Idioms And Quotes

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?) ~ Jodi Picoult

The devil is in the detail" is an idiom that refers to a catch or mysterious element hidden in the details. It derives from "God is in the detail" attributed to German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). Earlier on Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) said "Le bon Dieu est dans le detail." Meaning that things seem simple at first but are more complex or require more time and effort than expected. The earlier idea is that details are important; whatever one does should be done thoroughly. ~ Gustave Flaubert

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. ~ George Orwell

Then why do they come?"
Buonarroti shrugged his shoulders.
"Because things are in such a bad way in their homeland, they're ready to flee into a black hole in space, to a concentration camp, to the Sargasso Sea of international criminal brigands."
"Between the devil and the deep blue sea," said the new consul, demonstrating his knowledge of international idioms. ~ Vladimir Lorchenkov

The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music. ~ George Crumb

From the time of the North Briton of the unprincipled Wilkes , a notion has been entertained that the moral spine in Scotland is more flexible than in England. The truth however is, that an elementary difference exists in the public feelings of the two nations quite as great as in the idioms of their respective dialects. The English are a justice-loving people, according to charter and statute; the Scotch are a wrong-resenting race, according to right and feeling: and the character of liberty among them takes its aspect from that peculiarity. ~ John Galt

Most historians accept that Egypt was a cradle of civilization, and that many cultural idioms and traditions come from there. What has yet to be understood, however, is the manner in which Egypt inherited its cultural elements from the lands of the North-West. This fact is not known today because of the threat it poses to Rome and London, the Vatican and Crown, and to all those who have profited from the suppression of knowledge. ~ Michael Tsarion

The student, balancing between the deep knowledge of the specialist and the broad curiosity of the generalist, must develop, largely on their own, their capacity to be conscious of past and emerging idioms, to see their own work in the context of developing styles, and – most difficult of all – to identify how their own personal style can co-exist with the restrictions of utility and the conventions of genre. ~ Gerry Leonidas

If we just see life as we think it is and we perceive things only from our own tapered point of view and don't learn the idioms of the others, life is doomed to remain a misconstruction. ("Waiting for the smoke signals") ~ Erik Pevernagie

A good writer is likely to know and use, or find out and use, the words for common architectural features, like "lintel," "newel post," "corbelling," "abutment," and the concrete or stone "hems" alongisde the steps leading up into churches or public buildings; the names of carpenters' or pumbers' tools, artists' materials, or whatever furniture, implements, or processes his characters work with; and the names of common household items, including those we do not usually hear named, often as we use them. Above all, the writer should stretch his vocabulary of ordinary words and idioms--words and idioms he sees all the time and knows how to use but never uses. I mean here not language that smells of the lamp but relatively common verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The serious-mined way to vocabulary is to read through a dictionary, making lists of all the common words one happens never to use. And of course the really serious-minded way is to study languages--learn Greek, Latin, and one or two modern languages. Among writers of the first rank one can name very few who were not or are not fluent in at least two. Tolstoy, who spoke Russian, French, and English easily, and other languages and dialects with more difficulty, studied Greek in his forties. ~ John Gardner

I love you," he writes again and again. "I can't bear to live without you. I'm counting the minutes until I see you." The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less cliched. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe. ~ Christina Baker Kline

[We] cannot and should not expect to rediscover the full body of ancient wisdom by studying dusty monuments and myths full of idioms and subtle references understood only by those who lived at the time. The perennial wisdom requires each individual and age to discover it anew in external mathematics, expressing it in ways and symbols suitable for those times and cultures. ~ Michael S. Schneider

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms. ~ John Millington Synge

Beaumont specifically pointed out that the cultural elements and idioms regarded as "Egyptian" could not have originated in the land of the Nile. This single fact is inviolate and cannot be denied. It is obvious to those who have taken the time to study the subject, that the Egyptian civilization was transplanted by Western adepts and elders. ~ Michael Tsarion

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage. ~ Lester Bangs

March brought the news of Frederick's marriage. He and Dolores wrote; she in Spanish-English, as was but natural, and he with little turns and inversions of words which proved how far the idioms of his bride's country were infecting him. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

We're brainwashed with garbage idioms like "Big girls don't cry". Guys who "cry like a girl" are told to "man up". Or "she's crying like a baby", as if only babies cry, which makes no sense to me, given babies have the fewest problems out of all of us. They don't have mortgages or jury duty, and they get the fun end of the whole birthing situation. The mother is the one who is pushing and bleeding and tearing, and the baby basically just gets to jet down a water slide. I think the whole "crying like a baby" idiom should be reversed: what we should say about babies is "Jesus, that baby is crying like a grown-up! ~ Whitney Cummings

Douglas Thornton [an English Christian missionary to Cairo, Egypt with the Church Missionary Society from 1898-1907] was often more amusing than he tried to be. He had a delightful way of mixing up two kindred proverbs or idioms. Once he told his companions that he always had two strings up his sleeve. They then asked him if he had another card to his bow. Such exchanges enliven heavy committee eetings and create wholesome laughter. ~ J. Oswald Sanders

It is a strange sensation to not be entirely at home in either language. I am more comfortable in English, but Eric says that he can still tell I am not a native speaker-- Your idioms are always a little off and you say close for everything. Close the lights, the TV, the oven. You say close when you really mean turn off.

Because in Chinese, there is only one word for it. Guan. ~ Weike Wang

The things we take for granted. The things we never feel we'll lose. Not missing the water until the well runs dry, and hundreds more tired idioms and metaphors to build monument to the fact that I was drinking in every detail of Dominic's body like the precious thing it was, quenching the thirst of years with visions of flesh and beauty. It was impossible to believe, suddenly, that I had ever known beauty and excitement before. ~ Vee Hoffman

Ouma Nella's quotes p 144 -146
"Man, if you don't know where you going, any road will bring you there."
"It don't matter how far a river run. It never forget where it come from. That is all that is important."
"No matter if it's wet or dry," she grunt. "As long as you keep a green branch in your heart, there will always be a bird that come to sing in it."
"It's no use crying in the rain, my child, because no one will see your tears.
"Don't think you can climb two trees at the same time just because you got two legs."
"Ouma Nella, where am I not?"
"But you're right here with me, Philida. So there's many places where you're not."
"Tell me where those places are. I got to know. So I can go and look for myself. ~ Andre Brink

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature's seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions"

Bukusai Ashagawa ~ Bukusai Ashagawa

Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks, and with them a sensitivity to how they mesh and how they clash. This is the elusive "ear" of a skilled writer-the tacit sense of style which every honest stylebook, echoing Wilde, confesses cannot be explicitly taught. Biographers of great authors always try to track down the books their subjects read when they were young, because they know these sources hold the key to their development as writers. ~ Steven Pinker

A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Programming is not all the same. Normal written languages have different rhythms and idioms, right? Well, so do programming languages. The language called C is all harsh imperatives, almost raw computer-speak. The language called Lisp is like one long, looping sentence, full of subclauses, so long in fact that you usually forget what it was even about in the first place. The language called Erlang is just like it sounds: eccentric and Scandinavian. ~ Robin Sloan

My senses, until now starved of any except visual stimuli, were suddenly assailed by a concentrated, if not distilled essence of the sounds and smells of Bosnian country life. Witty, earthy idioms, formidable oaths, and strains of turbofolk music combined with fresh farmyard fragrances to deliver a triple whammy. ~ John Farebrother

It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no. ~ Zora Neale Hurston