning. I always figured it was hyperbole and massive overcompensation to say that you woke up grinning, woke up in a state of contentment and excitement for the smallest things. Even while I was in love formerly, it seemed more like a comfortable thing rather than a giddy, overwhelming happiness. Realize, then, that I had never been joined in a mutual state of infatuation with someone else. My infatuations tended to be unrequited, accompanied by a sense of muted sadness. I sat up at 7:00a.m. without even waiting for the alarm, and kept still there, smiling, looking at nothing and going over yesterday's conversations, the fevered symphony of emotion ringing forever in my ears.
I fell back and actually laughed to myself, reaching for my glasses to slide them on as I stretched out my back comfortably in a lazy, half-waking state.
You are in love. ~ Vee Hoffman

Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe. The agency is devoted to one overarching mission: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp. ~ Glenn Greenwald

With usenet gone, we just don't teach our kids entertainment-level hyperbole any more. ~ Paul Vixie

This is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. ~ David Foster Wallace

I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes. ~ John Legend

Am I not allowed to speak in hyperbole?"
"Only," he said, a bit too smoothly, "if you are talking about me."
Ellie's face slid into a smirk. "Oh, Charles," she exclaimed, "I feel as if we have known each other for a million years." Her tone grew more ironic. "I am that weary of your company. ~ Julia Quinn

I have much power. In the days to come I will grow stronger, and I would hate for you to find yourself on the wrong side of that which cannot be avoided." "Hyperbole and mystic aggrandizement, you mean? ~ Katie MacAlister

It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?" when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE. ~ Philip Roth

It started with a dose of mercury bichloride, then a measure of chloroform. Several tumblers of alcohol followed, and then a lead sash weight to the man's head. It finished with picture wire pulled tight around the victim's neck. To such a rare case, the word overkill could be applied without hyperbole. The complicated murder of Albert Snyder put the men of the medical examiner's office - especially Alexander Gettler - on public display. It rapidly became a very public event, the story of the spring for tabloid newspapers and their sensation-loving readers. ~ Anonymous

There has always been something less than wholesome about New Labour. But Blair for a long time had an easy ride. There was the whopping majority. There was the relief that the Tories were finally gone. There was the grand hyperbole. ~ Martin Jacques

HYPERBOLE IS THE BEST THING EVER! ~ Eileen Wilks

My statement to Harris that his book contains much to admire is specious hyperbole. In The End of Faith, Harris rails against religious fundamentalism, which seems obvious, as well as against religious moderates, which seems intolerant. ~ Nick Flynn

Is the president purposefully using propaganda and hyperbole to garner the American public for support? ~ Sean Hannity

Chapter 4,'Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief', uses Zizek's (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritualistic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organised abuse has come to public attention primarily as a subject of ridicule within the highly partisan writings of journalists, academics and activists aligned with advocacy groups for people accused of sexual abuse. Whilst highlighting the pervasive misrepresentations that characterise these accounts, the chapter also implicates media consumers in the production of ignorance and disdain in relation to organised abuse and women's and children's accounts of sexual abuse more generally. ~ Michael Salter

Hyperbole comes easily to us. To find measured prose and even tone in the midst of aching grief was tough. ~ Maithili Rao

One of the most terrifying things that has ever happened to me was watching myself over and over again
thirty-five days in a row
not to return a movie I had rented. Every day, I saw it sitting there on the arm of my couch. And every day, I thought, "I should really do something about that ... " and then I just didn't. ~ Allie Brosh

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but theycan still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. ~ Donald Trump

Instant-doomsday hyperbole caused the world's attention to focus on the hypothetical threat of global warming to the exclusion of environmental menaces that are real, palpable, and awful right now. ~ Gregg Easterbrook

When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because they're suffering from a disease. It's called bull-imia, and it's the regurgitation of patent hyperbole. ~ Anna Quindlen