Hyperbaton Quotes & Sayings

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a "green great dragon." He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn't have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.
The reason for Tolkien's mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac. It's an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can't exist. — Mark Forsyth

LOSER! You English lose ... I suppose he thought it was the most grievous insult he could hurl. But such a curse doesn't really have any effect on an English person - or a European - it seems to me. We know we're all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur. — William Boyd

No matter how many stones you throw at the water's surface, no matter how much you step on a shadow, the water's surface does not disappear, the shadow does not disappear. — Kohta Hirano

Our training is world-class across all the services. We spend an awful lot on every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman that comes in, and we ask them to do an awful lot, sometimes more than we expect of ourselves, and they do that. — Michael Mullen

What if Theater was the Pong of the the digital Ping?
A place where the live experience has an function? — Natasha Tsakos

This, in the end, is the prime purpose of a philosophy: to give us lucid ways to think about the world and how to live in it. — Daniel Klein

All men make mistakes. — Sophocles

The man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises - because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him. — Ayn Rand

How can we thankful? We can only love the Heart of Jesus more generously and by our union with Him, become the most humble. — Rose Philippine Duchesne

My love is such that rivers cannot quench — Anne Bradstreet

...sin is often the attempt to meet a legitimate need in an illegitimate way. — John Ortberg

I don't know, I feel like this isn't the real world. The people, the scene: they just don't seem real to me. — Haruki Murakami