Transgresses Dictionary Quotes

A long silence descended. Long enough to walk to the end of a long, narrow room, look up something in a dictionary, and walk back. ~ Haruki Murakami

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance. ~ Socrates

Impossibility is a dictionary word. ~ Sri Chinmoy

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary - it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Please be SILENT and LISTEN.
I am the SCHOOLMASTER
and you are in the CLASSROOM.
Just like ELEVEN PLUS TWO equals
TWELVE PLUS ONE,
And even a FUNERAL can be REAL FUN,
You will find my DICTIONARY
is quite INDICATORY.
If you want to read my story, just look ...
THEN UNREAD. ~ Pseudonymous Bosch

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

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

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses. ~ Francine Du Plessix Gray

Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories. ~ James Webb Young

If you feel suddenly so anxious for laugh,
then it's too late to find ha-ha in dictionary. ~ Toba Beta

In the late afternoon the group assembled for cocktails. Without consorting about it they'd all dressed up, and the women's perfumes fought for supremacy in the living room. The sun set, candles were lit; Mme Reynard found an English dictionary among the cookbooks and proposed they play the game called Dictionary, whereby a player assigns an incorrect definition to an unknown word in hopes of fooling the other players.
She claimed the secateur was the sabateur's assistant. Malcom that costalgia was a shared reminiscence, Susan that a remotion was a lateral promotion, Frances that polonaise was an outmoded British condiment fabricated from a horse's bone marrow, Madeline that a puncheon was a contentious luncheon, and Joan that a syrt was a Syrian breath mint. Julius, whose English was not fully matured, said that unbearing was the act of "removing a bear from a peopled premises. ~ Patrick DeWitt

It's killing me, baby," he says, his voice much more calm and quiet. "It's killing me because I don't want you to go another day without knowing how I feel about you. And I'm not ready to tell you I'm in love with you, because I'm not. Not yet. But whatever this is I'm feeling - it's so much more than just like. It's so much more. And for the past few weeks I've been trying to figure it out. I've been trying to figure out why there isn't some other word to describe it. I want to tell you exactly how I feel but there isn't a single goddamned word in the entire dictionary that can describe this point between liking you and loving you, but I need that word. I need it because I need you to hear me say it. ~ Colleen Hoover

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

According to the dictionary, "Islam" means "submission" in Arabic. A Muslim is someone who is submissive to God. Why does he submit? Because his God is the best, the brawniest, the nattiest, but most of all because, if he says anything to the contrary, he will burn in hell until well after the end of the world. The believer is thus encouraged not to screw around with God under penalty of something worse than death for all eternity. ~ Charb

A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses. ~ Lucy Larcom

Books provide a handy shorthand when Rory's mostly MIA father, Christopher, is first introduced to viewers. Christopher's offer to buy Rory the Compact Oxford English Dictionary she covets is sincere; his lack of ability to follow through on his good intentions is Christopher in a nutshell. ~ Jennifer Crusie

in Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2011). 2. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (ed. Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman III [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1998], 150) speaks of the city as "humanity en masse" and therefore "humanity 'writ large.'" 3. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (p. 150) defines city as a "fortified habitation." 4. See Frank Frick, The City ~ Timothy J. Keller

People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers-
a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry. ~ Anthony Liccione

Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted. ~ Vivienne Westwood

Did you just use juxtaposition in a sentence?"
"Yes, Sage" he said patiently. "We use it all the time with art, ... That, and I know how to use a dictionary ~ Richelle Mead

That right there, what just happened, is called attraction. A-trak-shee-un. Look it up in the dictionary. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

I don't understand your book. Isn't every book a book of words? ~ Kristin Cashore

About 35-40% of the time, a player wants to create a word ending in a specific letter. This, however, is not the way we traditionally think, and, not to mention, this is not the way dictionaries are sorted. In other words, in many situations, conventional dictionaries are not arranged in an easy to use manner. This dictionary solves that problem by sorting on the last letter of the word. ~ Richard D. Ekstrom

The dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language. ~ William Stafford

*Cheating. Of any sort. And before you get all cocky and think you can easily handle this one, let me tell you what "cheating" means in my dictionary. Anything you wouldn't do if my daughter, or myself, were watching is cheating. Yeah - shit just got real. I'll ~ S.E. Hall

To observe the world carefully, to write a lot and often, on a schedule if necessary, to use the dictionary a lot, to look up word origins, to analyze closely the work of writers you admire, to read not only contemporaries but writers of the past, to learn at least one foreign language, to live an interesting life outside of writing. ~ Lydia Davis

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken. ~ Steven Pinker

Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time). ~ Ernest Hemingway,

I used the dictionary very minimally and I just wrote how I speak. And I speak very hateful manner usually. I constantly did that because I think the fans would get more out of it if they understood exactly what I'm saying - exactly where I'm coming from. ~ Kerry King

Who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand. ~ Samuel Johnson

Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything. ~ Alice Sebold

Mans vanity transgresses death ~ Erik Christian Haugaard

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

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

And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?" "I think so." Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending." "Snap ending." Mildred nodded. "Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. ~ Ray Bradbury

Repertitious has not had nearly the success in entering the language that serendipitous has had, most likely because its PR team isn't nearly as good. The noun form of the latter, serendipity, was made up in the 1750s by the novelist Horace Walpole, based on Serendip (a former name for Sri Lanka). Repertitious, on the other hand, has its first mention in Thomas Blount's dictionary of 1656. Writers - 1, lexicographers - 0. Resentient ~ Ammon Shea

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

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

My teacher's mind and my interest in youth has brought me to some renewed conclusions, and I pass them on earnestly to mature persons who are given to assisting young people off the trail. The dictionary has a word for them: iconoclast. It is defined as, "one who attacks cherished beliefs as shames." What if the cherished beliefs that are attacked along the way are true? What if they are the very beliefs that make these boys and girls worthwhile, promising people they are? What if the foundations of their faith are effectively shaken at this crucial period, and they dangle, with no substantial footings to stand on? ~ Marion D. Hanks

Turning love into a commodity contributed greatly to the expansion of modern alienation ... It is the love of an actual person that transgresses the checklists and lets us accept another as they actually are. ~ Rod Dubey