Vocabulary Words Quotes

The purpose of all of this is not to walk around with new vocabulary words, but to cause you to speculate on the marvel of your own being. ~ Frederick Lenz

Intelligence isn't just about how many levels of math courses you've taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over 6 characters. It's about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it - then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It's about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging. ~ Andrea Kuszewsk

The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don't need any fingers. ~ Larry Flynt

There's a lot of memorization that goes on in school. You memorize vocabulary words and all these sorts of things. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. ~ James Nicoll

I'm learning all the right vocabulary words - 'You're right, I'm wrong.' ~ George Stephanopoulos

I collect words
they are sweets in the mouth of sound. ~ Sally Gardner

She took a deep breath. "Let me begin again." If this girl wanted to play ball in front of her department head, Christine would bring it. She closed her eyes and accessed the most expensive Philo Department vocabulary words she possessed.
"Well, as human beings, when we immanentize the eschaton ... ~ Red Tash

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by. ~ A.S. Byatt

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account. ~ John Dewey

Use your dictionary to find the meaning of the new vocabulary words needed for this exercise before you begin. Write the words in your language in the space provided. Complete the following sentences using the correct form of the verb to be. 1. My aunt __________________ nice. 2. The clouds __________________ white. 3. Kathy __________________ sick. 4. The ribbons __________________ yellow. 5. We __________________ twins. 6. The windows __________________ open. ~ Julie Lachance

It is our duty and our joy to communicate our hearts to each other. Words assist us in this task. ~ Kate DiCamillo

My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary. ~ Margaret Edson

Students who take Latin are more proficient and earn higher scores on the verbal SAT exam. The business world has long recognized the importance of a rich vocabulary and rates it high as evidence of executive potential and success. Understanding the etymological history of a word gives the user vividness, color, punch, and precision. It also seems that the clearer and more numerous our verbal images, the greater our intellectual power. Wheelock's Latin is profuse with the etymological study of English and vocabulary enrichment. Our own experiences have shown that students will not only remember vocabulary words longer and better when they understand their etymologies, but also will use them with a sharper sense of meaning and nuance. ~ Frederic M. Wheelock

A vocabulary of truth and simplicity will be of service throughout your life. ~ Winston Churchill

When I was in fourth grade, we were learning vocabulary words, and the word nonconformist came up. The teacher said, "It's somebody who whatever everybody is doing, they do the opposite." I remember raising my hand and saying, "Mrs. Christiansen, I would like to be a nonconformist." ~ Nick Offerman

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary. ~ Ari Marmell

You have to defend your honor. And your family. ~ Suzanne Vega

Sometimes the acutest of agonies are difficult to find expression in the given vocabulary: words fail but pain prevails. ~ Girdhar Joshi

And one of our vocabulary words was nonconformist. I just dug that word. I heard the explanation, the definition, and I felt like I had just learned about a new hero in a kick-ass Marvel comic book. ~ Nick Offerman

Yes, you can be a dreamer and a doer too, if you will remove one word from your vocabulary: impossible. ~ Robert H. Schuller

We talk about spreading democracy and freedom all over the world, but they are to us words rather than conditions. We haven't even got them here in America, and the farther we get into this war the farther we get away from democracy and freedom. Where is it leading us to, and when will it end? The war might stop this winter, but that is improbable. It may go on for fifty years or more. That also is improbable. The elements are too conflicting and confused to form any accurate judgment of its length. There may be a series of wars, one after another, going on indefinitely. ~ Charles Lindbergh

Have you…"
"Have I what?" Gray prompted, promptly kicking himself for doing so. God only knew what she'd ask now. Or what damn fool thing he'd say in response.
"Have you ever seen a Botticelli? Painting, I mean. A real one, in person?"
The breath he'd been holding whooshed out of him. "Yes."
"Oh." She bit her lip. "What was it like?"
"I…" His hand gestured uselessly. "I haven't words to describe it."
"Try."
Her eyes were too clear, too piercing. He swallowed and shifted his gaze to a damp lock of hair curling at her temple "Perfect. Luminous. So beautiful, your chest aches. And so smooth, like glass. Your fingers itch to touch it."
"But you can't."
"No," he said quietly, his gaze sliding back to meet hers. "It isn't allowed."
"And you care what others will allow?" She took a step toward him, her fingers trailing along the grooved tabletop. "What if you were alone, and there was no one to see? Would you touch it then?"
Gray shook his head and dropped his gaze to his hands. "It's not…" He paused, picking over his words like fruits in an island market. Testing and discarding twice as many as he chose. "There's a varnish, you see. Some sort of gloss. If I touched it with these rough hands, I'd mar it somehow. Make it a bit less beautiful. Couldn't live with myself then."
"So-" She leaned one hip against the table's edge, making her whole body one sinuous, sweeping curve. Gray sucked in a lungful of heat. "It isn't the ru ~ Tessa Dare

No matter how much I love you, I can't become you and you can't be me. Until death, we will remain as two separate entities, but it's precisely because of that that we choose to join as one. Melding into each other and becoming one with you. What words cannot express we use our bodies to convey. Deep in our hearts, where lies don't exist. I want to feel you to flame this passion to its heights. I love you. I love you. ~ Eda Yuuri

What are words, anyway? Right, words are beauty itself! Polish 'em up enough, and just hearin' 'em can touch your very soul ~ Ryohgo Narita

Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning. ~ Frederick Douglass

Words and pictures can work together to communicate more powerfully than either alone. ~ William Albert Allard

Her voice was flat, in a way Myrna recognized from years of listening to people trying to rein in their emotions. To squash them down, flatten, them, and with them their words and their voices. Desperately trying to make the horrific sound mundane. ~ Louise Penny

