Quotes & Sayings About Letters Of The Alphabet

Rushing toward her are all the letters of the alphabet. Each one moves in its own way, X cartwheeling over and over, C hopping forward, M and N marching stiff-legged and resolute. — Myla Goldberg

But I have never ceased to think of that girl. I have written to her, but I can not direct the epistle because her name is one of those nine-jointed Russian affairs, and there are not letters enough in our alphabet to hold out. I am not reckless enough to try to pronounce it when I am awake, but I make a stagger at it in my dreams, — Mark Twain

That's exactly what climbing is to me ... Expression. What a painter does on a canvas, what a writer can do with the twenty-six letters in the alphabet. It's the key that unlocks my spirit, the clearest representation of who I am. When I'm focused, climbing is almost an unconscious act for me. I don't have to drive myself, I'm already driven. — Stacy Allison

The alphabet is male and female. If you will know the correct order of letters, you make a world, you make creation. This is why they will hide the order. If you will know the combinations, you make all life and death. — Don DeLillo

I FEEL AS THOUGH I AM EATING the alphabet. Twenty-six courses of letters, each with its own distinctive flavor. It is inevitable that some letters will taste delicious, others not so much. Some will have a delicate flavor, others will be more like a hearty peasant stew. — Ammon Shea

Art is a kind of magic. Creativity is mysterious, even to artists, who might be able to name their inspiration but can't always explain how their influences and experiences came together to create this new thing- this painting, this story, this song. If you break art down to its base elements, there's nothing miraculous about the letters of the alphabet or a drop of paint. But an artist can put those elements together to create something powerful, something that moves us and withstands the test of time. A work that no one but that artist could have imagined, let alone created. — Sarah Cross

The twenty-seventh was Blackstar, or simply (the symbol of blackstar) - a suggestion that the A-Z was over, but there was more to come, beyond the known alphabet, beyond ordinary language; a second set of letters, communications, a rebirth. Inside the A to Z, and all the possible combinations of songs, styles, secrets, themes, discoveries, redirections, emotional climaxes, sheer drama, tension, relief, beauty, there was all you needed to know in order to construct and understand the language of Bowie
(re morley's alphabet of bowie albums) — Paul Morley

Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they'd had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops. — Donna Tartt

It is the highest and most legitimate pride of an Englishman to have the letters M.P. written after his name. No selection from the alphabet, no doctorship, no fellowship, be it of ever so learned or royal a society, no knightship,
not though it be of the Garter,
confers so fair an honour. — Anthony Trollope

(1) Phonological awareness is recognizing the sound structures of spoken language, not just the meanings it conveys. This is a reading prerequisite. (2) Phonemic awareness is the skill of recognizing and manipulating individual speech sounds or phonemes. Students must be able to segment words and syllables into phonemes to learn to read. (3) The Alphabetic Principle is the concept that printed language consists of alphabet letters that are deliberately and systematically related to the individual sounds of spoken language. Reading depends on understanding this concept. (4) Orthographic awareness is recognition of printed language structures, such as orthographic rules, patterns in spelling; derivational morphology and inflectional morphology, i.e. structural changes indicating word types and grammatical differences; and etymology, i.e. word and meaning — MTEL Exam Secrets Test Prep Team

Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview) — Patti Smith

If Plan A Doesn't Work, Don't Worry and Don't Stay Stuck In The Mud. Just Move On Because God Knows There's 25 Letters Left In The Alphabet & There's Always Numbers Too ;) — Timothy Pina

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river! — Mark Twain

His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered. — Charles Dickens

Numerical logistic is that which employs numbers; symbolic logistic that which uses symbols, as, say, the letters of the alphabet. — Francois Viete

And if words existed before matter of any kind, before suns and worlds and seas and human beings and fortune-tellers ... well, then an alphabet must have existed even earlier, so that words could be formed. Therefore letters are more fundamental and powerful than anything else a diviner could use to force the secrets of the universe into view. — Dean Koontz

The alphabet Miss Poobner taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters
Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on
and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan's will utterly. — Jonathan Lethem

