Word Salad Quotes

Part of what interests me is the impulse to dismiss and how often it slides into the very incoherence or hysteria of which women are routinely accused. It would be nice if, say, Rush Limbaugh, who called Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" for testifying to Democrats in Congress about the need to fund birth control and who apparently completely failed to comprehend how birth control works - Limbaugh the word-salad king, the factually challenged, the eternally riled - got called hysterical once in a while. ~ Rebecca Solnit

THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted. ~ Mark Kurlansky

Dean Rolfe squirmed, coughed, and looked everywhere except in Frank's eyes. To do what was fraught with legal ramifications. These were the words he had carefully avoided, the hidden croutons in his carefully prepared word salad. "To give you the reach to keep tabs on certain people, no matter where they go. You know . . . a surveillance system. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

If you think you're going to have a thoughtful discussion with someone who is toxic, be prepared for epic mindfuckery rather than conversational mindfulness. Malignant narcissists and sociopaths use word salad, circular conversations, ad hominem arguments, projection and gas lighting to disorient you and get you off track should you ever disagree with them or challenge them in any way. They do this in order to discredit, confuse and frustrate you, distract you from the main problem and make you feel guilty for being a human being with actual thoughts and feelings that might differ from their own. In their eyes, you are the problem if you happen to exist. ~ Shahida Arabi

They also bring to mind what sometimes seems to be a rapt predilection of small but influential cults of intellectuals or esthetes for what is generally regarded as perverse dispirited or distastefully unintelligible. The award of a Nobel Prize in literature to Andre Gide who in his work fervently and openly insists that pederasty is the superior and preferable way of life for adolescent boys furnishes a memorable example of such judgments. Renowned critics and some professors in our best universities reverently acclaim as the superlative expression of genius James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake a 628page collection of erudite gibberish indistinguishable to most people from the familiar word salad produced by hebephrenic patients on the back wards of any state hospital. ~ Hervey M. Cleckley

I have worked locked psych wards and had patients give me stories they wrote or poems and this reminded me of that...
Word salad! ~ Montzalee Wittmann

The current President's verbal abuse of language itself - with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he's serving, he's always serving meaninglessness. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The word salad here means any vegetable eaten raw or uncooked, e.g., a bowl of cold pasta in olive oil with a token vegetable is not a salad. I encourage my patients to eat two huge salads a day, with the goal of consuming an entire head of romaine or other green lettuce daily. I ~ Joel Fuhrman

In meditation you experience time slowing down because you can notice more things per discreet moment and you're more open ... The word 'meditation' in Sanskrit comes from the word 'familiarization' - as in familiarization with one's own mind. ~ Richard Davidson

It is not uncommon in the church for us to urge each other to witness to our faith and sometimes we do so as though it were easy to do. It is not. Our faith is so profoundly intimate and important that we draw our breath in pain to tell the story of our faith in God. And to find the appropriate word to speak even to a receptive mind is difficult. Especially if the opportunity that presents itself comes as a total surprise. ~ Fred B. Craddock

They all turned to the dark-haired woman standing quietly to the side and slightly behind Aunt Charlotte. She was, in a word, gorgeous. Everything about her was perfection, from her shiny hair to her milky-white skin. Her face was heart-shaped, her lips full and pink, and her eyelashes were so long that Honoria thought they must
touch her brows if she opened her eyes too wide.
"Well," Honoria murmured to Iris, "at least no one will be looking at us. ~ Julia Quinn

I think so much of writing is an instinct, or a feel for a scene, or a feel for a character. You have to put into words the word 'tone,' which I think is thrown around a lot and can mean a hundred different things, but communicating that to other people is definitely a challenge. ~ Elizabeth Meriwether

Improvisation is a weird word because we often think it means that you make things up out of whole cloth right there on the spot, and that's rarely the case in acting. You have to know who the character is, what the situation is and what is needed. ~ Roger Ebert

But the idea of science and systematic knowledge is wanting to our whole instruction alike, and not only to that of our business class ... In nothing do England and the Continent at the present moment more strikingly differ than in the prominence which is now given to the idea of science there, and the neglect in which this idea still lies here; a neglect so great that we hardly even know the use of the word science in its strict sense, and only employ it in a secondary and incorrect sense. ~ Matthew Arnold

I am old, but the word to me means familiar, comfortable. Accustomed after long and venerable use. Not dilapidated and useless. ~ Sherwood Smith

In life I will fall, I will backslide, but mark my word I will never give up. ~ Jonathan Anthony Burkett

The word of God is the only light in the darkness of this life, a word of life, consolation, and supreme blessedness. Where this precious and saving word is absent, nothing remains but a fearsome and terrifying darkness, error and faction, death and every calamity, and the tyranny of the devil himself, as we can see with our own eyes every day. ~ Timothy F. Lull

