linguistic patterns Quotes

"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."

I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.

Severe isn't a word normally associated with a cold. Severe is for weather or third-degree burns...No one responds 'severe' when someone asks how her cold is.In fact, nine out of ten Americans respond to 'How's your cold' with 'It sucks.' So there should be an It Sucks cold formula.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

You could teach [George] Carlin in college. It's the construction of the word and the order of things and how they go. How all those sentences are timed perfectly.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.

Words are like leaves,. . .like people really, fond of their own society.

I go through phases where I'll overuse words. S.E. Hinton, who wrote The Outsiders - she and I have been in contact for the 50th anniversary of the book - and she said, "You still owe me the 10 dollars that we bet that you couldn't stop saying the word 'gnarly.'"

Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.

I want to get a job naming kitchen appliances. That seems easy; refrigerator, toaster, blender. You just say what the thing does and add "er".

Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.

One of the things that's pretty unique about nu shu, when you look especially at these old letters and stories that have been saved, is that there are certain lines that are very standard that are used again and again. It's almost like a formula in a sense, so that these certain lines come up again and again.

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

I think that I speak a lot like I write.

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

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

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

The words I overuse are all adverbs.

The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology.

How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.