Italics Quotes & Sayings

Like italics and hyphens, quotation marks are to be used as sparingly as possible. They should light the way, not darken it. — Eric Partridge

Oh, sure," Gansey said, still cold and annoyed. "God forbid young men display their principles with futile but public protests when they could be skipping school and judging other students from the backseat of a motor vehicle."

"Principles? Henry Cheng's principles are all about getting larger font in the school newsletter," Ronan said. He did a vaguely offensive version of Henry's voice: "Serif? Sans serif? More bold, less italics. — Maggie Stiefvater

Just as the orator marks his good things by a dramatic pause, or by raising and lowering his voice, or by gesture, so the writer marks his epigrams with italics, setting the little gem, so to speak, like a jeweler. — Oscar Wilde

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!
To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!
What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!
I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.
I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,
Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn't come.
I'm free, and against organized, clothed society.
I'm naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.
It's too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,
Deliberately at the same time ...
No matter, I'll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.
This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!
I can't even light the next cigarette ... If it's an action,
It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called life. — Fernando Pessoa

Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them. — Leila Aboulela

Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can't help but consider irony. — Ann Beattie

Fate's book, but my italics. — Don Paterson

Better to start too slowly and build up," said a piece of text in italics, "than start too quickly and give up. — Nicci French

It's the typical hungry-vagina fodder, written in the same cotton-candy verbiage: "To really wow your guy pal, wait until he's almost there" - this is written in italics, an editorial nudge-wink - "and then put him in your mouth for a mind-blowing climax." Tasha is always annoyed by the use of "him" in place of "penis." What if she didn't know any better? What if she thought "him" meant him? All of him? She imagines herself an anaconda of a woman, her jaw unhinged, swallowing her lover like a reptilian black widow. — Olivia A. Cole

You might say she feels in italics and thinks in capital letters! — Katharine Weber

Writing about the futility of trying to force a wolf into a vehicle, Martino describes the final stage of the conflict. The italics are hers:

"But if I continue, perhaps muttering 'Get up you lazy old dusty thing,' The wolf grabs my arm in his teeth, snarling, as if to say, Look, move me where I don't want to go, and we're going to have problems. Your problems will be bigger than mine. He then looks at me with a frank arresting stare, the strength of the mountain rumbling in his eyes. — Teresa Tsimmu Martino

Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it. — J.D. Salinger

An image begins taking shape. Soon, however, it becomes diagonally deformed, like italics, and disappears like a flame blown out. Then the whole process starts again. The image strains to right itself. Trembling, it tries to give concrete form to something. But the image will not come together. — Haruki Murakami

Italics are like a rash -- you never know whether to ignore them entirely or whether the more you attention you give the more they spread. — Zanesh Catkin

Everyone is so desensitised that the potency of artfully deployed italics has long been lost. It was good enough for H. P. Lovecraft, but apparently it isn't good enough for the modern world, filled as it is with obtuse bastards. — Jonathan L. Howard

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way - even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications. — Vladimir Nabokov

Mental illness didn't really change people. It just made them more of who they were going to be anyway. Mental illness was less like obliteration, more like italics. — Heather Sellers

Rilla was fond of italics, as most girls of fifteen are. — L.M. Montgomery

It can be shown that maximum diversification is achieved by holding each stock in proportion to its value to the entire market (italics added) ... Hindsight plays tricks on our minds ... often distorts the past and encourages us to play hunches and outguess other investors, who in turn are playing the same game. For most of us, trying to beat the market leads to disastrous results ... our actions lead to much lower returns than can be achieved by just staying in the market. — Jeremy Siegel

I don't even use italics or boldface; that's clutter, not clarity. Fancy fonts are fine for blogs, just as calligraphy is fine for diaries. But when you're writing for anyone other than yourself, you want to get as universal as possible. — Andrew Vachss

Life is not stationary. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years all tick away at the same clip for everyone. No age-group can be isolated. None of us can settle into infancy, youth, middle age, or old age. We all grow older, and, incidentally, it is an exciting thought if the accent is on growing. "Though our outward man perish," said Paul, "yet the inward man is renewed day by day" (2 Cor. 4:16; italics added). — Hugh W. Pinnock

I doubt I was much of a storyteller, but I would have put that smile in my book. On page 104, right next to the image of the Ward. I would have written it on my heart. I would have proofread it a thousand times under a thousand moons until a thousand tears thoroughly rationalized what it meant to me. Each time for when I'd met the darkness, and then succumbed. The smile read "you can't break me'" - bold and in italics. — Nadege Richards

