Phrasing Quotes

From the first note I knew it was different from anything I had ever heard.... It began simply, but with an arresting phrase, so simple, but eloquent as a human voice. It spoke, beckoning gently as it unwound, rising and tensing. It spiraled upward, the tension growing with each repeat of the phrasing, and yet somehow it grew more abandoned, wilder with each note. His eyes remained closed as his fingers flew over the strings, spilling forth surely more notes than were possible from a single violin. For one mad moment I actually thought there were more of them, an entire orchestra of violins spilling out of this one instrument. I had never heard anything like it--it was poetry and seduction and light and shadow and every other contradiction I could think of. It seemed impossible to breathe while listening to that music, and yet all I was doing was breathing, quite heavily. The music itself had become as palpable a presence in that room as another person would have been--and its presence was something out of myth. ~ Deanna Raybourn

She was a good girl, he said to himself. He was thinking without quite phrasing it that no other person had ever understood him so fully, and he felt a secret relief as he realized that she had understood him and still loved him. ~ Norman Mailer

I was immediately taken with Geoff Muldaur's rich soulful voice, masterful phrasing and guitar playing when I first heard him. ~ Lucinda Williams

So stop talking about what a loser you are, because I wouldn't follow a loser into a slime-covered bedroom or a slime-covered bathroom, and I've followed you into both." George paused and said aggressively: "And I would really like to change the phrasing of that last sentence, because it sounded so bad, but I'm not sure how. ~ Cassandra Clare

Longing, for everyone, is always there, isn't it? More intense at some times than others. You get closer to less longing - an odd metaphoric phrasing, I realize - then, you are further and longing more than ever again. ~ Susan Minot

Lost in the stormy kiss, Elizabeth felt her legs gliding down his as he gently lowered her against him until her feet touched the floor. But when his fingers pulled at the ribbon that held her gown in place at her shoulder, she jerked free of his kiss, automatically clamping her hand over his. "What are you doing?" she asked in a quaking whisper. His fingers stilled, and Ian lifted his heavy-lidded gaze to hers.
The question took him by surprise, but as he stared into her green eyes Ian saw her apprehension, and he had a good idea what was causing it. "What do you think I'm doing?" he countered cautiously.
She hesitated, as if unwilling even to accuse him of such an unspeakable act, and then she admitted in a small, reluctant voice, "Disrobing me."
"And that surprises you?"
"Surprises me? Of course it does. Why wouldn't it?" Elizabeth asked, more suspicious than ever of what Lucinda had told her.
Quietly he said, "What exactly do you know about what takes place between a husband and wife in bed?"
"You-you mean 'as it pertains to the creation of children'?" she said, quoting his words to her the day she agreed to become betrothed to him.
He smiled with tender amusement at her phrasing. "I suppose you can call it that-for now."
"Only what Lucinda told me." He waited to hear an explanation, and Elizabeth reluctantly added, "She said a husband kisses his wife in bed and that it hurts the first time, and that is how it is done."
Ian hes ~ Judith McNaught

Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided."
Truth: Obama later said, "This was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech and we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given. The point we were simply making was, is that we don't want barbed wire running through Jerusalem. ~ Barack Obama

If nothing else, she would certainly keep him entertained the rest of his days, and not just in the bedchamber. Somewhat reassured by that thought, Daniel turned back to Richard and Langley as he finished with his cravat, and then grimaced when he saw Langley's glowering look.
"We are getting married," he announced at once to forestall any outraged accusations the man might be nurturing at that moment.
"You've decided for certain, have you?" Richard sounded amused.
"I am not sure that is the correct phrasing for it," Daniel admitted with a wry smile. "It would be more fitting to say I have bowed to the inevitable. The woman is a force of nature."
"That she is," Langley agreed, appearing to relax. "So,when is the trip to Gretna Green to occur? I should like to accompany you."
"The sooner the better," Daniel decided grimly. "If Suzette jumps out and drags me into one more room, I cannot guarantee she will reach Gretna as pure as she is now, and she is already less pure today than she was yesterday. ~ Lynsay Sands

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real. ~ Eric Jerome Dickey

I had great difficulties learning to play initially because I could not think rhythmically properly, although it's an even-paced rhythm, I was not phrasing properly, I was too Western. It took me a while to learn to think in needed form, and the only way I could learn was just by ear. ~ Richard Meale

(where the more distant phrasing can lend a veneer of respectability to the otherwise prurient-seeming habit of a naturalist spying on other creatures' intimate lives). ~ Marie Brennan

No doubt she would unfold it as soon as she was out of sight, but I felt secure in its odd phrasing. These ~ Kiera Cass

