Helping Verbs Quotes & Sayings

Misers take care of property as if it belonged to them, but derive no more benefit from it than if it belonged to others. — Wilfred Bion

Creoles tend to express variations in time by having a string of helping verbs rather than by having complicated word formation rules. In other words, they are more like English in this respect than like a language such as Italian:
English: I thought she might have been sleeping.
Italian: Pensavo che dormisse.
The idea of potential (in the English "might"), completed or whole action (in the English "have"), and stretched-out activity (in the English "been") that go with "sleeping" are all expressed in the ending on the Italian verb dormisse. (Dorm is the root for "sleep"; isse is the ending that carries all the meaning about the time frame.) — Donna Jo Napoli

All I ask, Madam, is to share with thee a common center of gravity. — James K. Morrow

Handcuffs. Freaking handcuffs.
What are you doing with those?
Handcuffing you.
No, I mean why do you have them in the first place?
I'm saving them for a rainy day. These are new actually. It's like a "thinking of you" gift because I was thinking of you when I bought them. — B.B. Reid

What were you thinking?"
"Not much, clearly."I hear the exasperation in Kacey's voice.
"I don't know about you, Livie ... Sometimes you're as graceful as a one-legged flamingo in a pit of quicksand. — K.A. Tucker

The discerning realize that it is not realistic to expect perfection in others when none of us is perfect ... Meaningful progress can be made only when all of us can cast the motes out of our own eyes, leave judgment to our Father in Heaven, and lose ourselves in righteous living. — Marvin J. Ashton

I just can't dance like no ones watching. I tried but it's futile. — Gary Gulman

Mrs. Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally. — Stephen King

When modernist poetry, or what not so long ago passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following piece by Mr. Ezra Pound is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled 'modernist' either in terms of condemnation or approbation ... Better he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame. — Laura Riding

A cottage will hold as much happiness as would stock a palace. — Hamilton Wright Mabie

The Olympics is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I was lucky enough to go twice, but most people only get one chance. And in judo you can train your whole life and it'll come down to a split second: You can lose everything or win anything. — Ronda Rousey

Never allow others to create your world because if you do, they will always make it too small. — Christopher Robinson

Gaspard eyed me cautiously. "I really can't say," he responded in his formal nineteenth-century style. Can't, or won't? I thought. — Amy Plum