If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday (Isa. 58:10, italics added). — Steve Corbett

The night was electric - The night was in italics. — Martin Amis

As [a man] thin-keth in his heart, so is he (Proverbs 23:7 KJV, italics added). — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

We must at regular and appropriate intervals speak and reassure others of our love and the long time it takes to prove it by our actions. Real love does take time. The Great Shepherd had the same thoughts in mind when he taught, 'If ye love me, keep my commandments' (John 14:15; italics added) and 'If ye love me feed my sheep' (John 21:16; italics added). Love demands action if it is to be continuing. — Marvin J. Ashton

He also seemed to speak predominantly in italics. — Gail Carriger

I suppose, as a politician, I should be content, for the Canada Pension Plan certainly put my name in Canada's history books, and in italics. — Judy LaMarsh

How about we walk back? Through the cemetery?' One thing my mom had taught me is that it's difficult to refuse requests made in italics. — The Harvard Lampoon

They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics. — Anne Carson

He could think in italics. Such people need watching.
Preferably from a safe distance. — Terry Pratchett

He wielded verbal italics as if they were capable of actual bodily harm. — Gail Carriger

Oh, good," he muttered. "We're going to discuss it now."
"No discussion," she said. Her mind was quite clear now, as though a fire had blazed through it, burning away all confusion. "It's perfectly simple. No One Must
Ever Know."
He came up onto one elbow and looked at her. "Do you know," he said, "I can hear those five words in italics. Capitalized. — Loretta Chase

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing. — Jorge Luis Borges

When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen? — Neil Gaiman

Amid this social intercourse, however, he avoided sedulously a meeting with Mrs. Annice; he had decided not to see her for a while. Indeed, it was not till an evening late in February, after dinner, that he took a cab to her house near Washington Square. He found her at home, and had not waited a minute before she came into the room. She was a tall woman, and wonderfully handsome by gaslight; but she had that tiresome habit, which many women have, of talking intensely
in italics, as it were: a habit found generally in women ill brought up-women without control of their feelings, or command of the expression of them.
("The Bargain of Rupert Orange") — Vincent O'Sullivan

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS. — Henry James

They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator's prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard's own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. — John Updike

When the Jews wanted to make something emphatic, instead of adding an exclamation point or using italics, they would simply repeat it. — R.C. Sproul

Trilateralists look forward to a pseudo postnational age in which social, economic, and political values originating in the trilatleral regions are transformed into universal values. Expanding networks of like-minded governmental officials, businessmen, and technocrats - elite products of Western civilization - are to carry out national and international policy formation. Functionally specific institutions with 'more technical focus, and lesser public awareness' [italics mine] are best suited for addressing international issues in the trilateral model. Trilateralists call this decision making process 'piecemeal functionalism.' No comprehensive blueprints would be proposed and debated, but bit and bit the overall trilateral design would take shape. Its 'functional' components are to be adopted in more or less piecemeal fashion, lessening the chance people will grasp the overall scheme and organize resistance. — Holly Sklar

Reg coughed repressively.Habit had made of the standard nouns and adjectives in his own vocabulary something merely conventional,like italics or points of exclamation.He sometimes found Laurie's conversation highly obscene,and would have voiced his disapproval to anyone he had liked less. — Mary Renault

As Jung noted in his Psychology of the Transference, "Psychological induction inevitably causes the two parties to get involved in the transformation of the third and to be themselves transformed in the process" (1946, p. 199, italics added). This is in the theoretical and phenomenological zone of Odgen's "analytic third, — Anonymous

While everyone was screaming in italics, the babies themselves seem to have done just fine. Despite their inability to do almost anything on their own, infants are far more flexible than they get credit for: within a few obvious parameters - food, shelter, love - they are astonishingly adaptive. — Nicholas Day

In this Postscript I distinguish references back to the revised text of this book by placing these in italics thus (262), from references to the works of other authors under discussion, which are thus (p. 162). account — E.P. Thompson

You can't have many exclamation points left,' thought Anne, 'but no doubt the supply of italics is inexhaustible. — L.M. Montgomery

I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:
The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.
Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right? — Jesse Andrews

It is inevitable that the doctor should be influenced to a certain extent and even that his nervous health should suffer. He quite literally 'takes over' the sufferings of his patient and shares them with him. For this reason he runs a risk - and must run it in the nature of things" (1946, p. 172, italics added). — Anonymous

A few italics really do relieve your feelings. — Lucy Maud Montgomery