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Dictionaries Quotes (page 2)

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. William Bernbach
Do you know what ‘Sputnik’ means in Russian? ‘Travelling companion’. I looked it up in a dictionary not long ago. Kind of a strange coincidence if you think about it. I wonder why the Russians gave their satellite that strange name. It’s just a poor little lump of metal, spinning around the Earth. Haruki Murakami
If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be "To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation. Vladimir Nabokov
Eddie Cantor quote: "Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing a..."
Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank. Eddie Cantor
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... George Orwell
Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Julio Cortazar quote: "Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in..."
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word. Julio Cortazar
Words - so innocent and powerless, as they are standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. Nathaniel Hawthorne
...The first dictionaries were glossaries of Homeric words, intended to help Romans read the Iliad and Odyssey as well as other Greek literature employing the 'archaic' Homeric vocabulary. Mortimer Adler
No other library anywhere, for example, has a whole gallery of unwritten books - books that would have been written if the author hadn't been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotter's guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room. A library so big that it distorts reality and has opened gateways to all other libraries, everywhere and everywhen... Terry Prachett
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary. Italo Calvino
Impossible is the word found only in a fool's dictionary. Wise people create opportunities for themselves and make everything possible... Napoleon Bonaparte
Then idiots talk....of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce!....But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I'll show you energy. Charles Dickens
I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better. Dashiell Hammett
Jorge Luis Borges quote: "The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an..."
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms. Jorge Luis Borges

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