Noun Phrase Quotes

This would be the moment to say 'I love you', although you never know what you get back, like 'moi non plus', statistically the most honest answer (moi non plus, French, used by Serge Gainsbourg, the one and only basis for his fame, this noun phrase, meaning "me neither"), or 'I love you too', but uttered unconvincingly, or 'I love you too', uttered more convincingly, although you know it's bullshit. ~ Michael Ampersant

The noun phrase straw man, now used as a compound adjective as in 'straw-man device, technique or issue,' was popularized in American culture by 'The Wizard of Oz.' ~ William Safire

Life is a verb, not a noun. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The word "people" is unpleasant to me. The phrase "Soviet people" was drummed into us from childhood on. I love concrete people, enlightened people who live conscious lives and do not simply sit there and vegetate. To love the people you have to be the general secretary of the Communist Party or an absolute dictator. ~ Vladimir Sorokin

There's a catch phrase that you all must have heard at one time or another. You walk into a room or go over toward a group. Someone turns and says with huge emphasis: 'There he is.' As though you were the most important one of all. (And you're not.) As though you were the one they were just talking about. (And they weren't.) As though you were the only one that mattered. (And you're not.) It's a nice little tribute, and it don't cost anyone a cent.
("New York Blues") ~ Cornell Woolrich

Excess exercise tends to be counterbalanced by excess hunger, exemplified by the phrase 'working up an appetite.' A few people with extraordinary willpower can resist such hunger day after day, but for the vast majority, weight loss through exercise is a flawed option. ~ Andrew Weil

If you can't illustrate 'it', 'it' doens't belong in Physics as a noun! You can't put an article in front. You can't put a verb after! ~ Bill Gaede

Though Article II requires "natural born" citizenship, the Constitution does not explain what the phrase means. There was no constitutional definition of American citizenship until 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. Nor was there any existing body of American immigration law to explain it. ~ Garrett Epps

One phrase stuck in Fainy's mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege. ~ John Dos Passos

You would have loved Jackson. He was a downtown guy, a real Bohemian. No banker's hours for him, believe you me. Every night the drinking and the talking and the fighting and the dancing and the staying up late; like everyone's romantic idea of what an artist ought to be: the anti-Rothko... At his worst you still loved him though; you loved him because he loved art so much... He thought it mattered. He thought painting mattered... Does not the poignancy stop your heart?... How could this story not end in tragedy?

Goya said, 'We have Art that we may not perish from Truth.'... Pollock saw some truth. Then he didn't have art to protect him any more... Who could survive that?

I was walking up to my house last week and this couple was passing. Lady looks in the window, says: 'I wonder who owns all the Rothkos.'... Just like that I'm a noun. A Rothko. ~ John Logan

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book. ~ Jean Rhys

If children conform to the standards set by their peers, in the seventies and eighties the peer pressure for black children to keep with their own was intense. Before desegregation, "acting white" was a phrase no one had ever heard with regard to school involvement or academics. Yet in the wake of busing, it rose to become one of the most hurtful insults one black student could level at another. Talking white, dressing white, being enthusiastic about anything "white" was forsaking one's own. For the thirty-eight black students at Vestavia, there was the black cafeteria table and there were the other cafeteria tables, and it was one or the other. There was no going back and forth. ~ Tanner Colby

My very first products were hand-made, one-of-a-kind pins. When I finally realized I could repeat a phrase to make multiples, 'intellectuals gone bad,' a fairly succinct description of my own life, seemed appropriate. ~ Anne Taintor

Today, few Americans born after 1980 are familiar with the Jonestown tragedy, although anyone with an Internet connection can listen to the haunting tape of the community's mass extinction. And while the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" has entered the cultural lexicon, its reference to gullibility and blind faith is a slap in the face of the Jonestown residents who were goaded into dying by the lies of Jim Jones, and, especially insulting to the 304 murdered children. As the FBI files clearly document, the community devolved into a living hell from which there was no escape. ~ Julia Scheeres

As he clambered back and picked up the paddle, he was still muttering furiously in his own language and glaring at her. Without deciphering a single word, she knew he was scolding her for her carelessness, trying to explain that one had to be alert the whole time in the jungle.
"Idiota!" he said finally, and though Senhor and Senhora Olvidares in the phrase book had not used the word, Maia understood it well enough. ~ Eva Ibbotson

Out beyond
the ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other'
doesn't make any sense. ~ Rumi

