Quotes & Sayings About Idioms

Write the following: "Private missive, from Lieutenant Master-Sergeant Field Quartermaster Pores, to Fist Kindly. Warmest salutations and congratulations on your promotion, sir. As one might observe from your advancement and, indeed, mine, cream doth rise, etc. In as much as I am ever delighted in corresponding with you, discussing all maner of subjects in all possible idioms, alas, this subject is rather more official in nature. In short, we are faced with a crisis of the highest order. Accordignly, I humbly seek your advice and would suggest we arrange a most private meeting at the earliest convenience. Yours affectionately, Pores." Got that, Himble?'
'Yes sir'
'Please read it back to me.'
'"Pores to Kindly meet in secret when?"'
'Excellent, Dispatch at once, Himble — Steven Erikson

He had a penchant for idioms, sayings, proverbs and the like; some of which he invented or used in a way that was incomprehensible to me, — Javier Marias

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling. — Bernard Herrmann

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature's seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions"

Bukusai Ashagawa — Bukusai Ashagawa

In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges by the toxic idioms of merchandising. — Charles Baxter

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?) — Jodi Picoult

Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks, and with them a sensitivity to how they mesh and how they clash. This is the elusive "ear" of a skilled writer-the tacit sense of style which every honest stylebook, echoing Wilde, confesses cannot be explicitly taught. Biographers of great authors always try to track down the books their subjects read when they were young, because they know these sources hold the key to their development as writers. — Steven Pinker

I love you," he writes again and again. "I can't bear to live without you. I'm counting the minutes until I see you." The words he uses are the idioms of popular songs and poems in the newspaper. And mine to him are no less cliched. I puzzle over the onionskin, trying to spill my heart onto the page. But I can only come up with the same words, in the same order, and hope the depth of feeling beneath them gives them weight and substance. I love you. I miss you. Be careful. Be safe. — Christina Baker Kline

The things we take for granted. The things we never feel we'll lose. Not missing the water until the well runs dry, and hundreds more tired idioms and metaphors to build monument to the fact that I was drinking in every detail of Dominic's body like the precious thing it was, quenching the thirst of years with visions of flesh and beauty. It was impossible to believe, suddenly, that I had ever known beauty and excitement before. — Vee Hoffman

Jesus probably studied this same information, in his youth. The apostle Paul probably studied this same information. How can I make such a bold assertion? Because, without this knowledge, much of the New Testament would make no sense.
Many of the idioms used in the New Testament are the result of lessons learned from this ancient Hebrew education system. Unfortunately, what was common in their day, has become forgotten in ours. For a Hebrew, math doesn't get in the way. It blazes the way. Other languages are disconnected from this mathematical relationship ... and it shows. — Michael Ben Zehabe

You can't buy time or save it, common idioms notwithstanding. You can only spend it. — Eric Zorn

If he was going to be boiled for a lamb, then he might as well be roasted for a sheep. — Terry Pratchett

Ouma Nella's quotes p 144 -146
"Man, if you don't know where you going, any road will bring you there."
"It don't matter how far a river run. It never forget where it come from. That is all that is important."
"No matter if it's wet or dry," she grunt. "As long as you keep a green branch in your heart, there will always be a bird that come to sing in it."
"It's no use crying in the rain, my child, because no one will see your tears.
"Don't think you can climb two trees at the same time just because you got two legs."
"Ouma Nella, where am I not?"
"But you're right here with me, Philida. So there's many places where you're not."
"Tell me where those places are. I got to know. So I can go and look for myself. — Andre Brink

Programming is not all the same. Normal written languages have different rhythms and idioms, right? Well, so do programming languages. The language called C is all harsh imperatives, almost raw computer-speak. The language called Lisp is like one long, looping sentence, full of subclauses, so long in fact that you usually forget what it was even about in the first place. The language called Erlang is just like it sounds: eccentric and Scandinavian. — Robin Sloan

That's Russian bureaucracy for you," says Kirill. "Talking to them, it is like - kak serpom po yaytsam."
"What did you say?" I ask.
"Like a sickle to the balls," says Kirill grimly.
I wince at the vivid imagery. Russians and their idioms.
"It means this is a bad situation," Kirill explains.
"I got that from the context clues, thanks. — Maria Malonzo

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. — George Orwell

To make the bloody thing talk the way I do when I'm on a verbal roll, in my idioms and rhythms. — Gary Lucas

Now it seems to me that we are in a universalising period ... If we are to have world peace, we should have an understanding of all the idioms of beauty because the members of humanity who have created these idioms of beauty are going to be a part of us. And I would say that we are in a period when we are discovering and becoming acquainted with these idioms for the first time. — Mark Tobey

