Tottered Dictionary Quotes

The Devil will use our words and his dictionary. ~ Adrian Rogers

There ought to be a dictionary of smiles; somewere you can look them up and find out what they mean. ~ Tom Holt

Whatever wisdom I have has been hard-earned – each meaning carefully culled out of the dictionary of human experiences and emotions and put in its precise place in the matrix. Meaning doesn't come easy. The Great Crossword Setter in the Sky is capricious and wilful, demanding absolute obedience. You can waste the better part of a lifetime arguing about the randomness of the clues, the setting of the squares, why a certain square is black and not white as you need it to be, question the whole point of doing the crossword – what, after all, is to be gained by solving it. Only after all the chattering is over and you give your complete attention to it, does the perfection of the pattern reveal itself. As is, where is, everything fits. And at the end, when it's all done, there is no reward to be had – the joy of doing it right is all the reward there ever is. (A Deepavali Gift) ~ Manjul Bajaj

Locavore" may have been the 2007 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year, but there's already been a word for those whose diets are restricted to seasonal items grown in their immediate area: That word is "peasant. ~ Brett Martin

In the private library of my spirit, there is a dictionary of words that aren't. ~ Tayari Jones

The [commercial] strip is marketed with the come-on of comfort (the Comfort Inn) and with the promise of a home on the road, a home where nobody knows your name and they're glad to see you as long as you can pay. The strip lives in the contradiction of the name Home Depot - domesticity on a gargantuan scale. Home - "a person's native place," "at ease," "deep; to the heart," says the dictionary, and Depot, "a storehouse or a 'warehouse.'" (Warehouse of the Heart?) ~ Howard Mansfield

The woman rolled her eyes. "DarkRiver males are damn possessive and complete exhibitionists during the mating dance."
Sascha ran through her dictionary of changeling terminology and could find no fit. "Mating dance?"
Mercy whistled. Dorian winced. Tamsyn suddenly got interested in her dough. Clay and Vaughn mysteriously disappeared. Behind her, Lucas's body was a hard wall of heat. "I think we need to discuss this upstairs. ~ Nalini Singh

Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn't know, she would always look it up in the dictionary. ~ Geraldine McCaughrean

A tremor of apprehension encircled the room. None of the ladies required any preparation to pronounce on a question of morals; but when they were called ethics it was different. The club, when fresh from the "Encyclopedia Brittanica," the "Reader's Handbook" or Smith's "Classical Dictionary," could deal confidently with any subject; but when taken unawares it had been known to define agnosticism as a heresy of the Early Church and Professor Froude as a distinguished histologist; and such minor members as Mrs. Leveret still secretly regarded ethics as something vaguely pagan. ~ Edith Wharton

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests. ~ Alice Sebold

There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books. ~ Charles Simic

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

No word has one specific definition.Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life
-Ms.Conyers of Sarah Dessen's Lock and Key ~ Sarah Dessen

Mace leaned on his shovel and did a passable imitation. "'I think we'd rather not.' Very good, guv'nor. I'll remember that next time."
"Divigation was nice. Where'd you get that one?"
"He swallowed a ****ing dictionary," Corporal Nettle said proudly. ~ Ian McEwan

The definition of a hero changes depending on the needs of the person with the dictionary. And of late I've become more aware how much being a hero to the empire means being a war criminal to the rest of the world. ~ Lindsay Buroker

Love is binary in nature, either yes or no. True love is just a dictionary thing... ~ Ankit Rawat

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

Sometimes words just don't get you there ... don't let you say all the stuff from deep in your heart, stuff that no dictionary has a name for. ~ Bill Condon

According to the dictionary entry on extracellular matrix in the Biology Online resource, biologists have recently become aware of the fact that an organism's environment or substrate (e.g. extracellular matrix) can influence the behavior of cells quite markedly, possibly even more significantly than DNA in the development of complex organisms. The removal of cells from their usual environment to another environment can have far-reaching effects. ~ Max More

At the stomp of boots on grass, I ease my eyes open. Aithinne leans down with a grin. "You didn't die. See? I told you it was easy." She offers me a hand and I take it, rising unsteadily to my feet.

"I've been bitten by some demonic woodland creature. My legs have been shredded by razor-sharp trees. We almost died. Easy? I'm getting you a damn dictionary."

I inspect my bleeding arm. The cut bisects five of the marks Lonnrach made, and I feel inexplicably proud of that. Good. Replace the old, bad memories with new badges. Start over.

"A dictionary," she repeats. "Is that a type of dessert?"

For the love of - "It's a type of book that explains the meaning of words."

"Oh. That sounds terribly dull. I was really hoping for dessert."

