Lenience Dictionary Quotes

#1. The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around. - Author: Mary Norris

#2. At home in my drawer I have this huge d - "
Ash clamped a hand over Cael's mouth, his face crimson. "Dictionary. A huge dictionary. Cael's teaching me new words, such as… delitescent. Adjective. This entire conversation should have remained delitescent."
"I'm a little scared right now," Dex whispered hoarsely, turning to Sloane. "Hold me. - Author: Charlie Cochet

#3. I'm going to be so normal that when people look up normal in the dictionary, my name will be there. - Author: Wendy Mass

#4. Commonplace, adj.
... But then I'll walk into the bathroom and find you've forgotten to put the cap back on the toothpaste again, and it will be this splinter that I just keep stepping on. - Author: David Levithan

#5. My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached "China," thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that "china" is Cockney rhyming slang for "mate." People say "my old china," meaning "my old mate," because "china plate" rhymes with "mate. - Author: China Mieville

#6. I sleep - I sleep long.
I do not know it - it is without name - it is a word unsaid,

It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,

To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?

It is not chaos or death - it is form, union, plan - it is eternal

life - it is Happiness.

from "Song of Myself," Strophe 50. - Author: Walt Whitman

#7. At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction. - Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

#8. 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. - Author: Lucy Larcom

#9. Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary. - Author: Ambrose Bierce

#10. 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.' - Author: John Niven

#11. 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. - Author: Bill Condon

#12. They all spoke some German, having been living in the German-speaking region of Switzerland. Lenin himself spoke it well. He was a remarkable linguist, Walter learned. He was fluent in French, spoke passable English, and read Aristotle in ancient Greek. Lenin's idea of relaxation was to sit down with a foreign-language dictionary for an hour or two. - Author: Ken Follett

#13. Sorry is not meant that you are wrong but is meant that you value the relationship."But in my dictionary "Sorry is too late", I rarely use this word! - Author: Chum Visal

#14. I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary. - Author: Nas

#15. What you mean to me is something out of the ordinary, cause even a whole of a dictionary won't be able to describe it! - Author: Andy Flynn

#16. 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. - Author: Marina Tsvetaeva

#17. To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words. - Author: Jeanette Winterson

#18. Database Management System [Origin: Data + Latin basus "low, mean, vile, menial, degrading, ounterfeit."] A complex set of interrelational data structures allowing data to be lost in many convenient sequences while retaining a complete record of the logical relations between the missing items.
From The Devil's DP Dictionary - Author: Stan Kelly-Bootle

#19. We are entrusted, you must know, with the revision of the English Dictionary. On the evidence of the Liverpool find of Christmas cards, in which occurred such couplets as:

Just to hope the day keeps fine
For you and your this Christmas time,

and:

I hope this stocking's in your line
When stars shine bright at Christmas-time

I hold that "Christmas-time" was often pronounced "Christmas-tine", and that this is a dialect variant of the older "Christmas-tide". Quant denies this, with a warmth that is unusual in him.'
'Quant is right. - Author: Robert Graves

#20. ADAMS. This is a great work, Sir. How are you to get all the etymologies? JOHNSON. Why, Sir, here is a shelf with Junius, and Skinner, and others; and there is a Welch gentleman who has published a collection of Welch proverbs, who will help me with the Welch. ADAMS. But, Sir, how can you do this in three years? JOHNSON. Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years. ADAMS. But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary. JOHNSON. Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman. - Author: Samuel Johnson

#21. It is intolerance to speak of toleration. Away with the word from the dictionary! - Author: Victor De Riqueti, Marquis De Mirabeau

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

#23. 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. - Author: George Mikes

#24. I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'. - Author: Harlan Ellison

#25. Onomatomania (n.) Vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word. Finding a word that so perfectly describes a rather large portion of my everyday existence is one of the things that makes reading the dictionary feel like an intensely personal endeavor. The book is no longer merely a list of words; suddenly it is a catalog of the foibles of the human condition, and it is speaking directly to me. Of course, as soon as I learned this word I promptly forgot what it was, but this just provided me with the frustration of not being able to think of it, and then the satisfaction of once again finding it. also - Author: Ammon Shea

