Terseness Dictionary Quotes

This is a God who is not identified with the help of a dictionary but through a relationship. ~ Kathleen Norris

In my dictionary, romance is not maudlin, treacly sentiment. It is a curry, spiced with excitement, and humour, and a healthy dollop of cynicism. ~ Loretta Chase

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
(on Ernest Hemingway ~ William Faulkner

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.
The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. ~ Richard Dawkins

The English language has about 450,000 commonly used words, but more may be needed. What to you call someone who has lost a sibling or had a miscarriage? Or a gay person whose partner has died? Or an elderly person who has lost every friend and relative? So many heartaches can't be found in the dictionary. ~ Jeffrey Zaslow

By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world. ~ John Banville

My favourite book is my dictionary. It excites me. Each time I open it, the endless possibilities come tumbling out. It's Alice falling into Wonderland. It's an artist's paint box. It's a new day. ~ Stephen Moore

I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary. ~ Nas

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise. ~ John Henry Newman

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

The multiplicity of facts and writings is become so great that every thing must soon be reduced to extracts and dictionaries. ~ Voltaire

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

The piece you have written for us is called "The Gambol of the Caribou." Now, Mr. Steenwilly, I don't mean to be critical. What I know about music could be squeezed into a peanut shell, and there would still be room for the peanut. But I looked up "gambol" in the dictionary, and it means to "skip or jump about playfully." It also means to "caper or frolic." Caribou are large, ponderous, woolly reindeer.
They do not gambol. They do not caper. They do not frolic. And they certainly do not skip. It would be an interesting sight to see a herd of caribou skipping down the tundra, but, Mr. Steenwilly, it would never happen. You could write a piece called "The Caribou Standing Still and Freezing Their Butts Off." Or "The March of the Caribou." Or even "The Stampede of the Caribou." But "The Gambol of the Caribou" is not such a great image to build a piece of music around. ~ David Klass

Fail, it's not in my dictionary. I've got a good dictionary up there and the words 'fail' and 'failure' have been ruled out for years. I don't know what people are talking about who use that word. All I do know is temporary non-success, even if I've got to wait another 20 years for what I'm after, and I try to put that into people, no matter what their object in life. ~ Percy Cerutty

Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact. ~ Henry Rollins

Lena?" He glanced at the dictionary. "Are you 'pleased, contented, joyful, delighted'? Do you feel 'Lucky, fortunate'? Are things 'clever and fitting,' 'successful and suitable' for you?"

Lena stopped slicing vegetables and closed her eyes. "Read me the list again, please," she said.

He shut the book.

"What have I done, you got to stop and think an hour before you can tell me. All I ask is a simple yes or no! You're not contented, delighted, joyful?"

"Cows are contented, babies and old people in second childhood are delighted, God help them," she said. "As for 'joyful,' Lee? Look how I laugh scrubbing out the sink . . ."

He peered closely at her and his face relaxed. "Lena, it's true. A man doesn't appreciate. Next month, maybe, we'll get away."

"I'm not complaining!" she cried. "I'm not the one comes in with a list saying/stick out your tongue. Lee, do you ask what makes your heart beat all night? No! Next will you ask, What's marriage? Who knows, Lee? Don't ask. A man who thinks like that, how it runs, how things work, falls off the trapeze in the circus, chokes wondering how the muscles work in the throat. Eat, sleep, breathe, Lee, and stop staring at me like I'm something new in the house! ~ Ray Bradbury

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

The only time 'success' comes before the 'work' is in the dictionary. ~ Harvey Specter Suits

Milton took vaudeville, which, if you look up 'vaudeville' in the dictionary, right alongside of it, it says 'Milton Berle' - and he made it just a tremendous party. ~ Alan King

A good writer is likely to know and use, or find out and use, the words for common architectural features, like "lintel," "newel post," "corbelling," "abutment," and the concrete or stone "hems" alongisde the steps leading up into churches or public buildings; the names of carpenters' or pumbers' tools, artists' materials, or whatever furniture, implements, or processes his characters work with; and the names of common household items, including those we do not usually hear named, often as we use them. Above all, the writer should stretch his vocabulary of ordinary words and idioms--words and idioms he sees all the time and knows how to use but never uses. I mean here not language that smells of the lamp but relatively common verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The serious-mined way to vocabulary is to read through a dictionary, making lists of all the common words one happens never to use. And of course the really serious-minded way is to study languages--learn Greek, Latin, and one or two modern languages. Among writers of the first rank one can name very few who were not or are not fluent in at least two. Tolstoy, who spoke Russian, French, and English easily, and other languages and dialects with more difficulty, studied Greek in his forties. ~ John Gardner

Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

The word precipice does not exist in the dictionary of birds! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

This is cunnilingus you're describing, right?"
"Good lord, where did you find that word?"
"I saw it in the dictionary."
"Are we perusing the dictionary for profane words now?"
"I wanted to know how to pronounce it properly. The accent is on the third syllable."
" Ah, good to know. Because that word is always likely to come up in casual conversation. ~ Kathy Cecala

I wonder what the difference between love and control is, but I'm afraid to look those words up in a dictionary. ~ Kevin Sampsell

Every dictionary contains a world. I open a book of thieves' slang from Queen Anne's reign and they have a hundred words for swords, for wenches, and for being hanged. They did no die, they danced on nothing. Then I peek into any one of my rural Victorian dictionaries, compiled by a lonely clergyman, with words for coppices, thickets, lanes, diseases of horses and innumerable terms for kinds of eel. They gave names to the things of their lives, and their lives are collected in these dictionaries – every detail and joke and belief. I have their worlds piled up on my desk. ~ Mark Forsyth

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today ... because there's no space for all of them. ~ Erin McKean

If you are looking for sympathy, it's betweem shit and syphillis in the dictionary. ~ Shannon Stacey

Opinions are not to be learned by rote, like the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a dictionary. They are conclusions to be formed, and formed by each individual in the sacred and free citadel of the mind, and there enshrined beyond the arm of law to reach, or force to shake; ay! and beyond the right of impertinent curiosity to violate, or presumptuous arrogance to threaten. ~ Frances Wright

We stopped at a door that read GUIDANCE. I always found that term wonderfully vague. The dictionary definition of the word is "advice or information aimed at resolving a problem." In short, an attempt to help. But to us students, the word - this office - is far more frightening. It conjures up our college prospects, growing older, getting a real job - our future. Guidance seemed more like a term for cutting us loose. Spoon ~ Harlan Coben

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam. ~ Sylvia Plath

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

You weasel, good-for-nothing, scumbag, swine,
sleazebag, scumbucket, scoundrel, son-of-a-bitch!"
In the midst of everything, we all looked at Rosina,
who smiled sheepishly.
"Sorry. I was reading the Dictionary the other day."
I stared at her with incomprehension. ~ Kelly Batten

My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate. ~ China Mieville

I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don't allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday. ~ Maya Angelou

The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary ~ Dave Kellett

Speaking slang only makes a man sound ignorant. If you can't think of more appropriate words to express yourself, then open a dictionary and study. ~ Kim Vogel Sawyer

If you're unable to find your face in the dictionary, then take this opportunity to define yourself. ~ Faydra D. Fields