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. ~ Frederick Douglass

I'll keep doing it even though she's not here to defend.
Because there are others like him still. Tonight they used words they know, words that don't bother people anymore. They said bitch. They told another girl they would put their dicks in her mouth. No one protested because this is our language now. But then I used my words, strung in phrases that cut deep, and people paid attention; people gasped. People didn't know what to think.
My language is shocking. ~ Mindy McGinnis

Final thoughts are so, you know, final. Let's call them closing words. ~ Craig Armstrong

The jovial party broke up next morning. Breakings-up are capital things in our school-days, but in after life they are painful enough. Death, self-interest, and fortune's changes, are every day breaking up many a happy group, and scattering them far and wide; and the boys and girls never come back again. ~ Charles Dickens

Words can wound, but they're bridges too. Like the bridges that are all the Genghis left behind. Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound ~ Max Gladstone

Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap? ~ Jack Spicer

Everyone's encouraged to put things in their own words, to discover new things. So there's definitely an element of dynamic improvisation, for sure, which I think gives those scenes some of their energy, some of their electricity. ~ Steve Zissis

As exits go, that's a good one. It was pretty hard to have the last word with a vampire. ~ Charlaine Harris

In God's vocabulary, 'lost' is an unnecessary adjective that is easily erased by the adjective 'found' if we would simply be brave enough to hand Him the eraser. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence. ~ John Green

A fire burned in his belly with Helen's words, her challenge laid bare. Are you a king worthy of great glory, or a pretender clamoring for attention at the edge of the world? One look to Menelaus was all the reminder Agamemnon needed of how much he detested that comparison. ~ Aria Cunningham

I've tried so hard to use those two annoying F words; forgive and forget. It never works. ~ Calia Read

From Oleg Cassini's memoirs... I learned that Cassini had also suffered from insomnia. One night, he woke from uneasy dreams with the opening of Dante's Inferno setting off 'a clamorous tumult in [his] subconscious: "Midway the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest."' When I read these terrible words, chills ran up my arms. I knew 'midway the journey' was supposed to mean midlife crisis. But it seemed to me one had always been midway the journey of our life, and would be maybe right up until the moment of death. ~ Elif Batuman

Kingsley could 'do' the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus shelter (this was very demanding and once led to heart palpitations). To create the hiss and crackle of a wartime radio broadcast delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for him scant problem (a tape of it, indeed, was played at his memorial meeting, where I was hugely honored to be among the speakers). The pièce de résistance, an attempt by British soldiers to start up a frozen two-ton truck on a windy morning 'somewhere in Germany,' was for special occasions only. One held one's breath as Kingsley emitted the first screech of the busted starting-key. His only slightly lesser vocal achievement - of a motor-bike yelling in mechanical agony - once caused a man who had just parked his own machine in the street to turn back anxiously and take a look. The old boy's imitation of an angry dog barking the words 'fuck off' was note-perfect. ~ Christopher Hitchens

If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music. ~ Jean Sibelius

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things. ~ Izaak Walton

An olive, with a pit ... ~ Victor Feguer

Oh, you know I'm only human;
I bend and fall and break
You cut me and I bleed
I'm a mess for you to make
So forget the words and give me deeds
My heart was yours to take. ~ Emery Lord

The words 'I'm sorry' are so powerful that it's almost difficult to overstate ~ Dennis Prager

Someone's got to be the hero," he replied, and walked off across the hull.
"Famous last words," I muttered. ~ Ransom Riggs

Because she was looking down and focusing her attention so precisely, Alice lost track of time and of herself. She wouldn't be able to put it into words, except to say she felt removed from the world. Or just at its edge. At the edge of the wild and beautiful world. She felt small, too. But part of something large. She was happy. ~ Kevin Henkes

No new truths await discovery; everything has been given already. But it has all been scattered abroad and dispersed, misrepresented by analysis, dulled by routine repetition. The essential words have been prostituted. We must recover the vital meaning of these ideas. ~ Isha Schwaller De Lubicz

When you hear on the radio and read in newspapers and magazines and books and speeches the words 'the Occupied Territories' year after year, and festival after festival, and summit conference after summit conference, you think it's somewhere at the end of the earth. You think there is absolutely no way you can get to it. Do you see how close it is? How touchable? How real? I can hold it in my hand, like a handkerchief.
Now here I am looking at it.

Who would dare make it into an abstraction now that it has declared its physical self to the senses? ~ Mourid Barghouti

The words you can't find, you borrow. ~ Gabrielle Zavin

Well, there are certain words and emotions I don't want kids hearing, and I'm not changing because they think it's going to sell better. This is going to sound horrible, but I got 12 million votes doing what I did. ~ Clay Aiken

There are times ... when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth.
... When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. ~ Mary Doria Russell

The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. ~ Francis Bacon

She was talking about the future. About their future, as if it were settled and agreed upon that they would be together. As if she'd accepted the mate bond.
The hard crust of time moved inside him--calcified years shifting, shifting, threatening to break apart under the assault of this new flood of feeling. He didn't move. Didn't breathe. Didn't allow his fingers to tighten on the hand he held. He was too strong. He could crush it, could quite literally crush her bones if he gripped too hard. He could hurt her.
He wouldn't. Easier to stop breathing than to take that chance. But she wanted his promise, didn't she? To give her that, he needed air.
[His] chest heaved. The breath he drew was ragged. He felt it all the way down. "All right. But you have to promise the same..."
Her face was still and solemn, her eyes large. It was too dark to see their beautiful ocean color, yet he could feel the ocean in them washing over him. Her voice was quiet. "I do so vow."
Those were the right words. The perfect words. Were they Wiccan? Part of some sidhe ritual? It didn't matter. He gave them back to her. "And I, too, do so vow."
(Blood Challenge by Eileen Wilks) ~ Eileen Wilks