Phrases Quotes (page 13)
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the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face. . . . What they abominate about ‘the West,’ to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don’t like and can’t defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson.
Christopher Hitchens
Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.
Graham Greene
They had reached Lockhart's classroom...'You could've fried an egg on your face" said Ron. 'You'd better hope Creevey doesn't meet Ginny, or they'll be starting a Harry Potter fan club.''Shut up,' snapped Harry. The last thing he needed was for Lockhart to hear the phrase 'Harry Potter fan club.
J. K. Rowling
There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for "content" are illusioned.
Marshall McLuhan
The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose....
Gore Vidal
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved
George Orwell
You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, &...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
O, Times! O, Manners! It is my opinion
That you are changing sadly your dominion
I mean the reign of manners hath long ceased,
For men have none at all, or bad at least;
And as for times, altho' 'tis said by many
The "good old times" were far the worst of any,
Of which sound Doctrine I believe each tittle
Yet still I think these worst a little.
I've been a thinking -isn't that the phrase?-
I like your Yankee words and Yankee ways -
I've been a thinking, whether it were best
To Take things...
Edgar Allan Poe
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a...
Christopher Hitchens
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
George Orwell
Going your own way shouldn't stop them from being happy with you."My brother and my sisters, they're clerks and parents and settled sort of people. I'm a puzzle, and sooner or later when you can't solve a puzzle, you have to think there's somthing wrong with it. Else there's something wrong with you."You ran away," she murmured. He wasn't sure he liked the phrase, but nodded. "In a sense, I suppose, and as fast as I could. What's the point in looking back?"But he was looking back, Keeley...
Nora Roberts