Mainly, she lived. She got on with the small acts of life. She continued to ensure that - in the phrase she always used inside her own head - she got away with it. No one found her out. ~ Maggie O'Farrell

I was rather unwilling to study Latin grammar. It seemed absurd to waste time analyzing, every word I came across - noun, genitive, singular, feminine - when its meaning was quite plain. I thought I might just as well describe my pet in order to know it - order, vertebrate; division, quadruped; class, mammalia; genus, felinus; species, cat; individual, Tabby. ~ Helen Keller

You are 'the best of cut-throats:'--do not start;
The phrase is Shakespeare's, and not misapplied:--
War's a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art,
Unless her cause by Right be sanctified.
If you have acted once a generous part,
The World, not the World's masters, will decide,
And I shall be delighted to learn who,
Save you and yours, have gained by Waterloo?

I am no flatterer--you've supped full of flattery:
They say you like it too--'tis no great wonder:
He whose whole life has been assault and battery,
At last may get a little tired of thunder;
And swallowing eulogy much more than satire, he
May like being praised for every lucky blunder;
Called 'Saviour of the Nations'--not yet saved,
And Europe's Liberator--still enslaved.

I've done. Now go and dine from off the plate
Presented by the Prince of the Brazils,
And send the sentinel before your gate
A slice or two from your luxurious meals:
He fought, but has not fed so well of late... ~ Lord Byron

After that there was nothing left to say as nothing gets on my nerves more than someone repeating the same phrase twice. I think it's something people have picked up from television, this emotional stutter. Rather than say something interesting once, they repeat a cliché and hope for the same effect ~ David Sedaris

And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? - because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security, relationship has a certainty. Relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say good-bye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun. ~ Rajneesh

And thigh gap?" he mutters to himself. "I hear that phrase all the time. I don't understand it. Your thighs part well enough for my c*ck and hands and face. That's a big enough gap for me. ~ Karina Halle

That's enough. You can stop now: the phrase Sedgwick said she longed to hear whenever she was suffering. (Enough hurting, enough showing off, enough achieving, enough talking, enough trying, enough writing, enough living.) ~ Maggie Nelson

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light. ~ Clive James

When you say 'I want to be an inspiring leader,' the operative phrase is 'I want.' This is inherently me-centered and self serving whether or not you recognise it. What you are really saying is 'I want to get people to do what I would like them to.' Perhaps they don't want to do that. So you have to somehow get them there. ~ Srikumar Rao

In an artistic sense, cool came to refer to someone with a signature artistic style so integral as to exude an authentic mode-of-being in the world: Miles, Bogart, Brando, Eastwood, Greco, Elvis, Lady Day, Sinatra. Such a person created something from nothing and gave the world some new artistic or psychological 'equipment for living,' to use a phrase of Kenneth Burke's. A signature style is yours and can only be carried by you: it cannot be abstracted except through dilution and commodification since it reflects an individual's complex personal experience. In this sense, cool was 'making a dollar out of fifteen cents,' to pull another phrase from the Africa-American vernacular. Lester Young was once at a bar when a tenor saxophone solo floated out of the jukebox. 'That's me,' he said happily. As he listened his mood collapsed - he realized it was one of his many imitators. 'No, that's not me,' he said sadly. To steal someone else's sound or style and capitalize on it has always been un-cool, the pretense of posers. ~ Joel Dinerstein

The always popular notion that the United States is in "moral decline" (a phrase favored in the pulpits and the press of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) rests on the assumption that Americans used to be far more religious and should strive to return to their former fidelity. ~ Peter Manseau

THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses - sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him. ~ Mark Twain

At our next session, the shrink calls this metaphor psychological warfare. You must rise above it, she says. They're just words being said many miles away.

That phrase about sticks and stones and bones.

But my bones are very brittle. And I am lactose intolerant. ~ Weike Wang

Although I don't use it nearly so much anymore, I've decided, five years down the line, that Mr. Treadstone's verdict on 'kind of' was kind of unjust. Obviously, this phrase can be redundant or reductive, or just plain stupid in some sentences, but not in all sentences. I wouldn't, for example, use a sentence like 'Antarctica is kind of cold', or 'Hitler was kind of evil'. But sometimes, things aren't black and white. And sometimes 'kind of' expresses this better than any other phrase. For example, when I tell you that my mother was kind of peculiar, I can think of no better way of putting this. ~ Gavin Extence

History never recorded this phrase: 'The Mass of Wise.' Because the wise is not too abundant to form masses! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And ~ Steven Pinker

You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge