Itive Verb Quotes

I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others' paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.

A thread now most often means a line of conversation via e-mail or other electronic means, but thread must have been an even more compelling metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women's work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of fiber into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale.

Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words becoming stories. The fairy-tale heroines spin cobwebs, straw, nettles into whatever is necessary to survive. Scheherazade forestalls her death by telling a story that is like a thre ~ Rebecca Solnit

A person who uses party as a verb is a person who will walk into a shop and walk out wearing a rubber jumpsuit. ~ Cynthia Heimel

If the noun is good and the verb is strong, you almost never need an adjective. ~ J. Anthony Lukas

Listen to them again: 'I love you.' Subject, verb, object: the unadorned, impregnable sentence. The subject is a short word, implying the self-effacement of the lover. The verb is longer but unambiguous, a demonstrative moment as the tongue flicks anxiously away from the palate to release the vowel. The object, like the subject, has no consonants, and is attained by pushing the lips forward as if for a kiss. 'I love you.' How serious, how weighted, how freighted it sounds. ~ Julian Barnes

The beginning of sense, not to say wisdom, is to realize that 'doing an action,' as used in philosophy, is a highly abstract expression
it is a stand-in used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that 'thing' is a stand-in for anynoun substantive, and 'quality' a stand-in for the adjective. ~ J.L. Austin

When Ole Kirk Kristiansen established the company name LEGO in 1934, it was a fortunate play on words. The entrepreneur had been inspired by the Danish phrase "leg godt" - "play well." He took the beginning of each respective word and made what he considered to be a pleasant-sounding, imaginary word out of them. The company owner was unaware that as the first person present singular of the verb legere, "lego" is also the Latin word for "I assemble" - and therefore completely appropriate for the modularity of the company's later invention, the LEGO brick. ~ Christian Humberg

I fall way beyond the norm on the verb. ~ Method Man

it's being branded a failure that causes the most pain; when 'failure' changes from being a verb to becoming a noun. ~ Anup Kochhar

Love is a verb. When it becomes a noun, it's over."

from "The God Patent" by Ransom Stephens ~ Ransom Stephens

Love is a verb. We have to let our love call us to action. ~ Lierre Keith

By 1850, the pauper funeral had become perhaps the dominant representation of that vulnerability, of the possibility of falling irrevocably from the grace of society, of exclusion from the values of one's culture. It was an image that worked on the poor; they would, as one observer put it, "sell their beds out from under them sooner than have parish funerals." Anxiety about pauper burial did not, of course, stand alone in drawing - pushing might be the better verb - the poor into industrial civilization, but ignominious burial was one of the most powerful ways in which the relationship between money and standing was made manifest, a metaphor for the meaning of consumption, a vehicle for the creation of desire that made the new economic order possible. ~ Thomas W. Laqueur

The Word 'Repulse': I hate this word. I believe 'repel' is a perfectly good word, and 'repulsion' is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says 'compulse' or 'impulse' as a verb. So why would you ever say 'repulse'? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renee looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I'm right. ~ Rob Sheffield

A battle is a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill: I kill, thou killest, he kills, we kill, they kill, all kill. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Information is currency ... Power is a place as well as a verb; it is inside the information tent. ~ Lynda Obst

Doldrums, n.
The proper verb for depression is sink. ~ David Levithan

GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him -
Tell him the page I did n't write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.
Tell him just how the fingers hurried, 5
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow;
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.

"Tell him it was n't a practised writer,
You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled; 10
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
As if it held but the might of a child;
You almost pitied it, you, it worked so.
Tell him - No, you may quibble there,
For it would split his heart to know it, 15
And then you and I were silenter.

