Reproachfully Dictionary Quotes

A great many years ago I purchased a fine dictionary. The first thing I did with it was to turn to the word "impossible," and neatly clip it out of the book. That would not be an unwise thing for you to do. ~ Napoleon Hill

What she did NOT appreciate was the homework. Captain Wilkes had scrounged textbooks for her to study. Not just Marine manuals, either. Math, science, English. Chemistry. Yuck! With weekly tests. And he was making her do all her platoon reports, then "annotating" them. He had given her a dictionary and thesaurus, among other things, and after the first report after giving them to her told her she was "not allowed words of more than two syllables." It was worse than fucking school. "Recess" was killing zombies. ~ John Ringo

I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a 'surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow'. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon. ~ Edward Abbey

You absurd boy! Oh, Evelyn, I'm so thankful you've come, but what in the world has detained you? I've been sick with apprehension!"
There was a quizzical gleam in the gentleman's eyes, but he said in accents of deep reproach: "Come, come, Mama - !"
"It may be very well for you to say Come, come, Mama," she retorted, "but when you faithfully promised to return not a day later than -" She broke off, staring down at him in sudden doubt.
Abandoning the portmanteau, the gentleman shrugged the greatcoat from his shoulder, pulled off his hat, and mounted the remaining stairs two at a time, saying still more reproachfully: "No, really, Mama! How can you be so unnatural a parent?"
"Kit!" uttered his unnatural parent, in a smothered shriek. "Oh, my darling, my dearest son! ~ Georgette Heyer

Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. ~ Walt Whitman

In all its myriad manifestations, the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms, a thesaurus of illogic and inconsistency. ~ Paul Johnson

Though Mrs. Gamely was by all measures prescientific and illiterate, she did know words. Where she got them was anyone's guess, but she certainly had them. Virginia speculated that the people on the north side of the lake, steeped in variations of English both tender and precise, had made with their language a tool with which to garden a perfect landscape. Those who are isolated in small settlements may not know of the complexities common to great cities, but their hearts are rich, and so words are generated and retained. Mrs. Gamely's vocabulary was enormous. She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years. Virginia checked them in the Oxford dictionary, and found that (almost without exception) Mrs. Gamely's usage was flawlessly accurate. For instance, she spoke of certain kinds of dogs as Leviners. She called the areas near Quebec march-lands. She referred to diclesiums, linipoops, rapparees, dagswains, bronstrops, caroteels, opuntias, and soughs. She might describe something as patibulary, fremescent, pharisaic, Roxburghe, or glockamoid, and words like mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, mage, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale, comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad, and pintulary fled from her lips in Pierian saltarellos. Their dictionary looked like a sow's ear, because Virginia spent inordinate proportions of her days racing through it, though when Mrs. Gamely was angry a staff of ~ Mark Helprin

Agatha Christie n. A silent, putrid fart committed by someone in this very room, and only one person knows whodunnit. ~ VIZ

Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them. ~ Leila Aboulela

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness ... I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory ... Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping ~ Emil Cioran

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city. ~ Cornelia Otis Skinner

learned to read and write in the Slavic alphabet from a single sheet. Then, I proceeded to make up my own dictionary using a small notebook with every page a different letter. An added impediment was the difference between these two Slavic languages. The writing presented also slight differences, also the orthography. All this added to the difficulties and the confusion, at first. The new, Soviet administration never thought of offering language classes for the new citizens. ~ Pearl Fichman

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. ~ George Mikes

Sorry & Thanks are the only two words in the dictionary of life wherein its presence connects two strangers, and its absence departs two loved ones. ~ Swati Jain

Sometimes I hate this language with its false words like sunset. The sun does not set. It doesn't rise either. It just stays there in one place, yet we get all romantic, huddling on beaches to watch its so-called departure, when it is we who turn away from it, which is a good thing-if the sun could turn, it would never come back, it'd just keep going, look for some better planet to nourish.

Moonlight is another lie. It's a luminescent echo. The moon is a politician whose speeches are written by the sun. I long for a world where witnesses in court must place their hands on a dictionary when they swear. A world where an archer must ask an arrow's permission before loading it into a crossbow. A world with inverted flashlights that shoot out beams of darkness, so you can go to the beach and sabotage sunbathers, rob them of their shine.

A world where people eat animals they wish to emulate. But who the hell am I? I'm just the spark from two people who rubbed their genitals together like sticks in a forest one October night because they were cold. I'm just burning the firecracker at both ends. Every morning I get up and swallow my weirdness pills.

I know the glass is half full, but it's a shot glass, and there are four of us, and we're all very thirsty. I know it's easy not to cry over spilled milk when you've got another carton in the fridge. ~ Jeffrey McDaniel

Unique feelings are so unique that they can not be popularized. Feelings without words in the dictionary disappear. Every year thousands of feelings disappear for lack of a concrete form. ~ Isidore Isou

With the years and convulsions of history, the word-as reductionist as the dictionary itself-has undergone absurd metamorphoses. In some countries, they prefer the word "destabilization." Poor" countries no longer exist, just "disadvantaged" or "underprivileged" ones. We say "brainwashing" instead of "propaganda." And now we refer to revolutions in fashion, music and electronics, where ink flows but not blood. The point is profit, not truth ~ Elie Wiesel

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors. ~ Walter Lippmann

So; in the beginning was the Word, but ten nanoseconds later there was a twelve-volume dictionary, and ten nanoseconds after that a Library of Congress, with 90 per cent of the books in foreign languages. It's probably not possible after such a lapse of time to find out what the original Word was. Given the consequences, however, it could well have been oops. ~ Tom Holt

