Subjunctive Quotes

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business. ~ Mark Twain

And if we never slept together or otherwise 'realized' our relationship, I would leave Spain with this gorgeous possibility intact, and in my memory could always ponder the relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive. ~ Ben Lerner

Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality. ~ C.J. Cherryh

I hate all these crazy verbs, using a subjunctive to get what's happened in the future and the past mixed up. ~ Kerstin Gier

Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go. ~ David Mitchell

Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn't you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, "sleep for all" - who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness. ~ Karen Russell

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact. ~ Donna Leon

(She) says that she's finding it especially hard to take when these earnest ravaged folks at the lectern say they're `Here But For the Grace of God,' except that's not the strange thing she says, because when Gately nods hard and starts to interject about `It was the same for--' and wants to launch into a fairly standard Boston AA agnostic-soothing riff about the `God' in the slogan being just shorthand for a totally subjective and up-to-you `Higher Power' and AA being merely spiritual instead of dogmatically religious, a sort of benign anarchy of subjective spirit, Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that her trouble with it is that `But For the Grace of God' is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. `But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin's bathroom floor,' so that an indicative transposition like `I'm here But For the Grace of God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in. ~ David Foster Wallace

At one point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what was not, could invent an alternative reality. He ~ Donna Leon

I've always had trouble with the subjunctive. I wish that were not the case. ~ Phil Elmore

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame. ~ Mark Twain

So," Chronicler said. "Subjunctive mood." "At best," Kvothe said, "it is a pointless thing. It needlessly complicates the language. It offends me. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Contrary to what I thought, being a college grad and fluent in English doesn't make one a good English teacher. I was surprised to learn that all the stuff I didn't know about the language was more than I knew - by a multiple of ten. I knew my nouns, verbs and adjectives. I could speak intelligently about the past, present and future tenses. No problem. But my students were asking me about aspects of English way out in the hinterlands of my understanding. Holy hell! When did English get more than three tenses? Turns out a world existed beyond verbs and nouns. A big world that, for me at the time, seemed as deep and incomprehensible as quantum physics. Tenses like the past perfect, the subjunctive, the pluperfect, the present perfect, the future perfect continuous. Often ~ Mary Williams

Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you! ~ Haruki Murakami

Quality and consistency of conjecture are one good measure of the ambition and the inwardness of any literary biography. The biographer is master of the archive, but also and equally master of the subjunctive mood, of un-certainty, of non-factuality. ~ Geoffrey Wall

History cannot be unwritten or written in the subjunctive, and the wholesale application of late twentieth-century values distorts the past and makes it less comprehensible. ~ Lawrence James

A woman gets into a taxi in Boston's Logan airport and asks the driver, 'Can you take me somplace where I can get scrod?' He says, 'Gee, that's the first time I've heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive. ~ Steven Pinker

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined. ~ Alan Bennett