Plural Self Quotes

You want to lash out at the parts of your self that seem to hold you back. At moments like that, it's important to be able to sit down and speak gently within yourself, as if saying a prayer or reading a poem. Whichever part of you is unhappy, reassure it: accept your many selves, and allow them to speak both to you and to each other. ~ William Sieghart

The light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as he again met it; and he completed his demonstration. ~ Henry James

We believe that if the argument for equality has merit, it does so because it protects difference. Equality used to allow those who differ not to subsume themselves under another's identity but to claim equity for their distinction and the State's protection in maintaining and even defending it. Now, however, equality is being used to erase difference, destroy institutional distinction and remove proper and plural provision for different groups, faiths and organisations ... What is needed here is equity that respects difference not equality that destroys it. ~ Roger Scruton

The Prophet had made dishonorable proposals to my wife ... under cover of his asserted 'Revelation.' ... Smith told his wife Jane the Lord had commanded that he should take plural wives, to add to his glory ... Joseph asked her to give him half her love; she was at liberty to keep the other half for her husband. ~ William Law

Odd choice of a word, isn't it? Fish is either singular, or plural. Imagine my surprise when I walked in the study and found not one fish in a tiny fish bowl, but an entire aquarium."
She practically vibrated for the need to fight. "Otto was lonely and you were practicing animal cruelty. He was too isolated. Now, he has friends and a place to swim."
"Yes, nice little tunnels and rocks and algae to play hide and seek with his buddies. ~ Jennifer Probst

Where you are tender, you speak your plural. ~ Roland Barthes

You are the lifemate of a senstive, modern male. Julian's lazy amusement warmed her further, confirming what she already suspected, that he often stayed a shadow in her mind.
How fortunate for me. Desari smiled at herself in the mirror. Her dark hair cascaded in waves down her back. There was a sparkle in her eyes. She knew Julian had made her feel more alive than she had ever been. Sensitive, modern men are so to my liking.
Men? I am certain I did not hear my lifemate use the word men.The plural.No man is allowed to be to your liking other than myself. He sounded stern, the fierce Carpathian male at his most menacing.
Desari laughed aloud. I suppose I can see your point, Julian, but really, it is so difficult to keep from noticing all of those handsome hunks in the audience.
Handsome hunks? His voice dropped low with the affront. They are more like lovesick fops. If they could feel the vibrations in the air, they would show sense and run for their lives. It is bad enough to read their fantasies and hear them talk their trash, cara,but it is altogether worse to hear that my woman is looking back. One smile at the wrong man, lifemate, and trouble will find the man quickly.
You sound jealous,she accused him, amusement curving her soft mouth.
The first rule for all women to know and never forget is that Carpathian makes do not share their lifemates. Your brother has much to answer for that this was not drilled into you since birth.It was his job ~ Christine Feehan

O most illustrious of the days of time!
Day full of joy and benison to earth
When Thou wast born, sweet Babe of Bethlehem!
With dazzling pomp descending angels sung
Good will and peace to men, to God due praise,
Who on the errand of salvation sent
Thee, Son Beloved! of plural Unity
Essential part, made flesh that mad'st all worlds. ~ Abraham Coles

ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First's English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom I'm going to fire tomorrow if YOU don't watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I'm still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again;
And who the hell are you anyw ~ Samuel R. Delany

A Blessing in Disguise

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,
But I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you
For a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs turned to the light
Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.
If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into
the day
On the wings of the secret you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer "you" in the plural, I want "you,"
You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation. ~ John Ashbery

George Smith shows how many of the prophet's followers embraced plural marriage during a period when the LDS Church was emphatically denying the practice ... [and he tells this in] a lucid writing style. ~ Daniel Walker Howe

I wanted to go from seeing the individual patient to seeing the plural - the whole population as a market. You want to see the larger population, yet at the same time you need to understand the impact of decisions on individuals. ~ Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On on another, as Logos depends
On Eros, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Music falls on the silence like a sense
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together
And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away together as one in the greenest body. ~ Wallace Stevens

The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level - call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material. ~ Philip K. Dick

In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures. ~ Edward De Bono

Whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves. ~ Hannah Arendt

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe! ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Look!" I cried. "A moose - two mooses." Wynn smiled and nodded his head as he followed my pointing finger. He turned to me and said simply, "I must correct you, Elizabeth, so you won't be laughed at. - Moose is both singular and plural. ~ Janette Oke