The Actor, noticing a closed bookshop, dismounted from the horse which he tied to a street lamp. He woke up the bookseller and bought a Spanish grammar and dictionary. He set out again across town marveling at the way that the words of the foreign language were freshly gathered fruits and not old and dry. They touched the senses marvelously, new like young beggars who accost you, not yet words but the every things they designate, happily running naked before being clothed again in abstraction. ~ Georges Limbour

In the throes of passion, I threw out an I love you. Did I mean it? Does a dictionary mean what it says? ~ Jarod Kintz

In the dictionary of the seeker of truth there is no such thing as being "not successful." He is or should be an irrepressible optimist because of his immovable faith in the ultimate victory of Truth, which is God. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word 'pessimist' was not in our vocabulary at that time. It's a modern 'invention' which I believe we should 'dis-invent.' ~ Zig Ziglar

I didn't even know what the word lesbian meant until I was called one ... and then I had to look it up in the dictionary. ~ Kathleen Hanna

Zenosyne.

It's actually just after you're born that life flashes before your eyes.

Entire aeons are lived in those first few months when you feel inseparable from the world itself, with nothing to do but watch it passing by.

At first, time is only felt vicariously, as something that happens to other people. You get used to living in the moment, because there's nowhere else to go. But soon enough, life begins to move, and you learn to move with it. And you take it for granted that you're a different person every year,
Upgraded with a different body...a different future. You run around so fast, the world around you seems to stand still. Until a summer vacation can stretch on for an eternity.
You feel time moving forward, learning its rhythm, but now and then it skips a beat, as if your birthday arrives one day earlier every year.

We should consider the idea that youth is not actually wasted on the young. That their dramas are no more grand than they should be. That their emotions make perfect sense, once you adjust for inflation. For someone going through adolescence, life feels epic and tragic simply because it is: every kink in your day could easily warp the arc of your story. Because each year is worth a little less than the last. And with each birthday we circle back, and cross the same point around the sun. We wish each other many happy returns.

But soon you feel the circle begin to tighten, and you realize i ~ The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows

It is understandable that there has been a good deal of joking about purely learned works of this type. Their actual value for the future of scholarship and for the people as a whole cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, scholarship, as was true for art in the olden days, must indeed have far-flung grazing grounds, and in pursuit of a subject which interests no one but himself a scholar can accumulate knowledge which provides colleagues with information as valuable as that stored in a dictionary or an archive. ~ Hermann Hesse

DAGUERREOTYPE Will take the place of painting. (See PHOTOGRAPHY.) (From The Dictionary of Received Ideas, assembled from notes Flaubert made in the 1870s.) ~ Gustave Flaubert

Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.
Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?"
"I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random. ~ Cassandra Clare

From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary of phonetic spellings. ~ Fran Ross

To dispatch one's friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one's own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

I opened up a dictionary
And tried to find a meaning in a hurry.
Turned the pages to look for the word -- "Perfect"
And saw you listed there, coz I know you're worth it! ~ Ritika Chhabra

Although, as you well know, dictionary sales to laymen have been waning for a long time. As books have gone out of print and we've moved from reading to "consuming data streams," "texting" rather than writing - as Memes have become king - the average consumer has had much less need for real meanings. And Synchronic ~ Alena Graedon

The high-minded definition of politics is: 'the art or science of government; the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy.' It is only when you keep reading in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary that you get closer to the truth: 'political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices'. ~ Cal Thomas

The word hammockable (describing two trees that are the perfect distance apart between which a hammock can be hung) is not in the dictionary, but it should be. [Of lying in hammocks] ~ Dan Kieran

That was a pygmy marmoset by the way. Just in case you were wondering."
I wheezed. "Thank you oh Walking Monkey Dictionary. ~ Colleen Houck

And Mamma was still asleep. I called it the sleeping sickness because coma is the ugliest word in the entire universe. If I could, I'd erase it from the dictionary, but Old Webster would probably hunt me down. ~ Kimberley Griffiths Little

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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.' ~ Rashida Jones

But sometimes it is fun not knowing what the words mean because you can look them up in a dictionary... ~ Mark Haddon

Unlike babies, phenomena are typically born long before humans give them names. Zurara did not call Black people a race. French poet Jacques de Brézé first used the term "race" in a 1481 hunting poem. In 1606, the same diplomat who brought the addictive tobacco plant to France formally defined race for the first time in a major European dictionary, "Race…means descent," Jean Nicot wrote in the Trésor de la langue française. "Therefore, it is said that a man, a hors, a dog or another animal is from a good or bad race." From the beginning, to make races was to make racial hierarchy.

Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. Race making is an essential ingredient in the making of racist ideas, the crust that holds the pie. Once a race has been created it must be filled in-and Zurara filled it with negative qualities that would justify Prince Henry's evangelical mission to the world. This Black race of people was lost, living "like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings, " Zurara wrote. "They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

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. ~ Charlie Cochet

The thing is, it's my own fault. I just can't put up with a person that won't go out of his way for me. And that's what a man is. Somebody that won't go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Now a Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as descended from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary; but you and I know what a Jew is - One Who Killed Our Lord. And although there should be a statute of limitations for that crime, it seems that those who neither have the actions nor the gait of Christians, pagan or not, will bust us out, unrelenting dues, for another deuce. ~ Lenny Bruce

To make dictionaries is dull work. ~ Samuel Johnson

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. ~ Steven Wright

(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.
(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
(c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of 'most complicated book': the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.
(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: 'Einstein is a fool', or 'Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.' Everyone is ~ Paulo Coelho