Even the king of phrasing, Frank Sinatra, did not do as well as Joe Cocker with his reinterpretation of 'Something' by George Harrison, which Sinatra called the greatest love song ever written. ~ Andrew Rosenthal

But I write badly. The part of my brain in charge of writing ability refuses to work. My memory has weakened, my thoughts lack consistency, and each time I set them down on paper it seems to me that I've lost the intuition of their organic connection, the constructions are monotonous, the phrasing impoverished and timid. I often write something other than what I mean; when I get to the end, I no longer remember the beginning. I often forget ordinary words, and always have to waste much energy avoiding superfluous phrases and unnecessary parenthetical clauses in my writing–both clearly witnessing to a decline of mental activity. And, remarkably, the simpler the writing, the more excruciating is the strain. ~ Anton Chekhov

The millions of vacationers who came here every year before Katrina were mostly unaware of this poverty. French Quarter tourists were rarely exposed to the reality beneath the Disneyland Gomorrah that is projected as 'N'Awlins,' a phrasing I have never heard a local use and a place, as far as I can tell, that I have never encountered despite my years in the city. The seemingly average, white, middle-class Americans whooped it up on Bourbon Street without any thought of the third-world lives of so many of the city's citizens that existed under their noses. The husband and wife, clad in khaki shorts, feather boa, and Mardi Gras beads well out of season, beheld a child tap-dancing on the street for money and clapped along to his beat without considering the obvious fact that this was an early school-day afternoon and that the child should be learning to read, not dancing for money. Somehow they did not see their own child beneath the dancer's black visage. Nor, perhaps, did they see the crumbling buildings where the city's poor live as they traveled by cab from the French Quarter to Commander's Palace. They were on vacation and this was not their problem. ~ Billy Sothern

Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn't know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance. ~ Galina Vishnevskaya

But all our phrasing - race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy - serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

World's freakiest bloodsucker, right here," I went on. "And you know what? If it makes some of you uncomfortable, too bad. If it makes some of you so uncomfortable you want to start shit with me about it, step right up and see if I don't eat the hell out of you next!"
I'd meant that last part as a threat, but somewhere in my impassioned declaration of independence from hiding what I was, I'd neglected to think through my phrasing. I saw Bones raise a brow, a muffled snicker broke out from Ian, and then Vlad laughed loud and hearty.
"With that sort of invitation, Reaper, you might want to suggest the line form to your right."
"That's not ... I meant eat them in a bad way," I sputtered. ~ Jeaniene Frost

I don't care if Margot is a Dame of the British Empire or older than myself. For me she represents eternal youth; there is an absolute musical quality in her beautiful body and phrasing. Because we are sincere and gifted, an intense abstract love is born between us every time we dance together. ~ Rudolf Nureyev

Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters. ~ Mary Lascelles

Aside from the decorum of ancient thought as opposed to the coarseness of fresh ink, I have spent some time phrasing the idea in the mathematics of evolutionary arguments and conditional probability. For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

it's about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don't you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?" He ~ Zadie Smith

NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE. It's not the first time I've said that. But among the few worthy bon mots I've gotten off in sixty-seven years, that and possibly one other may be the only considerations eligible for carving on my tombstone. (The other one is the one entrepreneurs have misappropriated to emboss on buttons and bumper stickers: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
(I don't so much mind that they pirated it, but what does honk me off is that they never get it right. They render it dull and imbecile by phrasing it thus: "The two most common things in the universe are ... "
(Not things, you insensate gobbets of ambulatory giraffe dung, elements! Elements is funny, things is imprecise and semi-guttural. Things! Geezus, when will the goyim learn they don't know how to tell a joke. ~ Harlan Ellison

If you mess up the tiniest little thing in the Beethoven concerto, or the phrasing isn't just exactly perfectly executed, Beethoven brings out the worst in the best violinist. You almost never hear a satisfying performance, because it doesn't play itself. ~ Joshua Bell

That was the first time a younger girl who looked dashing in glasses had said something like that to me. Well, that phrasing suggests that this was the first time that someone who was a girl; my junior; and also good-looking in glasses had said something like that. That's a bit of a misleading turn of phrase. Allow me to correct myself. That was the first time I had heard something like that from a girl who looked good in glasses, or from a girl who was my junior, or from a girl who was a xenor. Heck, no girl has ever taken an interest in me, as far as I can remember. ~ Torii Nagomu

And her skin shone luminous and impossibly pale, as if it drank light from the moon. ~ Madeline Miller

The phrasing didn't work as well. ~ Paul Simon

When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you. ~ Wally Lamb

The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another. ~ Mark Twain

Q'eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of "I offer you the bread of life," but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into "Let us violate cakes together. ~ John Scalzi

But it's only after you've played it on the road 20 or 30 times that it becomes really finished and polished ... and you realize what it means, and you get the phrasing right. ~ James Taylor

Lying," he said out loud, hoping no one would hear. "I need to lie. Teach me, quickly."