Snakes can have dozens of young at a time, and so they are often symbols of fertility. They resemble vegetation, especially roots, in their form and often in the green and brown of their skins. The undulating form of a snake also suggests a river. A point of muscular tension passes through the body of a snake and drives the animal forward, like a moment moving along a continuum of days and years. Like time itself, a snake seems to progress while remaining still. In addition, the body of a snake also resembles those marks with a stylus, brush, or pen that make up our letters. Ornamental alphabets of the ancient Celts and others were often made up of intertwined serpents. It could even be that the tracks of a snake in sand helped to inspire the invention of the alphabet. The manner in which snakes curl up in a ball has made people associate them with the sun. — Boria Sax

As the component parts of all new machines may be said to be old[,] it is a nice discriminating judgment, which discovers that a particular arrangement will produce a new and desired effect ... Therefore, the mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc. like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as the exhibition of his thoughts; in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea to the world. — Robert Fulton

Opinions are not to be learned by rote, like the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a dictionary. They are conclusions to be formed, and formed by each individual in the sacred and free citadel of the mind, and there enshrined beyond the arm of law to reach, or force to shake; ay! and beyond the right of impertinent curiosity to violate, or presumptuous arrogance to threaten. — Frances Wright

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer's head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different. — Margaret Atwood

But the Semitic names did possess meaning in Semitic languages: they were the words for familiar objects ('aleph = ox, beth = house, gimel = camel, daleth = door, and so on). These Semitic words were related "acrophonically" to the Semitic consonants to which they refer: that is, the first letter of the word for the object was also the letter named for the object ('a, b, g, d, and so on). In addition, the earliest forms of the Semitic letters appear in many cases to have been pictures of those same objects. All these features made the forms, names, and sequence of Semitic alphabet letters easy to remember. Many — Jared Diamond

In Degas's compositions with several dancers, their steps, postures and gestures often resemble the almost geometric, formal letters of an alphabet, whereas their bodies and heads are recalcitrant, sinuous and individual. — John Berger

There are only so many letters in the alphabet. When I talk to young musicians or authors and they ask for advice, I say, 'You gotta learn all the letters of your own personal alphabet. With music, you need to know all the different kinds of music and everything in and around your given instrument.' — David Lee Roth

Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens. — Fran Lebowitz

Love and ruin are explained with letters of the alphabet.
The power of the word can describe the glory of the universe. It only requires an open mind and heart. — J.R. Ortiz

I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: each time I was overcome with fear. Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons - and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them: they run off - and how will you ever get control of them again! They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper - black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and implore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind. — Nikos Kazantzakis

If atoms do, by chance, happen to combine themselves into so many shapes, why have they never combined together to form a house or a slipper? By the same token, why do we not believe that if innumerable letters of the Greek alphabet were poured all over the market-place they would eventually happen to form the text of the Iliad? — Michel De Montaigne

I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me
and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting
into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting school.
My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the head of fairy tales. In "Once upon a time," an "o" had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came years later for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the world's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start. — Eudora Welty

We have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion "letters the longest "word" yet discovered?" — John Lennox

They felt, in fact, tremendously bucked-up, which was how Lady Ramkin would almost certainly have put it and which was definitely several letters of the alphabet away from how they normally felt. — Terry Pratchett

Just like literature, wine takes time to learn. Before having access to the emotion of a stunning poem or to the vigor of a captivating novel, we all had to go through a long initiation. First, we need to learn the alphabet, the sound of each letter. In wine, that would be learning about the grapes and their characteristics. Then, once we master our letters, we need to learn the arrangements of letters, the pronunciation, the grammar, the structure of sentences. Now we can read. In wine, that would be the stage when we start noticing differences between two reds. You no longer drink wine: you start drinking this wine. — Olivier Magny

I stared at the paper. I said, "This isn't reading. This is drawing." "Writing," she corrected. "It's like buttons and hems. You've got to learn those before you can sew on the machine. You've got to know your letters before you can read." I supposed so, but it was boring. When I said so she got up again and wrote something along the bottom of the paper. "What's that?" I asked. "'Ada is a curmudgeon,'" she replied. "Ada is a curmudgeon," I copied at the end of my alphabet. It pleased me. After — Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

When did your name
change from a proper noun
to a charm?

Its three vowels
like jewels
on the thread of my breath.