Prayer is the Word of God which comes to you when you are silent enough, still enough and expectant to receive it. ~ Joel S. Goldsmith

Salad freshens without enfeebling and fortifies without irritating. ~ Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

There is a secret key to nurturing your health. This key is an essential secret transmission that any person aiming to take good care of himself must understand and observe. The secret is in the single word decrease. Decrease means to reduce all of your ten thousand affairs and avoid increasing them. Be frugal in everything or, in other words, decrease your desires ~ Kaibara Ekken

Give full attention to what you do. If you give a rapt attention to what you do, you can have what you could have done in 3 hours well completed within 2 hours or less. Concentration is the key word. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Man may deceive his fellow-men, deception may follow deception, and the children of the wicked one may have power to seduce the foolish and untaught, till naught but fiction feeds the many, and the fruit of falsehood carries in its current the giddy to the grave; but one touch with the finger of his love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all into insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind. (Messenger and Advocate Oct 1934 pp 14-16) ~ Oliver Cowdery

One word, two lips, three four five fingers form a fist.
One corner, two parents, three four five reasons to hide.
One child, two eyes, three four seventeen years of fear.
A broken broomstick, a pair of wile faces, angry whispers, locks on my door. ~ Tahereh Mafi

There is a plain under a dim sky. It is covered with gentle rolling curves that might remind you of something else if you saw it from a long way away, and if you did see it from a long way away you'd be very glad that you were, in fact, a long way away.

Three gray figures floated just above it. Exactly what they were can't be described in normal language. Some people might call them cherubs, although there was nothing rosy-cheeked about them. They might be rumored among those who see to it that gravity operates and that time stays separate from space. Call them auditors. Auditors of reality.

They were in conversation without speaking. They didn't need to speak. They just changed reality so that they had spoken.

One said, It has never happened before. Can it be done?

One said, It will have to be done. There is a personality. Personalities come to an end. Only forces endure.

It said this with satisfaction.

One said, Besides... there have been irregularities. Where you get personality, you get irregularities. Well-known fact.

One said, He has worked inefficiently?

One said, No. We can't get him there.

One said, That is the point. The word is him. Becoming a personality is inefficient. We don't want it to spread. Supposing gravity developed a personality? Supposing it decided to like people?

One said, Got a crush on them, that sort of thing?

One said, ~ Terry Pratchett

They were obsessed, taken hostage, or co-dependent – anything rather than admit they were not in control, for the very word "love" now meant weakness. ~ M.C. Beaton

We hear a great deal about the German "Fatherland" - we like the sound. But the word "Father" is the whole of it. The "land" is nothing: the "Father" is key to the music. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

You cannot ... transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word "God" to be its grammatical subject. ~ Antony Flew

In all of knowable reality, God is unique. He is knowable not like the multiplication table or the table of elements; he alone is knowable as the one totally in control of being known. He is not at the disposal of the human mind. He is known when he wills to be known. Yet he is known in and through created reality, which is known naturally. Therefore the glory of God is exalted most not when we know God apart from observation and reading and study, but when we know God as a result of his free and gracious self-revelation in and through our earnest observation of and meditation on his work and Word in history. ~ John Piper

I wanted to kill them. No, not kill. "Kill" is too dull a word for that which I desired. I wanted to annihilate them. I wanted to tear them limb from limb. I wanted to crack their bones and bury my face in the wet remains. I wanted to reach inside their chests and yank out their hearts and devour the bloody meat as the last stray current twitched the muscle and watch their faces as they died. ~ Justin Cronin

It's strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head. ~ Veronica Roth

And a word carries far-very far-deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space. ~ Joseph Conrad

Selethen was names Hawk. Alyss had been given the title of Tsuru, or Crane. . .Evanlynn was Kitsune, the Nihon-Jan word for Fox . . .Halt strangly enough had been known only as Halto-san. . . But Will had been taken aback in his confrotation with Arisaka to discover that his name - Chocho - meant "butterfly". It seemed a highly unwarlike name to him- not at all glamorous.And he was puzzled to know why they had selected it. His friends,of course, were delighted in helping him guess the reason.
"I assume its because you're such a snazzy dresser," Evanlynn said. "You Rangers are like a riot of color after all."
Will glared at her and was mortified to hear Alyss snigger at the princess's sally. He'd thought Alyss, at least, might stick up for him.
"I think it might be more to do with the way he raced around the the training ground, darting here and there to correct the way a man might be holding his sheidl then dashing off to show someone how to put theri body weight into their javelin cast," said Horace, a little more sympathetically. Then he ruined the effect by adding thoughtlessly, "I must say, your cloak did flutter around like a butterfly's wings."
"It was neither of those things," Halt said finally, and they all turned to look at him. "I asked Shigeru," he explained. "He said that they had all noticed how Will's mind and imagination darts from one idea to another at such high speed," . .
Will looked mollified. "Isuppose it's not too bad it you put ~ John Flanagan