I wouldn't if I were you, came the response. For a start, it's a variable concept here. You are in a culture where ambiguity has been raised to a high level. Let me give an example: depending on phrasing, circumstance, expression, body movement, intonation and context, the statement "I love you" can mean I love you; I don't love you; I hate you; I want to have sex with you; I do, in fact, love your sister; I don't love you any more; leave me alone, I'm tired, or I'm sorry I forgot your birthday. The person being talked to would instantly understand the meaning but might choose to attribute an entirely different meaning to the statement. Lying is a social act and the nature and import of the lie depends in effect on an unspoken agreement between the parties concerned. Please note that this description does not even begin to explore the concept of deep lies, in which the speaker simultaneously says something he knows to be untrue and genuinely believes it nonetheless: politicians are particularly adept at this. ~ Iain Pears

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next. ~ Pat Conroy

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.
-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

So Aunt Jillian quit her job and hitched her wagon to Brant. Lived off food stamps and her savings account in a spare bedroom at Brant's house for two years. Then she brokered their first deal and all of the Sharps moved their bank account decimals seven places to the right. ~ Alessandra Torre

The mistake that people make in stand-up is thinking they're profound or they're deep when there are so many people who have more worthwhile ways of phrasing things. ~ Colin Quinn

I don't need words. It's all in the phrasing. ~ Louis Armstrong

I just realized he was phrasing all of his questions as statements. Wasn't there a character in Alice in Wonderland who did that? Did Alice punch him in the face? ~ David Wong

I just wanted to show people - maybe I'm wrong - that I can still really sing. I can sing better than I ever have before. My intonation is way better, my timing, my phrasing - there's a lot more expression; I feel it's a more lived-in, soulful voice. ~ Dan Hill

I want you to spend the night," you said. And it was definitely your phrasing that ensured it. If you had said, "Let's have sex," or "Let's go to my place," or even "I really want you," I'm not sure we would have gone quite as far as we did. But I loved the notion that the night was mine to spend, and I immediately decided to spend it with you. ~ David Levithan

How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words ... ) ~ Philip Larkin

My first love in music was jazz, but I like it all," "I reacted emotionally to Art Blakey and, of course, to Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery. I was all of 16 when I had my first guitar lesson with Joe. But I never focused on being a bebop player. I loved the harmony, rhythm and phrasing, but I wanted to apply them to my own concept and sound. ~ Larry Carlton

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me. ~ Margaret Atwood

Some players, they have all their licks memorized. They think about what they're going to play, but I try to think about what not to play. Tone and phrasing, that's what's important - less is more. The feeling, that's the thing. ~ Charlie Musselwhite

Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing ~ William F. Buckley Jr.

My favorite singer to this day is Nat King Cole. I've tried to emulate his phrasing. It is so absolutely beautiful to listen to his lovely voice. ~ Johnny Mathis

Whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Our amended Constitution is the lodestar for our aspirations. Like every text worth reading, it is not crystalline. The phrasing is broad and the limitations of its provisions are not clearly marked. Its majestic generalities and ennobling pronouncements are both luminous and obscure. This ambiguity of course calls forth interpretation, the interaction of reader and text. The encounter with the Constitutional text has been, in many senses, my life's work. ~ William J. Brennan

Pegi just recorded "I Don't Want to Talk About," written by Danny Whitten, the original Crazy Horse guitar player and singer who's all over Early Daze, an album of songs from the beginning of Crazy Horse that I have been working on compiling recently. Danny was every bit the artist I am, but he died of a heroin OD in the early seventies. Every time I hear Pegi sing that song, it makes me tremendously sad. She sings it so beautifully, phrasing it to break my heart. She does it justice. You can see I have some unfinished business with Danny. ~ Neil Young

You do realize," he said, "that 'nauseated' actually means that you make other people sick. The correct phrasing would be 'I feel nauseous. ~ Dana Fredsti

From who?"
"From whom, I believe is the correct phrasing."
"All right, from-the-fuck-whom, Ms. Lane? ~ Karen Marie Moning

Tragic deaths aren't avoidable. That's what Ezra said outside Sam's wake, and even though--to use Foster's phrasing--I didn't know anything about anything, I felt in this moment that Ezra was wrong. What often makes something tragic is that it can be avoided. ~ Emma Mills

I've tried to write songs for other people and it usually requires them singing it and then changing the phrasing. I can put a lot of words in a song, and one of the reasons is, I'm not that good of a singer, so I don't hold a lot of notes. ~ Craig Finn

