Quotes & Sayings About Alliteration

Who needs sense when you have alliteration? — Mark Forsyth

It was earliest morning, when even small trees cast long shadows and scarlet foxes trot denward through the dew like flecks of fire. — Gene Wolfe

Bicycles, bullock carts, and buses that belched thick, black smoke moved in anarchic streams with the auto rickshaws and cars along the streets. Many of the shops - normally selling everything from groceries to stainless steel cookware to shoes - stood silent behind shutters and honeycomb grilles. — Ken Doyle

And they always slept better with blades beneath their beds. — Cinda Williams Chima

Until 1982, Canada Day was known as Dominion Day. I always thought that had more of a ring to it. Beyond the zippy alliteration, it reminded us citizens that our domain of orderly domesticity was graced by the dominant power of our 'Dominus.' — Rick Moranis

Wake up to think of words ... want to walk through pages of meanings, the links in assonance, alliteration, or just simple sense that moves the eye to leap that way to the next-door play of sound and resonance. — Initially NO

Dear Eldritch Snitch. I slap you with the satin glove of righteous wrath! From what noxious nest of nattering nincompoopery do you release your rancorous roosters of rumor ... — James Kennedy

Jack furiously chopped vegetables. Captain Dependable! Wait, we vetoed that one. The Divine Door Maker? Too much? Hmm ... Handsome Hero, but maybe I should move away from alliteration. Something sleek. Our Lord and Master Jack. — Kiersten White

Hear the language, this English, double-jointed as Bedivere's limbs. It only sounds awkward. In its ability to join one concept to another as with pegs, its dependent clauses, figures of speech and cadenced alliteration, a man can say one thing five ways and yet imply a sixth; can change meaning with an inflection, a pause or a deliberate misuse of a word, can mock, scorn and flay an opponent without uttering one overt insult. — Parke Godwin

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems. — Margaret Atwood

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid. — Charles Churchill

Alliteration is not a prostitute to be sold to every sailor who visits the port. This fine lady is a valuable literary diva one should ask to sing her aria only for special occasions. — Dennis Vickers

I wish Howard Ashman was still alive so I could just meet him and tell him his words are magic. It's so fun to say. He has such great alliteration and paints the most vivid images with his lyrics — Tituss Burgess

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. — James Joyce

A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could have daring syntax and clever cacophony, it could have a neat and ordered rhyme scheme ... but, if it loses its authenticity, its ability to convey the very heart and soul of the poet, then all the euphony and cacophony in the world cannot make up for the loss of its identity as a poem. And that is the true cacophony. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

Karmic progression implies that we are kind of alliterating steps to life. There's alliteration, a kind of rhythmic structure. Once we're in time and space, the variable structures are somewhat limited. — Frederick Lenz

The hinterlands. Where the criminals and the carnivals and the concatenating counterfeiters of no morals to speak of make a home. — Catherynne M Valente

Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent. Seems it may be less important that it be true than that it rhyme, or show alliteration or the like. What goes around comes around: really? What does this mean? — Kim Stanley Robinson

He pointed to the board where the word 'alliteration' had been written in handwriting far better than mine, which on good days looks like it came from the hand of a blind doctor writing his own morphine scripts in an earthquake. — Robert Wilder

And this? Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Listen to this page: 'Primitus pantorum procerum poematorum pio potissimum paternoque presertim privilegio panegiricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgatas.' ... The words all begin with the same letter!"
"The men of my islands are all a bit mad," William said proudly. — Umberto Eco

Alliteration seems to offend people. — Dean Koontz

The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and people and numbers and concepts and idea that they have never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge ... Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher. — Phillip Done

Alliteration is alarmingly addictive. — Tamara Ireland Stone

There was alliteration happening all over the place in that sentence. — Moira J. Moore

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing. And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough. — Lauren F. Winner

A conglomerate of complicated words, they confuse, condemn and cajole, created, he is sure, for the sole purpose of fuddling the listener, which in this case is regrettably him. — Curtis Ackie

Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It's a language aside from the language they have with strangers. I've always been maybe an abuser of alliteration, but I've always loved it and I like how those words sound together. — Ben Gibbard

You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter. — Mark Forsyth

Unaware that he is only interested in the presumed parched pucker in her pants, she is more than happy to give him her phone number. — Curtis Ackie

Another werewolf thing. Like most animals, we spent a large part of our lives engaged in the three Fs of basic survival. Feeding, fighting and ... reproduction. — Kelley Armstrong