Occasionally, events in one's life become clearer through the prism of experience, a phrase which simply means that things tend to be clearer as time goes on. For instance, when a person is just born, they usually have no idea what curtains are and spend a great deal of their first months wondering why on earth Mommy and Daddy have hung large pieces of cloth over each window in the nursery. But as the person grows older, the idea of curtains becomes clearer through the prism of experience. The person will learn the word "curtains" and notice that they are actually quite handy for keeping a room dark when it is time to sleep, and for decorating an otherwise boring window area. Eventually, they will entirely accept the idea of curtains of their own, or venetian blinds, and it is all due to the prism of experience. ~ Lemony Snicket

The inward offer is a kind of spiritual enlightenment, whereby the promises are presented to the hearts of men, as it were, by an inward word. ~ William Ames

In the '90s, you couldn't say the word 'nerd' to someone when pitching a show. They would have considered that too niche and wouldn't have listened. ~ Chris Hardwick

The word longing comes from the same root as the word long in the sense of length in either time or space and also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us. The longing for home is so universal a form of longing that there is even a special word for it, which is of course homesickness, ~ Frederick Buechner

I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said ... but did not. ~ Anne Sexton

Artist?' Thomas suggested. 'That's a word. I've never heard anyone say it, but I've read it in some of the books. It means, well, someone who makes something beautiful. Would that be a word? ~ Lois Lowry

I mean, people who watch Jon Stewart's show every night don't think he went far enough, because he couldn't do what he does on his show every night, because it's a different job. The same thing with Chris Rock. He can't come out and do a tossed-salad routine, the way he does on his HBO shows, because this is the Academy Awards. ~ Bruce Vilanch

The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. ~ Alain De Botton

Tolerance is not a spiritual gift; it is the distinguishing mark of postmodernism; and sadly, it has permeated the very fiber of Christianity. Why is it that those who have no biblical convictions or theology to govern and direct their actions are tolerated and the standard or truth of God's Word rightly divided and applied is dismissed as extreme opinion or legalism? ~ John Stott

Notice with whom the persecution originates: it began in organized religion. Today the Word of god is being hurt and hindered most by the organized, liberal church which has rejected the Word of God. They will align themselves with some very shady characters, boasting of their brotherhood, their love for everyone, and their broad-mindedness. But when it comes to accepting a fundamentalist, someone who stands for the Word of God, I have found that their broad-mindedness and love disappears. There is more opposition to the furtherance of the gospel originating in the organized church than there is in the liquor industry or in any political group that I know of today [1978]. ~ J. Vernon McGee

I'll learn all the katas and be the ninjing-est ninja that ever ninjed." Bubbles whined, so I bent down to rub his silky little head. "Is it the c-word, Bubbs? Don't you worry, we love the doggas as well as the katas." David laughed. ~ J.L. Merrow

The automobile industry began a campaign to popularize the use of the word "jaywalking" (walking like a "jay," or rube), a term so derogatory that when it was used in 1915 by New York's police commissioner, The Times responded with an editorial criticizing the "truly shocking" and "highly opprobrious" slur. ~ Anonymous

Many like to hear of the love of Christ, but not of loving their enemies; they like the comforts of the word, but not its reproofs. ~ Thomas Watson

My presence speaks volumes before I say a word. ~ Mos Def

We go quiet as the next episode picks up exactly where it left off. Antoine manages to subdue Marie-Thérèse, and the two proceed to argue for ten minutes. Don't ask me about what, because it's in French, but I do notice that the same word - héritier - keeps popping up over and over again during their fight.

"Okay, we need to look up that word," I say in aggravation. "I think it's important."

Allie grabs her cell phone and swipes her finger on the screen. I peek over her shoulder as she pulls up a translation app. "How do you think you spell it?" she asks.

We get the spelling wrong three times before we finally land on a translation that makes sense: heir.

"Oh!" she exclaims. "They're talking about the father's will."

"Shit, that's totally it. She's pissed off that Solange inherited all those shares of Beauté éternelle."

We high five at having figured it out, and in the moment our palms meet, pure clarity slices into me and I'm able to grasp precisely what my life has become.

With a growl, I snatch the remote control and hit stop.

"Hey, it's not over yet," she objects.

"Allie." I draw a steady breath. "We need to stop now. Before my balls disappear altogether and my man-card is revoked."

One blond eyebrow flicks up. "Who has the power to revoke it?"

"I don't know. The Man Council. The Stonemasons. Jason Statham. Take your pick."

"So you're too muc ~ Elle Kennedy

The word 'equality' shows up too much in our founding documents for anyone to pretend it's not the American way. ~ Martha Plimpton