Unity is plural and, at a minimum, is two. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

The word for woman is Gy (pronounced hard, as in Guy); it forms itself into Gy-ei for the plural, but the G becomes soft in the plural like Jy-ei. They have a proverb to the effect that this difference in pronunciation is symbolical, for that the female sex is soft in the concrete, but hard to deal with in the individual. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

But the same in the plural in ia must be. E, or i, are the ablative's ends, - mark my song, While or to the nominative case doth belong; For the neuter aforesaid we settle it thus: The plural is ora; the singular us. ~ Percival Leigh

Individuals are fine once you get to know them, especially if they're interesting in conversation or have large, sumptuous breasts, but I don't like people in the plural and I've seen very little to change my mind about that. ~ Yahtzee Croshaw

To the newcomer to the south, hearing that a coworker plans a weekend visit to 'mama and them's' (the correct plural possessive, don'tchaknow), might make him think that mama has been left alone either throught an act of scoundreldom involving the town's resident hoochie-mama (an altogether different kind of mama) or Daddy's untimely demise. ~ Celia Rivenbark

People often seem surprised that I choose to write science fiction and fantasy - I think they expect a history professor to write historical fiction, or literary fiction, associating academia with the kinds of novels that academic lit critics prefer. But I feel that speculative fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is a lot more like the pre-modern literature I spend most of my time studying than most modern literature is. Ursula Le Guin has described speculative fiction authors as "realists of a larger reality" because we imagine other ways of being, alternatives to how people live now, different worlds, and raise questions about hope and change and possibilities that different worlds contain.

....

Writing for a more distant audience, authors tended to be speculative, using exotic perspectives, fantastic creatures, imaginary lands, allegories, prophecies, stories within stories, techniques which, like science fiction and fantasy, use alternatives rather than one reality in order to ask questions, not about the way things are, but about plural ways things have been and could be. Such works have an empathy across time, expecting and welcoming an audience as alien as the other worlds that they describe. When I read Voltaire responding to Francis Bacon, responding to Petrarch, responding to Boethius, responding to Seneca, responding to Plutarch, I want to respond to them too, to pass it on. So it makes sense to me to answer in the genre people ha ~ Ada Palmer

But only if youses shift yoursels and get in. He used the demotic plural of you, a common feature of speech in Scotland. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

I think leadership is never singular. In a good organization, it's plural. ~ Mike Krzyzewski

Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance.5 In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender. ~ Francis Fukuyama

The plural of anecdote is not data. ~ Marc Bekoff

I'm not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I'm offering a whole new variety of services, plural - water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren't being poisoned in your own home. ~ Christopher Bollen

I am both the singular and the plural. I am what was, what is, and what will be. I am everything that is and isn't. ~ Natasha D. Lane

The answer is thoughtful, plural institutions: an unending labor of differentiated creation. This is a matter of imagination, maturity, and survival. We ~ Timothy Snyder

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space. ~ John Derbyshire

If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. ~ Zadie Smith

But there is me.
And you. Somewhere out there, there's you.
And I'm glad there's you. And I'm glad that I know that
there's you.
And somewhere, in a remote corner somewhere,
there's a little we. A little we that will still be there no matter
what happens now.
First-person plural: We.
I. And you.
We. ~ Per Nilsson

There's no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural. ~ John Michael Greer

I never give anyone just one congratulation. Congratulations are always plural. They are similar to grapes. ~ Demetri Martin

If the plural for marble, marbles, is slang for sanity, then what does it mean to get lost in a room of marble statues? ~ Bridgette Bates

Changing the legal standard creates a slippery slope ... plural marriage. The court opened up a pandora's box by doing that. ~ Rick Santorum

In Old English, thou (thee, thine, etc.) was singular and you was plural. But during the thirteenth century, you started to be used as a polite form of the singular - probably because people copied the French way of talking, where vous was used in that way. English then became like French, which has tu and vous both possible for singulars; and that allowed a choice. The norm was for you to be used by inferiors to superiors - such as children to parents, or servants to masters, and thou would be used in return. But thou was also used to express special intimacy, such as when addressing God. It was also used when the lower classes talked to each other. The upper classes used you to each other, as a rule, even when they were closely related.
So, when someone changes from thou to you in a conversation, or the other way round, it conveys a different pragmatic force. It will express a change of attitude, or a new emotion or mood. ~ David Crystal