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain its presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man. — James Whistler

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words
rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition
children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down. — John Edgar Wideman

One of the deepest motives (as you are aware) in the human beast (so deep that many have failed to detect it) is Alliteration. — Lewis Carroll

His rap was fluid, on time, and in tune. He ad-libbed - or "freestyled" - using a range of poetic tricks, from rhyme and repetition to assonance and alliteration: — Kevin Ashton

Liir held Chistery in his lap and sobbed into his scalp. Chistery said, "Well, we'll wail while woe'll wheel," and he cried along with Liir. — Gregory Maguire

Icy glares from vampires are far icier than icy glares from people and when the vampire giving you an icy glare is originally from Iceland, you're confronted with the archetypal origin of the term, and you shouldn't be surprised if your core body temperature drops a few degrees. — Kevin Hearne

Crouching in position posing in perfect posture
On the rooftop of a gothic cathedral sits a monster — Justin Bienvenue

The shelves of this store are stacked with stock. You will find a steamship, a sailing ship, and even a spaceship. There are several sorts of shoe and scores of signs and symbols. There is a sketch of a squinch, a selection of shells (not all from the sea), a siamang settled on a seat, a sponge to be studied, and sundry stuff suspended from strings. In all I included 1,234 Ss for you to see. — Mike Wilks

Nothing like a cheap shot, right?' He snorted blood from his nose. 'I'm disappointed. I thought even terrorists had principles.'
'Can it,' Nasira said, towering over him with her P90 leveled at his head. 'If we need patriotic paramoralisms, we'll give Jack Bauer a call.'
Denton grimaced, pulled himself upright. 'And if I need overblown alliteration, I'll give you a call. — Nathan M. Farrugia

No worries, Atticus. I will snarf surreptitiously. And I should get bacon, because my adverb was two syllables longer than yours, plus a bonus for alliteration."
I grinned. "It's a deal. You're the best hound ever. — Kevin Hearne

Dinted
dimpled wimpled
his mind wandered down echoing corridors of
assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the
point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words. — Aldous Huxley

So popular is alliteration that in the 1960s it actually made a grab for political power. In the 1960s a vast radical youth movement began campaigning to do things for the sole reason that they began with the same letter. Ban the bomb. Burn your bra. Power to the people. For a moment there it seemed as though alliteration would change the world. But then the spirit of idealism faded and those who had manned the barricades went off and got jobs in marketing. — Mark Forsyth

Always avoid alliteration. — Sienna McQuillen

Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.) — Truman Capote

A flipped fork flicked my forehead. — Dean Koontz

Pity the poor screenwriter, for he cannot be a poet. He cannot use metaphor and simile, assonance and alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, synecdoche and metonymy, hyperbole and meiosis, the grand tropes. Instead, his work must contain all the substance of literature but not be literary. A literary work is finished and complete within itself. A screenplay waits for the camera. If not literature, what then is the screenwriter's ambition? To describe in such a way that as a reader turns pages, a film flows through the imagination. — Robert McKee

We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. We are suckers for alliteration, assonance, and rhythm. We rejoice over stories, whether fiction or "documentary," whose outcomes are flagrantly manipulative, self-serving, or both. Usually both. — Tim Parks

The clever old conniver continued to cogitate. — James D. Doss

Atticus "three kinds of cat shit, Oberon."
Oberon "and an arrogant family of squirrels. — Kevin Hearne

They say every dog has its day, Ganapathi, but for this terrier twilight came before tea-time. — Shashi Tharoor

A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts! — Albert Brooks

And the Austrian army, awfully arrayed, boldly, by battery, besieged Belgrade. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

Tempted to type meaningless twaddle all the time on Twitter ... with alliteration, no less! — E.A. Bucchianeri

Soothe and sly stamina with a short sword they slice
They are beyond precise making the victim pay the price — Justin Bienvenue

I write to tame and organise the thoughts that bubble in my head. I write for the part of me that's inconsolable and don't have the hands or the talent for painting, pottery or the piano. I write because it's proven more effective than screaming to communicate my personal truths. I write because publication provides the perfect payback for a painful childhood and because I'm addicted to alliteration, a glutton for grammar and ruled by the rule of three. I continue writing to discover where my imagination will take me; because if I stopped, I'd no longer be me. — Anne Goodwin

Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance. — Amy Lowell