Thesaurus Quotes

I tried to find a word for it in my thesaurus, but there isn't one. At least, not one that doesn't belittle the plight of POWs and victims of famine. I guess we can just call it beyond suck. -Lulu Dark ~ Bennett Madison

Don't ya'll have anything better to do than to mess with Myles?" she asked. "Sadly, Mom, they don't," Myles said. It's the only respite they have from their monotonous, inconsequential tedium of an existence." Amir's eyes widened. "Duck, Pop! He's gonna big word us to death." Amir lifted his forearm. "Thesaurus-shields up! ~ Marcus Major

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

His eyes searched hers. I'd rather just be me. Feel comfortable in my own skin and be able to speak my mind without having to carry a damned thesaurus. Sure doesn't seem worth giving up who you are to please others. Far as I'm concerned, they either like me or they don't. Their choice. ~ Leah Braemel

I don't like ten dollar words. Anybody can do anything with a thesaurus. Make me feel a certain way with the least amount of words possible and I respect that. ~ Rude Jude

You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: it wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena. ~ Jon Stewart

My son's always showing me pictures of dinosaurs and asking me what their names are. I dont know so I make stuff up: That son is a thesaurus. ~ Craig Ferguson

I am bravery. I am courage. I am valor. I am daring. I am holding a thesaurus. ~ Demetri Martin

My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They're intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it's appropriate to have policies that reflect that They don't comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society. ~ Ken Cuccinelli

It seems that, depending upon which side of the thesaurus-writer's gaze we sit, one's uniqueness can be deemed to be either eccentric or distinctive. Both, in my opinion, are good. ~ Fennel Hudson

It's funny, this - so many words to describe the same thing," she smiled..."Penis is simply an anatomical appendage, as exciting as a finger or a phalange. A willy is something small and flaccid, and at least slightly humorous. Prick is the organ as viewed with distaste, perhaps with so much as to describe the entire body it's attached to, like a dick, but more so. Phallus is a symbol of fertility, but my favourite...is the cock, which is only ever the hard, real thing, unleashed and ready to dive head-first into any waiting orifice. Or hole, while I'm in thesaurus mode. ~ Morgana Blackrose

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory ... dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it. ~ Rumer Godden

Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through the dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric,' a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation,' the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a 'cursory' journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the 'hieroglyph' of his displeasure. ~ Ian McEwan

Sometimes I think people think poetry must be filled with flowery language, thesaurus-driven vocabulary or the dreaded "purple prose," which is often prevalent in my genre...But oftentimes the best poetry isn't difficult to understand at all. It's the juxtaposition of the words. The line breaks. The enjambs. The shape of the poem. Or the double meanings the positioning of the words make the reader feel or think or do. ~ R.B. O'Brien

No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you. ~ Dorothy Fields

Thesaurus [10w]
There's no synonym for thesaurus ~
the closest one is hashtags. ~ Beryl Dov

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism. ~ Terry Pratchett

What is another name for a Thesaurus? ~ Steven Wright

Apparently, this really was Kill Charley Davidson Week. Or at least Horribly Maim Her ... It would probably never get government recognition, though, destined to be underappreciated like Halloween or Thesaurus Day. ~ Darynda Jones

Last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you but could only find rain and more rain and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, like an orchestra. ~ Shinji Moon

What's another word for thesaurus? ~ Steven Wright

One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home. ~ Ben Yagoda

I entered the word "crisis" into Thesaurus.com, it suggested "hot potato" as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know that Thesaurus.com lists "hot potato" as a synonym for "crisis. ~ Aziz Ansari

We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.

The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying 'OH NO YOU DON'T COCK-CHEEK'. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

She won't ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus).

She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm).

And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.

I will stop finding her hairs.


I will stop hearing her breathing. ~ Max Porter

Every artist needs canvass, mine just happens to be Microsoft Word and a Thesaurus. ~ Lori Lesko

You don't want to sound as though you used a Sharper Image catalogue for a thesaurus. ~ Renni Browne

Yet, when I'm alone, I rarely feel lonely. If I were writing the thesaurus entries for alone, the synonyms would include: authentic, free, individual, indulgent, open, peaceful, protected, pure, quiet, rejuvenating, solitary. Thanks to the amount of time I spend alone, I'm on intimate terms with myself. I have a running internal dialogue that informs my life, my writing, my relationships. I observe and absorb the world around me. I'm good at being alone. ~ Cynthia Kim

The Thesaurus is to the writer what a rhyming dictionary is to
the songwriter - a reminder of all the choices - and you should use it with
gratitude. ~ William Zinsser

it's going great. Two months in, and I've created three apps."

"Apps?"

"For people who buy my book as an e-book --which will be everybody. The first is called Don't Look. It's for the overly sensitive. It blurs and turns the type red when a dog dies or a baby is born with a birth defect. Stuff like that. My second is It's Not Okay When You Say It, and it delivers an electrical zap if the reader laughs at a racial slur. My third is Jesus Thesaurus, which replaces explicit sexual language with church words. So, when one of my characters 'saints' a guy's 'disciple', He'll beg her to 'cavalry' his 'Baptists' and 'shout amen'. ~ Helen Ellis

Carrying his books from one life into the next was nothing new to Zuckerman. He had left his family for Chicago in 1949 carrying in his suitcase the annotated works of Thomas Wolfe and Roget's Thesaurus. Four years later, age twenty, he left Chicago with five cartons of classics, bought secondhand out of his spending money, to be stored in his parents' attic while he served two years in the Army. In 1960, when he was divorced from Betsy, there were thirty cartons to be packed from the shelves no longer his; in 1965, when he was divorced from Virginia, there were just under sixty to cart away; in 1969, he left Bank Street with eighty-one boxes of books. ~ Philip Roth