#26. dictionary with unsaid words - Author: Milan Kundera

#27. 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.' - Author: Rashida Jones

#28. Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.
The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. - Author: Richard Dawkins

#29. Hair, to Tillie, meant nothing by way of being a woman's crowning glory. It was merely, as the dictionary so ably states, small horny, fibrous tubes with
bulbous roots, growing out of the skins of mammals; and it was meant to be combed down as flat as possible and held in place with countless wire hairpins. - Author: Bess Streeter Aldrich

#30. If we measured our affection toward others by how many nicknames we bestow upon them, our pets would be the most loved. Here's the etymological journey for the nicknames I have for Tobey: Tobito, Toblerone. T-Bone. T-bonics. Ta-T. Ta-Tobes. Tubby, for when he's gotten into the trash and gorged himself. Nicknames with origins based on appearance: Bearded Yum Yum, Handsome McHandsome, Fuzzy Face. Then this strange progression: Pooch. Poochers. Poocharoo. Poochacho. Pachune. Then, somehow, Pooch turned into Mooch, and so there had to be Moocharo. Muchacho. Manu, and most recently Man-nu-nu. All these monikers I say in voices more commonly echoed from the confines of straightjackets and padded walls. Anyone we truly love should come with their own dictionary. - Author: Carrie Brownstein

#31. I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention. - Author: Drew Barrymore

#32. In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it's related to, and how it's related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected. - Author: Tim Berners-Lee

#33. To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism. - Author: David Foster Wallace

#34. Darkness is more than a shade of nightfall. It is a feeling as though there has been an eclipse not only within what should be a vibrant life inside you but in all that is good around you. - Author: Andrew Kendall

#35. 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. - Author: Terry Pratchett

#36. The woman rolled her eyes. "DarkRiver males are damn possessive and complete exhibitionists during the mating dance."
Sascha ran through her dictionary of changeling terminology and could find no fit. "Mating dance?"
Mercy whistled. Dorian winced. Tamsyn suddenly got interested in her dough. Clay and Vaughn mysteriously disappeared. Behind her, Lucas's body was a hard wall of heat. "I think we need to discuss this upstairs. - Author: Nalini Singh

#37. I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. - Author: Steven Wright

#38. This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship. - Author: Kathleen Norris

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

#40. You won't find the word happy in any self-respecting grumbler's dictionary, no matter it's Christmas Eve or the any other day. - Author: Cleveland Amory

#41. Like this book, the dictionary shows you that the word "nervous" means "worried about something"
you might feel nervous, for instance, if you were served prune ice cream for dessert, because you would be worried that it would taste awful
whereas the word "anxious" means "troubled by disturbing suspense," which you might feel if you were served a live alligator for dessert, because you would be troubled by the disturbing suspense about whether you would eat your dessert or it would eat you. - Author: Lemony Snicket

#42. 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. - Author: VIZ

#43. If I am hated at Barcelona, it is their problem but not mine. Fear is not a word in my football dictionary. - Author: Jose Mourinho

#44. The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help. - Author: Carl Sandburg

#45. Books provide a handy shorthand when Rory's mostly MIA father, Christopher, is first introduced to viewers. Christopher's offer to buy Rory the Compact Oxford English Dictionary she covets is sincere; his lack of ability to follow through on his good intentions is Christopher in a nutshell. - Author: Jennifer Crusie

#46. Always remember that striving and struggling precede success, even in the dictionary. - Author: Sarah Ban Breathnach

#47. I don't know. Sometimes I try to say what's on my mind and it comes out sounding like I ate a dictionary and I'm shitting pages. Sorry - Author: J.R. Moehringer

#48. The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary. - Author: Guy De Maupassant

#49. If you can't attract a woman, you are, by dictionary definition, sterile. - Author: Mystery