Inherence Dictionary Quotes

Our town was too big for people to know everything about you, but just small enough to clench down on one defining moment like teeth on prey. Won the spelling bee in fourth grade? You are Dictionary Girl forever. Laughed a little too hard in sixth grade? You will still be the Guy Who Peed His Pants as you walk across the stage to receive your diploma.

And I was the Girl Whose Boyfriend Drowned. ~ Emery Lord

The traditional dictionary definition of the difference is that an alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout, come to, and apologize for it. A junkie will steal your wallet and then help you look for it. But ultimately I think all addictions boil down to just not being able to be with yourself for any long degree of time. ~ Jerry Stahl

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

Bethyl Ann has vomited words like she ate the dictionary. ~ Jennifer Archer

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

The [commercial] strip is marketed with the come-on of comfort (the Comfort Inn) and with the promise of a home on the road, a home where nobody knows your name and they're glad to see you as long as you can pay. The strip lives in the contradiction of the name Home Depot - domesticity on a gargantuan scale. Home - "a person's native place," "at ease," "deep; to the heart," says the dictionary, and Depot, "a storehouse or a 'warehouse.'" (Warehouse of the Heart?) ~ Howard Mansfield

I believe Williams was the only one of us, except perhaps Ronald Tolkien, from whom Lewis learnt any of his thinking. It was Charles Williams who expounded to him the doctrine of co-inherence and the idea that one had power to accept into one's own body the pain of someone else, through Christian love. This was a power...he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim ~ Jocelyn Gibb

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

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

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

In my dictionary, romance is not maudlin, treacly sentiment. It is a curry, spiced with excitement, and humour, and a healthy dollop of cynicism. ~ Loretta Chase

A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses. ~ Lucy Larcom

My pet peeve and my goal in life is to somehow get an adjective for 'integrity' in the dictionary. 'Truthful' doesn't really cover it, or 'genuine.' It should be like 'integritus.' ~ Rashida Jones

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others. ~ Alain De Botton

To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason, the universe, the all, seems to defy definition ... Just as no one in his senses would look for the morning news in a dictionary, no one should use speaking and thinking to find out what cannot be spoken or thought. ~ Alan Watts

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

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

Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Кто уцелел - умрёт, кто мёртв - воспрянет.
И вот потомки, вспомнив старину:
- Где были вы? - Вопрос как громом грянет,
Ответ как громом грянет: - На Дону!

- Что делали? - Да принимали муки,
Потом устали и легли на сон.
И в словаре задумчивые внуки
За словом: «долг» напишут слово: «Дон».

30 марта 1918


Those spared - will die, those fallen - rise from under.
Then come the sons, remembering days far gone: - And where were you? - the words will roll like thunder,
The answer roll like thunder: - On the Don!

- What did you do? - We bore with grief and cruelty,
Then laid us down to sleep, our last strength gone.
And in the dictionary, over Duty,
The grandsons, looking back, will write: the Don. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

I just wish they'd put a new word in the dictionary bigger than love because love just doesn't describe what I feel. ~ John Mayer

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

The Actor, noticing a closed bookshop, dismounted from the horse which he tied to a street lamp. He woke up the bookseller and bought a Spanish grammar and dictionary. He set out again across town marveling at the way that the words of the foreign language were freshly gathered fruits and not old and dry. They touched the senses marvelously, new like young beggars who accost you, not yet words but the every things they designate, happily running naked before being clothed again in abstraction. ~ Georges Limbour

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Swimming in bewilderment, Fiona somehow managed to remain relatively calm while the man who'd starred in her dreams for months sat beside her on the sofa. Relatively calm - in her dictionary - loosely translated to not drooling or humiliating herself. ~ Candis Terry

corgi 1. n. A high class hound, such as those that accompany the Queen. 2. n. A high class hound, such as the one that accompanies Prince Charles. ~ VIZ

BOOK, a four-letter word for truth serum" -Kevin 'Freak' from Freak's Dictionary
"Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick pg 161 ~ Rodman Philbrick

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses. ~ Francine Du Plessix Gray

I love Twitter, and my little corner of it is heavily weighted in favour of women, many of them writers: Caitlin Moran, India Knight, Lauren Laverne, Grace Dent, Deborah Orr, Marina Hyde, Suzanne Moore. I look at that list of names and think, 'Here comes the fun - fun that knows its way around a dictionary.' ~ John Niven

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

The word precipice does not exist in the dictionary of birds! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Any dictionary, no matter how well made, was destined to go out of date. Words were living things. ~ Shion Miura

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

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

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. ~ Kahlil Gibran

What is Life?
(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)
(3) Mrs Woolf: 'Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.'
(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.
(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].
Which?
Mental Cramp. ~ Isaiah Berlin

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

It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell, she was compelled to walk the entire wall, no matter the obstructions in her path (beer cans, branches). This compulsion, applied to other fields, manifested itself as "intelligence." Every unknown word sent her to a dictionary--in search of something like "completion"--and every book led to another book, a process that, of course, could never be completed. This route through early life gave her no small portion of joy, and, indeed, it seemed at first that her desires and her capacities were basically aligned. She wanted to read things--could not resist wanting to read things--and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook for intelligence was in fact only a sort of mutation of the will? ~ Zadie Smith

Since you cannot always carry and display your diploma. Kindly act like you have one. Professionalism. Include that to your dictionary. ~ Joshua De Vera Bautista

And so, there is something interesting about the word gove. The OED defines it as "to stare stupidly." So do Funk and Wagnalls, the Century Dictionary, and the Imperial Dictionary. In fact, every dictionary I have checked defines this word as "to stare stupidly" except for Webster's Third New International, which defines it as "to stare idly." I am quite sure that the fact that the editor of Webster's Third was named Gove had nothing to do with this decision. also ~ Ammon Shea

Look up the definition of rejection in the dictionary, get really comfortable with it, and then maybe you can go into acting. ~ Loni Anderson