House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

I was a child of wealth, expected to do nothing but everything. ~ Alessandra Torre

Not only the words (vocabula) which the Holy Spirit and Scripture use are divine, but also the phrasing ~ Martin Luther

There are tools that help sharpen freestyle skills like having a diverse vernacular, some sense of music theory, being outspoken, phrasing, spacing, cross word puzzles, thesauruses, the ability to expand on an issue and embellish that with more descriptive terminology. ~ Myka 9

Though he had spoken of the subject many times, in the silence of his room he added the powerful kind of phrasing that would not have occurred to him as he spoke, because it's origins were in the collaboration of hand and pen. ~ Mark Helprin

The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. ~ Mark Twain

I learned my phrasing from Frank. I loved him so much. ~ Eydie Gorme

The journalism, I was a financial journalist - it's very good training as a writer. You have to write for deadlines; you have a certain economy of phrasing. As a training ground as a writer, it's fantastic. I also think it teaches you to be observant, to listen to people, and gives you an ear of dialogue from doing interviews. ~ Paula Hawkins

The great psychologist Dr. George W. Crane said in his famous book Applied Psychology, "Remember, motions are the precursors of emotions. You can't control the latter directly but only through your choice of motions or actions. . . . To avoid this all too common tragedy (marital difficulties and misunderstandings) become aware of the true psychological facts. Go through the proper motions each day and you'll soon begin to feel the corresponding emotions! Just be sure you and your mate go through those motions of dates and kisses, the phrasing of sincere daily compliments, plus the many other little courtesies, and you need not worry about the emotion of love. You can't act devoted for very long without feeling devoted. ~ David J. Schwartz

Katharsis arrives in English virtually untranslated, as "catharsis," which derives from katharos - "pure." But the word has stretched to signify or entail a wide variety of processes, including clarification, enlightenment, purgation, elimination, transubstantiation, sublimation, release, satisfaction, homeopathic cure, or some combination thereof. Second, the phrasing of Aristotle's original sentence leaves it unclear whether "catharsis" applies to incidents or to emotions - that is, whether the action takes place inside an individual, outside of her, or somewhere in between. ~ Maggie Nelson

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too
the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical. ~ Andrew Clements

It is not a mystical thing, however, it is obvious and practical and I think that what the performer does is to try to get to that point with every choice you make from the phrasing in a tune to the choice of tunes. ~ Leo Kottke

We are sorry about the way things turned out. We gave, in the phrasing of our words if not literally in the words themselves, the false impression that these pages might hold some small fragment, some slight fragrance of a greater truth. That there might be something here to be learned. Before we go any further the author of this cartoon wishes to make an apology. Such an impression was deliberately cultivated. It is a ruse. It is a lie. We are every bit as lost and afraid as children abandoned in a wood: every bit as lost as you. ~ Anders Nilsen

I admire Tebaldi's tone; it's beautiful - also some beautiful phrasing. Sometimes, I actually wish I had her voice. ~ Maria Callas

Happiness is like a genre of music that nearly everyone knows how to dance to. Happiness has a very simple tempo, catchy phrasing, and memorable lyrics. It's the song at the wedding that makes everyone excited to run to the dance floor. ~ T.K. Coleman

Listening to Dad's guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do. ~ Leif Enger

It was nice to call my parents and proudly tell them, "My lady garden is going viral." In hindsight, that may have been a poor choice of phrasing. ~ Jenny Lawson

A word of advice about Ricky ..." Gabriel said as he swung his car from the end of the drive.

"Is it going to cost me?" I waved off his answer. "Whatever you're going to say, save your breath."

"I overheard him offering you a ride on his motorcycle. I don't believe you understand what that entails."

"Grass, gas, or ass. No one rides for free." I looked over at him. "I've seen the T-shirt."

"I don't think you're taking this seriously, Olivia. Do you know what a one-percenter is?"

I sighed. "Yes, Gabriel. It refers to the portion of bikers who belong to a professional motorcycle club. A gang. Ricky is one. As such, I'm going to guess that the only women who get to ride his bike are also riding him. Am I right?"

His mouth tightened as if he didn't appreciate the crass phrasing. "I'm afraid you're under some illusions about Ricky because he does not fit the stereotype."

"Oh, I'm not fooled. He may appear to be the heir to a criminal empire, but he's really an undercover cop, working tirelessly to overthrow his father's evil empire and restore justice and goodness to the land." I glanced over. "Am I close?"

Not even a hint of a smile. ~ Kelley Armstrong

I talk about it a lot to my students. Musicality never came up in any of own writing education, and I can see why - we don't have the vocabulary for it. Phrasing is intuitive, and its difficult to articulate when it's on and when it's not. ~ Paul Lisicky