"Tell him night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing 'day!'
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended -
What could it hinder so, to say? 20
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow, - happy letter!
Gesture, coquette, and shake your head! ~ Emily Dickinson

I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three. ~ Richard Ford

As it turns out, to 'become who you are' is not about finding a 'who' you have always been looking for. It is not about separating 'you' off from everything else. And it is not about existing as you truly 'are' for all time. The self does not lie passively in wait for us to discover it. Selfhood is made in the active, ongoing process, in the German verb werden, 'to become'. ~ John Kaag

I believe in love the verb, not the noun. ~ Greg Behrendt

Always, I liked the infinitive 'to go.' Let's go, let's go. let's really go. 'Andare' was the first verb I learned to conjugate in Italian. 'Andiamo,' let's go, teh sound comes out at a gallop. ~ Frances Mayes

There is no singular meaning of wife. That is the point. That is its meaning. To see the wife fully through a multi-faceted lens is one of the central challenges facing society in the twenty-first century. To do this, new scripts are required that employ wife as a verb and as a gender-neutral concept. These are essential if we are to create necessary new narratives, new ways of living as women and men together. ~ Anne Kingston

I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write. ~ Richard Flanagan

So often when we say 'I love you' we say it with a huge 'I' and a small 'you'. We use love as a conjunction instead of it being a verb implying action. It's no good just gazing out into open space hoping to see the Lord; instead we have to look closely at our neighbour, someone whom God has willed into existence, someone whom God has died for. Everyone we meet has a aright to exist, because he has value in himself, and we are not used to this. The acceptance of otherness is a danger to us, it threatens us. To recognise the other's right to be himself might mean recognising his right to kill me. But if we set a limit to this right to exist, it's no right at all. Love is difficult. Christ was crucified because he taught a kind of love which is a terror for men, a love which demands total surrender: it spells death. ~ Anthony Bloom

Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality. ~ C.J. Cherryh

Evident in every small act of kindness, it was love as a verb. Love that made me feel more complete than I had ever felt in my glamorous, Jimmy Choo filled past. ~ Emily Giffin

There is no virtue or vice in a transitive verb, everything depends on the direct object. 'I LOVE' could be virtuous or not - you could love ice cream, Jesus, child porn, my country, hurting people, the lust of the flesh. Love is not an automatic virtue. Hatred is not an automatic vice. What's the direct object? from Debate In The Age Of The Glitter-Bomb in The City, Fall 2013. ~ Douglas Wilson

Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment. / For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike / down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment. / For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb / before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond / your own intelligence. ~ Les Murray

The verb that's been enforced on girls is to please. Girls are trained to please ... I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be educate, or activate, or engage, or confront, or defy, or create. ~ Eve Ensler

Branding is a verb, ya heard? Now get out there and BE your brand. ~ Catrice M. Jackson

Consider the sentence "He closed the door firmly." It's by no means a terrible sentence (at least it's got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between "He closed the door" and "He slammed the door," and you'll get no argument from me . . . but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before "He closed the door firmly?" Shouldn't this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn't firmly an extra word? Isn't it redundant? ~ Stephen King

In wondered in avenging was being used as an adjective or a verb. ~ David Levithan

Life is never a complacent thing. It's more like a verb. You're not just alive; you have to consciously fuel every moment with life, regardless of whether or not your reality lines up with your ideals. Your life is not what your ideals are. Your life is what you actually have when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep at night. So what are you gonna do with that? ~ C. JoyBell C.

Presence is a noun, not a verb; it is a state of being, not doing. States of being are not highly valued in a culture that places a high priority on doing. Yet, true presence or "being with" another person carries with it a silent power. ~ Jay Allison

Honesty isn't a verb. You can't 'honest'. It's a way of life. ~ Sarah Whitchurch

A guy whose name has become its own verb, and synonymous with trouble. ~ Nicole Williams

Remember Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'. There are athletes who believe God helps them win - against opponents who would seem, on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism. There are motorists who believe God saves them a parking space - thereby presumably depriving somebody else. This style of theism is embarrassingly popular, and is unlikely to be impressed by anything as (superficially) reasonable as NOMA. Nevertheless, ~ Richard Dawkins

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence. ~ Kenneth Koch

Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena. ~ Michael Shermer

The verb 'to darn' is explained in my pocket dictionary as follows: 'To mend by imitating the texture of the stuff, with thread and needle.' But this definition does not correspond to the work accomplished by good Chinese housewives. When they mend a sock, they do not try 'to imitate the texture of the stuff'. Their art makes no attempt at concealment: it even takes a certain pride in revealing itself. ~ Daniele Vare