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 was like 14 and decided I wanted to be a rapper, so I needed a hip rapper name. I was with one of my friends in class and literally went through a thesaurus. I saw "temper" and thought, "I like this, but it's too much." My friend was like, "What about Tinie for tiny," and that was that. ~ Tinie Tempah

Drake chimed in, "No, Mortimer or Horatio - something long suffering and filled with angst."
"Mortimer? Horatio? What the hell is angst? What kind of word is that? Dude, have you been reading a thesaurus again? What did I tell you about using words you can't understand? ~ Kris Michaels

The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.
Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends ... ~ Hunter S. Thompson

So. Her husband-to-be was a philanderer. A smooth operator. A debaucher. A rake. A frisker. (Jane was something of a walking thesaurus when she was upset, a side effect of too much reading.) ~ Cynthia Hand

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

She grinned. "This is the fun part."
She didn't even look, but a moment before the demon hit, massive wings snapped out of her back with lightning speed and a thundercrack, smacking the demon and flicking it over the rooftops like it was a ... gnat.
Okay, so the thesaurus in my head wasn't cranking out the synonyms because I was too busy gawking at the enormous white wings checkered with several feathers the same brilliant blue as her hair and shirt. They fluttered with a whispering grace, sending a soft breeze to cool my sweaty skin.
I blinked when she snapped her fingers in my face.
"Did you hear anything I just said?"
"You have wings?"
She sighed. Her shoulders and wings slumped. "I need you to focus, dear, so listen up. You must stick close to the Hex Boys. They'll protect you whilst - "
"Where did the wings come from? ~ A&E Kirk

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. ~ Stephen King

I had recently come into the possession of a Thesaurus. You would not believe how many words there are! When I opened that book, I was like, whoa! Word party! ~ The Harvard Lampoon

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

I realized with horror that I'd left my thesaurus in English class, and so wouldn't be able to describe their beauty in suitably poetic terms, but let me tell you, they were smokin' hot and no bullshit. ~ Stephfordy Mayo

The man is not wholly evil – he has a Thesaurus in his cabin." (Captain Hook as described by J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan) ~ Debra Eve

Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards. ~ Toni Morrison

Not to sound corny, but intelligence is big. Everything fades, and everything can be modified. But intelligence is something you can't fake. I'm not even talking about whether you can read a thesaurus backwards. But there is a beauty in common sense. ~ Wale

You have that expression on your face that speaks of incipient moral dubiousness,' Torin observed, making me glad I'd bought that thesaurus a few years back. ~ Rachel Hawkins

I also decided I want to have a meaningful relationship. But only with one person. And then stay with that person for a long time. Like, uh, monography."
Stephen types a few keys in a quick rhythm. "It's shame your epiphany wasn't accompanied by a thesaurus. ~ Valerie Z. Lewis

Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can't contain Him. Isn't it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate? ~ Francis Chan

I wrote it three times - with a Thesaurus. ~ Gypsy Rose Lee

You are a cad,' he told himself. 'A cur. A bounder. A scoundrel. A ... human thesaurus. ~ Sarah M. Eden

792. Thief.-- N. thief, robber, homo trium literarum, pilferer, rifler, filcher, plagiarist.

spoiler, depredator, pillager, marauder; harpy, shark, land-shark, falcon, moss-trooper, bushranger, Bedouin, brigand, freebooter, bandit, thug, dacoit, pirate, corsair, viking, Paul Jones; buccan-eer, -ier; piqu-, pick-eerer; rover, ranger, privateer, filibuster; rapparee, wrecker, picaroon; smuggler, poacher, plunderer, racketeer.

highwayman, Dick Turpin, Claude Duval, Macheath, knight of the road, foodpad, sturdy beggar; abductor, kidnapper.

cut-, pick-purse; pick-pocket, light-fingered gentry; sharper; card-, skittle-sharper; crook; thimble-rigger; rook, Greek, blackleg, leg, welsher, defaulter; Autolycus, Cacus, Barabbas, Jeremy Diddler, Robert Macaire, artful dodger, trickster; swell mob, chevalier d'industrie; shop-lifter.

swindler, peculator; forger, coiner, counterfeiter, shoful; fence, receiver of stolen goods, duffer; smasher.

burglar, housebreaker; cracks-, mags-man; Bill Sikes, Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild, Raffles, cat burglar.

[Roget's Thesaurus, 1941 Revision] ~ Peter Mark Roget

Generations of British writers would look up to Roget as a kindred soul who could offer both emotional as well as intellectual sustenance. In the stage directions to Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie includes an homage to Roget: The night nursery of the Darling family, which is the scene of our opening Act, is at the top of a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury. We might have a right to place it where we will, and the reason Bloomsbury is chosen is that Mr. Roget once lived there. So did we in the days when his Thesaurus was our only companion in London; and we whom he has helped to wend our way through life have always wanted to pay him a little compliment. For Barrie, Roget's masterpiece was synonymous with virtue itself. To describe the one saving grace of the play's villain, Captain Hook, Barrie adds, "The man is not wholly evil--he has a Thesaurus in his cabin. ~ Joshua Kendall

Diction is not memorizing vocabulary, not memorizing word lists, not overusing the thesaurus, not replacing all the short words with long ones. ~ Jeff Anderson