Parts Of Speech Quotes
Most popular parts of speech quotes
Avoid the ecstatic adjectives that occupy such disproportionate space in every critic's quiver—words like "enthralling" and "luminous."
I have always had a deep and abiding love for the English language. I've always loved the flirtatious tango of consonants and vowels, the sturdy dependability of nouns and the capricious whimsy of verbs, the strutting pageantry of the adjective and the flitting evanescence of the adverb, all kept safe and orderly by those reliable little policeman, punctuation marks.
The writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects—nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs—ball them together and make them bounce.
When you read proof, take out adjectives and adverbs wherever you can.
The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Nouns and verbs are almost pure metal. Adjectives are cheaper ore.
The beastly adverb—far more damaging to a writer than an adjective.
The adjective is the enemy of the noun and the adverb the enemy of damn near everything else. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language.
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.
I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.
If an adverb became a character in one of my books, I'd have it shot. Immediately.
Poets are always in search of the right word, the adjective that is inevitable, Because an ill-chosen adjective induces levity in the reader, and no poet wishes to be levitable.
Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor; but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.
Avoid the use of qualifiers. Rather, very, little, pretty—these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating.
I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang.
An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.
As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
Pick adjectives as you would pick a diamond or a mistress. Too many are dangerous.
Don Basilio was a forbidding-looking man with a bushy moustache who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.
Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty. The sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and graceful boughs and frisky kittens and sleepy lagoons.