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles. — Joshua Foer

... it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms — Alasdair MacIntyre

I twisted words, phrases, and idioms around,
and deftly nixed the budding metaphor bounds.
Voila, a virtual book in a blog became softbound! — Rebecca Rose Orton

It may be that Japanese culture is not ego-based like Western culture: argument has often a strong ego base. The most likely explanation is that Japanese culture was not influenced by those Greek thinking idioms which were refined and developed by medieval monks as a means of proving heretics to be wrong. (p36) — Edward De Bono

Idioms are a big thing in Ireland. They want to fill the time, to show how good they are at talk - it's a talk-off — Dylan Moran

March brought the news of Frederick's marriage. He and Dolores wrote; she in Spanish-English, as was but natural, and he with little turns and inversions of words which proved how far the idioms of his bride's country were infecting him. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage. — Lester Bangs

[T]here is a methodological bias in favor of taking natural discourse literally, other things being equal. For example, unless there are clear reasons for construing discourse as ambiguous, elliptical, or involving special idioms, we should not so construe it. — Tyler Burge

The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music. — George Crumb

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. — George Orwell

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner. — Jacques Derrida

A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella. — Elizabeth Gilbert

We're headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid. New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic. — Joe Haldeman

The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205) — Geoffrey Nunberg

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. — George Orwell

The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands - it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language. — William Lindsay Gresham

The hardest portion of English, I must say it: Idioms. — Flula Borg

It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms,yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no. — Zora Neale Hurston

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms. — John Millington Synge

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them. — Gilbert Ryle

Beaumont specifically pointed out that the cultural elements and idioms regarded as "Egyptian" could not have originated in the land of the Nile. This single fact is inviolate and cannot be denied. It is obvious to those who have taken the time to study the subject, that the Egyptian civilization was transplanted by Western adepts and elders. — Michael Tsarion

Then why do they come?"
Buonarroti shrugged his shoulders.
"Because things are in such a bad way in their homeland, they're ready to flee into a black hole in space, to a concentration camp, to the Sargasso Sea of international criminal brigands."
"Between the devil and the deep blue sea," said the new consul, demonstrating his knowledge of international idioms. — Vladimir Lorchenkov

God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. You can express the same thought, but to different people you have to use a different language. It's the same in religion. — Huston Smith

But I did not return until half past four this morning and I distinctly remember stubbing my toe on the stairs. I am as drunk as a skunk, Drumknott, which of course means skunks are just as drunk as I. I must say the term is unfamiliar to me, and I had not thought hitherto of skunks in this context, but Mustrum Ridcully was kind enough to enlighten me. — Terry Pratchett

With every step, I cursed the person who had ever invented the saying: "Speak of the devil". Clearly, they had no sympathy for me! — Adele Rose

Tuan volgen oketh ama. I said, using on eof my favorite Siaru idioms. It meant 'don't let it make you crazy' but it translated literally as: 'don't put a spoon in your eye over it. — Patrick Rothfuss

The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are 'report a crime' and 'report to five families.' The reporting is the vengeance-not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. — Maxine Hong Kingston

The culturalists tried to make the idea more appealing by pointing out that even in modern languages we use idioms that are rather imprecise about color. Don't we speak of "white wine," for instance, even if we can see perfectly well that it is really yellowish green? Don't we have "black cherries" that are dark red and "white cherries" that are yellowish red? Aren't red squirrels really brown? Don't the Italians call the yolk of an egg "red" (il rosso)? Don't we call the color of orange juice "orange," although it is in fact perfectly yellow? (Check it next time.) — Guy Deutscher

Why kill two birds with one stone? I go for the whole nest
I am not satisfied with my work unless someone's a bloody mess — Justin Bienvenue

From the time of the North Briton of the unprincipled Wilkes , a notion has been entertained that the moral spine in Scotland is more flexible than in England. The truth however is, that an elementary difference exists in the public feelings of the two nations quite as great as in the idioms of their respective dialects. The English are a justice-loving people, according to charter and statute; the Scotch are a wrong-resenting race, according to right and feeling: and the character of liberty among them takes its aspect from that peculiarity. — John Galt

Most historians accept that Egypt was a cradle of civilization, and that many cultural idioms and traditions come from there. What has yet to be understood, however, is the manner in which Egypt inherited its cultural elements from the lands of the North-West. This fact is not known today because of the threat it poses to Rome and London, the Vatican and Crown, and to all those who have profited from the suppression of knowledge. — Michael Tsarion