Its consonants
brushing my mouth
like a kiss.

I love your name.
I say it again and again
in this summer rain.

I see it,
discreet in the alphabet,
like a wish.

I pray it
into the night
till its letters are light.

I hear your name
rhyming, rhyming,
rhyming with everything.


"Name — Carol Ann Duffy

when Peter the Great came to rule, making it one of his first job to remove Greek letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. Middle Russian In the late 1300's, the Russians overthrew the Mongols and moved their capital city to Moscow. The primary language continues as Church Slavonic until the 1700's and — Tania Johnson

These Phoenicians who came with Cadmus and of whom the Gephyraeans were a part brought with them to Hellas, among many other kinds of learning, the alphabet, which had been unknown before this, I think, to the Greeks. As time went on the sound and the form of the letters were changed. At this time the Greeks who were settled around them were for the most part Ionians, and after being taught the letters by the Phoenicians, they used them with a few changes of form. In so doing, they gave to these characters the name of Phoenician, as was quite fair seeing that the Phoenicians had brought them into Greece.
(5-58-59) — Herodotus

May God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons - and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them; they run off - and how will you ever get control of them again! — Nikos Kazantzakis

Not only does every Hebrew word have its own definition, but every Hebrew letter, within the word, has its own meaning. God placed before you a great banquet of universal truths. All this in 22 Hebrew letters. Every letter contains a progressive curriculum designed to teach you about this marvelous world that God gave us. These letters will flavor each word's definition claiming its place in God's well organized universe. — Michael Ben Zehabe

I'm intrigued that the same letters from the alphabet are used in the word silent and in the word listen. Perhaps it's evidence that the most important part of listening involves remaining silent. — Robert Herjavec

Stu stops munching, looks up at me from under his shaggy hair.
"So, can you read?" He slides a section toward me.
I cock my head toward the paper. The letters are small, blurry drawings. The alphabet might as well be Chinese or Arabic. Strange that I can't read or speak, though I still have language inside my head. Words are a consolation, but not a tool.
"Guess not. You want me to read stuff out loud to you?"
I would, but not right now. If I wanted to show interest in the newspaper I could cross the table and rub against his shoulder. Instead I gaze at him over the bowl of milk.
"It's so weird," he says in a hesitant voice. "You don't look like a cat. When you stare at me, you look like Eliza."
That's the nicest thing he could have said. With a happy lightness to my step I move between the bowls, over his napkin ring and spoon, until I stand on the edge of the table and nip at his prickly chin. This is my way of saying: Hi, there. I like you. — Simone Martel

... [T]he letters of the alphabet (two Cs, a large D; the combination of Y, S, and L) belong on an ophthalmologist's chart. For the Parisienne, luxury should never be spelled out. — Anne Berest

We are but beginners now in spiritual education; for although we have learned the first letters of the alphabet, we cannot read words yet, much less can we put sentences together; but as one says, "He that has been in heaven but five minutes, knows more than the general assembly of divines on earth. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Character starts with the alphabet. Letters: words: sentences Character is a function of language - a collection of errors and deviations that resonate with certain behaviors. As with every other element in fiction, it is a record of a writer's decisions. — Noy Holland

He was creating the first letters of the Slavonic alphabet. He started with rounded letters, but the Slavonic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly language in them like a bird. — Milorad Pavic

I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do. — Paul Reiser

The truly perfect pangram would contain all the letters of the alphabet in the right order, but the only thing that achieves that is the alphabet. There are phrases that use fewer characters, but they are not as catchy. And this is not for want of trying. Here are two of the shortest: 'Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.' 'Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow. — Simon Garfield

Man's books are but man's alphabet, Beyond and on his lessons lie The lessons of the violet, The large gold letters of the sky; The love of beauty, blossomed soil, The large content, the tranquil toil: The toil that nature ever taught, The patient toil, the constant stir, The toil of seas where shores are wrought, The toil of Christ, the carpenter; The toil of God incessantly By palm-set land or frozen sea. — Joaquin Miller

The King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing. — Jared Diamond

All that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me. — Sue Monk Kidd

It was the sheer force of the letters themselves which brought forth the meaning, since the only link between the Sephirot of non-verbal Wisdom and verbal Intelligence was through the letters of the alphabet. — Johanna Drucker

