Declarative Quotes & Sayings

I think the way design was practiced for most of the 20th century was very declarative. A designer came up with a solution for a project and put it in place and shipped the solution and it landed in a reader or a customer's hands as a brochure. They would see it as a poster, or as a piece of signage. And that was sort of it. That was the end of it. I think Internet technology has really upended that whole equation because in some ways a designer's work is never really done online. — Khoi Vinh

The only man, woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead. — E. E. Cummings

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. — Ernest Hemingway,

I don't think - I begin, but then I stop there. Strangely enough, this sounds like a full, declarative sentence, as if I'm standing in a bar shouting out one of my most obvious character flaws. I don't think! — Matthew Norman

Here, then, is the story of algebra. It all began in the remote past, with a simple turn of thought from the declarative to the interrogative, from "this plus this equals this" to "this plus what equals this? — Anonymous

sum up Casablanca in just four clipped, declarative sentences: "Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back again. Boy gives up girl for humanity's sake. — Noah Isenberg

On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time. — Ernest Hemingway,

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?
in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,
serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,
Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,
winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair. — Thomas Pynchon

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book. — Terry Brooks

The idea of starting with that Kanye [West] song is declarative. It says, "This is the kind of story we're telling." — Akiva Goldsman

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact. — Donna Leon

The people at MTV are encouraged to be very confrontational and declarative about their tastes. — John Seabrook

It's no accident that marketing professionals often describe it in military language: capturing market share, penetrating the customer base, defeating competitors. It can be declarative, propagandistic, uninvolving. But in its best moments it can also encapsulate a belief, a set of values, even a religion. — Tom Doctoroff

Akhmed summoned the arborist with small declarative memories, and Sonja let him go on longer than she otherwise would because she, too, had tried to resurrect by recitation, had tried to recreate the thing by drawing its shape in cinders, and hoped that by compiling lists of Natasha's favorite foods and songs and annoying habits, her sister might spontaneously materialize under the pressure of the particularities. — Anthony Marra

Have you ever noticed that every now and then you'll overhear an amazingly clear declarative sentence when you're out in public, spoken with such force and purpose that you absolutely yearn to know what it means, because it is just so forceful and crystalline? And you want to follow along behind whoever just spoke, even though you don;t know them, just to find out what that sentence means and how it would affect the lives of the people involved? — Jeff Lindsay

How can you trust someone who doesn't bother to spell correctly or can't manage to lay out a simple declarative sentence? — Sue Grafton

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings. — John Burnside

The motivation for adding such intelligence to properties is to enable rich functionality directly from declarative markup. — Anonymous

Memory means different things to psychologists. Autobiographical memory is an interesting case because it straddles the most basic of the distinctions that scientists make between types of memory: that between semantic memory (memory for facts) and episodic memory (memory for events). Our memory for the events of our own lives involves the integration of details of what happened (episodic memory) with long-term knowledge about the facts of our lives (a kind of autobiographical semantic memory). Another important distinction is that between explicit or declarative memory (in which the contents of memory are accessible to consciousness) and implicit or non-declarative memory (which is unconscious). As we will see, this distinction is particularly important when it comes to the question of how memory is affected by trauma and extreme emotion. — Charles Fernyhough

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing. — Garrison Keillor

Once you have found the right shot to introduce the scene-written your first declarative sentence-then the rest flows. You've found the key to the whole scene. — John Huston

Tribalism isn't a bad thing. If you're a Facebook user, or Twitter user or Foursquare user or LinkedIn user, those are all tribes ... and they may even have sub-tribes. It's not pejorative, it's declarative. — Peter Guber

Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an ssertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more
self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances. — Neal Stephenson

By comparison, George W. Bush was light and breezy and apparently forgot during one debate that Social Security was a federal program. In fact, his depth, and his unfamiliarity with the complexities of the issues, to say nothing of the simple declarative sentence, worked remarkably to his advantage. — Charles P. Pierce

I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique. — Scott Westerfeld

Computers are scary. They're nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design. — Wesley Morris

A bottle of Stag's Leap Artemis Cab was open and hardly touched. That would be Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, thought Sunny, not to be confused with Stags' Leap Winery or the Stags Leap District. How many hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of dollars did the lawyers get to sort out that tangle of suits and countersuits? And, in the end, it all came down to the placement of an apostrophe. The place where one stag leaps versus the place where multiple stags leap versus the declarative statement that multiple stags are inclined to leap around these few acres where very good Cabernet Sauvignon grapes are grown. — Nadia Gordon

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics. — Alan Furst

Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence. — William Zinsser

One great difference between good writing, that readers overlook, and bad writing, that they fail to notice, has to do with the number of rewrites and revisions usually required by the former. It isn't at all easy to write clear, declarative prose - transparency evolves from ruthless cutting and trimming and is hard work - while lumpy, tangle-footed writing flows from the pen as if inspired by the Muse. — Ira Levin

Okay," I said. "I'm going to do something I know you both hate. I'm going to get direct. And I'm going to get direct answers from you, answers that convince me that you aren't trying to hide anything from me and aren't trying to mislead me. I know you both have to speak the truth. So give me simple, declarative answers, or I assume you're scheming and walk away right now."
That made Lily press her lips together and fold her arms. Her gaze turned reproachful. Maeve rolled her eyes, casually gave me the finger, and said, "Wizards are such weasels. — Jim Butcher

I'd never met anyone with Emma's brash confidence. Everything about her exuded it: the way she carried herself, with shoulders thrown back; the hard set of her teeth when she made up her mind about something; the way she ended every sentence with a declarative period, never a question mark. It was infectious and I loved it, and I had to fight the sudden urge to kiss her, right here in front of everyone. — Ransom Riggs