I'm hoping to end this rescue with my sanity intact. ~ Elizabeth May

IF INDIVIDUAL LEADERSHIP QUALITY AND CAPABILITY IS PERFECTLY GENUINE TO TACKLE & INSCRIBE ANY ANGLE OF IMPOSSIBILITY INTO POSSIBLE ACCORDING TO MODERN TRENDS.THAT IS DICTIONARY MEANING OF LEADERSHIP IN ANY WALK OF GLOBAL PERSONAL,OFFICIAL AND SOCIAL LIFE AFFAIRS.LEADER MEANS THE MODERN, HI-FI,SOPHISTICATED AN ALL IN ONE EXPERIENCED KNOW HOW FLASH EXCELLENCE MIND SOFT WARE FOR ALL ANGLES OF GLOBAL ENACT DRIVE 24/7/3600 TILL LAST DAY OF SUN & MOON MOVE ON UNIVERSAL SPACE. ~ Various

[ ... ]Are both of you ... ?"
"Manscaped?" Dante smiled. "I'm fucking Italian; I been mowing my lawn since I was thirteen. ~ Damon Suede

Sorry is not meant that you are wrong but is meant that you value the relationship."But in my dictionary "Sorry is too late", I rarely use this word! ~ Chum Visal

I have written all the 406 pages of my book in Swahili words. Even the countries are in Swahili. Instead of 'Nigeria', for example, I have written 'Nijeria'. That is how it is written in the Swahili dictionary. This can seem as a minor detail and that people may find my mission close to ridiculous! However, single letters and commas matter. ~ Enock Maregesi

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words. ~ Samuel Johnson

If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians? ~ Deb Caletti

And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages. And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous poetry and painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti's poetry and the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value which is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic note was struck by Theophile Gautier's advice to the young poet to read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a poet's reading. ~ Oscar Wilde

The dictionary contains no metaphors. ~ Paul Ricoeur

Where in a medical dictionary does it say a woman cannot handle such things? What is a man's soul made of that a woman's is not? I had no idea my innards were composed of cotton and kittens, while yours are filled with steel and steam-driven parts. ~ Kerri Maniscalco

Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

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

Get thee to a dictionary and be relentless about your visits there. p. 591 ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

I assume you're aware of the definition of the word hypocrite? Because I'm thinking if we looked it up in the dictionary, your picture would be right next to it. ~ Jt Geissigner

Glint, glisten, glitter, gleam ...
Tiffany thought a lot about words, in the long hours of churning butte. Onomatopoetic , she'd discovered in the dictionary, meant words that sounded like the thing they were describing, like cuckoo. But she thought there should be a word that sounds like the noise a thing would make if that thing made a noise even though, actually, it doesn't, but would if it did.
Glint, for example. If light made a noise as it reflected off a distant window, it'd go glint!And the light of tinsel, all those little glints chiming together, would make a noise like glitterglitter. Gleam was a clean, smooth noise from a surface that intended to shine all day. And glisten was the soft, almost greasy sound of something rich and oily. ~ Terry Pratchett

BOOK, a four-letter word for truth serum" -Kevin 'Freak' from Freak's Dictionary
"Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick pg 161 ~ Rodman Philbrick

The discipline of AutoQuotery is based on generating axiomatic entries that technically provide a mechanism to serve later on as a network of neural synapses between the very same lexemes it is utilizing. However, those lexical atomic units are signed differently -by the AutoQuoter- from their usages in the dictionary and therefore behave semantically in a wave-like pattern and syntactically in a particle-like pattern within the boundaries of the produced Quotery Lexicon itself. As time passes by, the semantics attain a standing-waves state mimicking thereby the dictionary; and almost ends up putting the synapses in an idle state when no more signals are being transferred between the lexemes. Philosophy would insist that an idle state cannot be reached, while Reason would emphasize -as a response- that such a perception is only pedagogically sensed when engaging (by studying, practicing or teaching) in the AutoQuotery discipline. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

We have control on every word of the dictionary except for the 2:; "Death" and "Heart ~ Nikita Tak

The debate is whether the war is legal. It has brought pain, misery and desperation to hundreds of thousands of people. Does that sound legal to you? To me it sounds like the dictionary definition of the legal profession. ~ Frankie Boyle

You invented the words, and you gave me a dictionary and you said, 'These are what the words mean.' Well, this is what they mean to you, but to someone else, they have got a different dictionary. ~ Charles Manson

I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time, I thought the greatest word was 'jejune' and I would throw it into every piece because something about it appealed to me. ~ Tom Wolfe

The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one - at least, no male person - ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from HER. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker's Almanack. You can put even the Oxford Dictionary to evil purposes by looking up words like - and - . ~ George Orwell

Open a dictionary at random; metaphors fill every page. Take the word "fathom." for example. The meaning is clear. A fathom is a measurement of water depth, equivalent to about six feet. But fathom also means "to understand." Why?

Scrabble around in the word's etymological roots. "Fathom comes from the Anglo-Saxon faethm, meaning "the two arms outstretched." The term was originally used as a measurement of cloth, because the distance from fingertip to fingertip for the average man with his arms outsretched is roughly six feet. This technique was later extended to sounding the depths of bodies of water, since it was easy to lower a cord divided into six-foot increments, or fathoms, over the side of a boat. But how did fathom come to mean "to understand," as in "I can't fathom that" or "She's unfathomable"? Metaphorically, of course.

You master something- you learn to control or accept it-when you embrace it, when you get your arms around it, when you take it in hand. You comprehend something when you grasp it, take its measure, get to the bottom of it-fathom it.

Fathom took on its present significance in classic Aristotelian fashion: through the metaphorical transfer of its original meaning (a measurement of cloth or water) to an abstract concept (understanding). This is the primary purpose of metaphor: to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't yet been named or so abstract that they cannot ~ James Geary