Putting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer.
The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors, Manna said, fingering the discarded leaves of her roses. I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red. I feel too greedy for colors to see them in carefully chosen words of poetry. — Azar Nafisi

The atoms may be compared to the letters of the alphabet, which can be put together into innumerable ways to form words. So the atoms are combined in equal variety to form what are called molecules. — William Henry Bragg

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day. — Richard Price

One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In that sequence, O and P are inseparable. You might just as well say O and P as Orestes and Pylades.
A true satellite of Enjolras, Grantaire lived within this circle of young men. He dwelt among them, only with them was he happy, he followed them everywhere. His pleasure was to watch these figures come and go in a wine-induced haze. They put up with him because of his good humour.
In his belief, Enjolras looked down on this sceptic; and in his sobriety, on this drunkard. He spared him a little lordly pity.
Grantaire was an unwanted Pylades. Always snubbed by Enjolras, spurned, rebuffed and back again for more, he said of Enjolras, 'What marmoreal magnificence'. — Victor Hugo

For designers, the rigidity of an alphabet presents a never-ending artistic challenge: How do you do something new and still preserve the letters' essential forms? — Virginia Postrel

X, n. In our alphabet being a needless letter has an added invincibility to the attacks of the spelling reformers, and like them, will doubtless last as long as the language. — Ambrose Bierce

In the act of writing he experiences, today, an exceptional sensual pleasure
in the feel of the pen, snug in the crook of his thumb, but even more in the feel of his hand being tugged back lightly from its course across the page by the strict, unvarying shape of the letters, the discipline of the alphabet. — J.M. Coetzee

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E's, nine thousand T's, and only two hundred Z's. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text. — James Gleick

There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet. — Aaron Allston

I like talking to myself and making patterns out of the letters of the alphabet on blank surfaces. — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It's the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language. — Joshua Foer

When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible. — Alexander Kluge

What creature is it that is
female in nature and hides
in its womb unborn children
who, although they are voiceless,
speak to people far away?
The female creature is a letter.
The unborn children are the letters
(of the alphabet) it carries. And the
letters, although they have no voices,
speak to people far away. — Sappho

We appreciate your coming to us with a copy of your letter to your sister, but it was unnecessary. Your offense was known to us even before the letter's receipt by your sister. Effective as of September 15 the primary responsibility of our isle's new assistant chief postal inspector has been to scan all post for use of illegal letters of the alphabet, then to make nightly reports to the Council. A report has been put on file on your behalf, your official sentence to be forthwith in issuance. — Mark Dunn

I know. I admit that. You're working with NSC now. And the FBI." "So?" "So how would you like to be part of a joint effort with NIC?" "I already have enough alphabet letters, thanks." "You — David Baldacci

A is for Alibi, my first book, was published in 1982. As it happened the next couple of books took place in June and August of that year. Without meaning to I painted myself into a corner. The other issue was the aging process. I did not want my main character to age one year for every book so I slowed the whole process down. This way I could get through all 26 letters of the alphabet without making her 109 years old in 2015. I might end the series in either 1990 or on New Years Eve 1989. — Sue Grafton

Marissa keeps herself entertained by rating the guys that cruise by. She has her own rating scale: each guy is assigned a letter of the alphabet. But it isn't A to Z order - Marissa must have like a touch of autism or something, because she has this theory that some letters are sexier than others. — Elana K. Arnold

The nature of a letter can also be revealed within its numeric value. All letters and numbers behave in a certain but recognizable way, from which we can deduce its nature. The number two is the only even prime. There is an inherent mathematical dilemma with, "one." No matter how many times you multiply it, by itself, you still can't get past "one" (1 x 1 x 1 x 1 = 1). So, how does "one" move beyond itself? How does the same, produce the different?
Mathematically, "one" is forced to divide itself and work from that duality. Therein, hides the divine puzzle of bet (b). To become "two," the second must revolt from wholeness - a separation. Yet, the second could not have existed without the benefit of the original wholeness. Also, the first wanted the second to exist, but the first doesn't know what the second will become. Again, two contains potential badness, to a Hebrew. (Ge 25:24) — Michael Ben Zehabe