Orally Quotes & Sayings

Hall, for example, probably the most famous and influential writer in the field, distinguishes between what he calls "low context" societies like the United States and Europe and the "high context" societies found throughout most of the developing world. In the former, when one communicates with others - whether orally or in writing - one is expected to be direct, clear, explicit, concrete, linear, and to the point. But in most of the rest of the world, such behavior is considered a bit rude and shallow: one should approach one's subject in a thoughtfully indirect, suggestive, and circumlocutious manner.97 — Arthur M. Melzer

House of pleasure, how may I orally please you? she purred, recognizing the number. — Eve Langlais

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white. — Ambrose Bierce

If you need bug repellant in quantity it makes sense to buy the diethyl metatoluamide at the drugstore and make your own dilution. A dosage of 200 milligrams/day of vitamin B-1 taken orally will make your perspiration repellent to mosquitos and thus keep them away. So will the heavy consumption of garlic. — Robert Snyder Wood

historically fairy tales were women's stories, passed orally in a time when women didn't have many rights. — Nora Roberts

Gay sexuality inevitably involves brutal physical abusiveness and the unnatural imposition of alien substances into internal organs, orally and anally, that inevitably suppress the immune system and heighten susceptibility to disease. — Rod Parsley

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books - setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. (From the Introduction of 1941's The Garden of Forking Paths) — Jorge Luis Borges

Deaf, signing parents will "babble" to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant's brain is especially attuned to learning language in the first three or four years, whether this is an oral language or a signed one. But if a child learns no language at all during the critical period, language acquisition may be extremely difficult later. Thus a deaf child of deaf parents will grow up "speaking" sign, but a deaf child of hearing parents often grows up with no real language at all, unless he is exposed early to a signing community. — Oliver Sacks

Myths grew from the ancient tradition of passing on knowledge orally, the only means of doing so before writing.
They're narratives of human existence. They helped our ancestors interpret reality, solve problems, and guided social behavior. They structured natural and social information into patterns using symbols, and embedded fact into story form. This increased their impact, making information meaningful and personally involving - not just cold, detached facts. — Alan Joshua

With the money from the legal settlement, he hires a beautiful young woman from the local university to type for him as he orally composes the sentences. But soon he realizes she is editing and rewriting what he tells her before she even types it in. And what dawns on him is that she is the better writer. Soon he sits mute in the room while she writes. He only watches. He wants to kill her, strangle her with his hands. But he can't move his hands to do it. He is in hell. — Michael Connelly

You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, "Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something". But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally. — Sandra Cisneros

Music is about communication ... it isn't just something that maybe physically sounds good or orally sounds interesting; it's something far, far deeper than that. — Evelyn Glennie

No officer should be required or permitted to take part in the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns. Their right to vote and to express their views on public questions, either orally or through the press, is not denied, provided it does not interfere with the discharge of their official duties. No assessment for political purposes on officers or subordinates should be allowed. — Rutherford B. Hayes

When I started, the scripts weren't as good, and you'd have to have a huge burst of energy to go, "Sheesh, how am I going to? This stuff's no good." So you'd have to improvise something or create something or try to work with the ware and try to figure out, how do you make this visually and orally acceptable, entertaining? Nowadays, the scripts are just so much better, that you don't have to feel that way. You feel like the script's coming to you, you can just relax. You don't have to drive the boat. — Bill Murray

We have a tradition of passing our history orally and singing a lot of it and writing songs about it and there's kind of a calling in Irish voices when they're singing in their Irish accent. — Sinead O'Connor

It's safe to say that 'Horror,' as a fictional genre, has claim to it's own canon. There is a definite history that can be traced back to the origins of human language, both orally and written, and now multimedia based. We at this point, have access to the full gambit of 'genre' Horror in all its hybrid forms (electronically at least). Sub-genres ensure that Horror can and will multiply in its complexities and evolve along with human fears. — William Cook

... he was doing a breath hydrogen test. If you know the amount of hydrogen someone is exhaling orally, it's a simple matter to extrapolate the amount they're exhaling rectally. This is because a fixed percentage of hydrogen produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and, and when it reaches the lungs, exhaled. The breath hydrogen test has given flatus researchers a simple, consistent measure of gas production that does not require the subject to fart into a balloon. — Mary Roach

Because of the widespread illiteracy during the period of the Reformation, catechesis often took place in face-to-face discussion. This is why "Luther intended his catechism to target primarily pastors, but also parents, and other 'opinion makers' who would in turn share the teachings of the catechism orally with children and illiterate members of the household. — Justin S. Holcomb

The Divine Law was revealed to Moses, not only through the Commands that were found written in the Bible, but also through all the later rules and regulations of post-exilic days. These additional laws it was presumed were handed down orally from Moses to Joshua, thence to the Prophets, and later still transmitted to the Scribes, and eventually to the Rabbis. — Maurice H. Harris

And here it is worth while remembering, since we are discussing Not Writing for Children, that neither the Sleeping Beauty nor Rumpelstiltzkin was really written for children. In fact, none of the fundamental fairy stories was ever written at all. They all arose spontaneously from the folk and were transmitted orally from generation to generation to unlettered listeners of all ages. — P.L. Travers

The ability for a woman to orally satisfy somebody in a rock band, that's important to a rock 'n' roll musician. — Chad Kroeger

Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."
And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Pantaenus was one of these and is said to have gone to India. It is reported that among persons there who knew of Christ, he found the Gospel according to Matthew, which had anticipated his own arrival. For Bartholomew, one of the apostles, had preached to them, and left with them the writing of Matthew in the Hebrew language, which they had preserved till that time. After many good deeds, Pantaenus finally became the head of the school at Alexandria, and expounded the treasures of divine doctrine both orally and in writing. — Eusebius

Why are we so afraid of silence? Teenagers cannot study without their records; they walk along the street with their transistors. Grownups are as bad if not worse; we turn on the TV or the radio the minute we come into the house or start the car. The pollution of noise in our cities is as destructive as the pollution of air. We show our fear of silence in our conversation: I wonder if the orally-minded Elizabethan's used "um" and "er" the way we do? And increasingly prevalent is what my husband calls an articulated pause: "You know." We interject "you know" meaninglessly into every sentence, in order that the flow of our speech should not be interrupted by such a terrifying thing as silence. — Madeleine L'Engle

Back when the Bible was written, then edited, then rewritten, then rewritten, then re-edited, then translated from dead languages, then re-translated, then edited, then rewritten, then given to kings for them to take their favorite parts, then rewritten, then re-rewritten, then translated again, then given to the pope for him to approve, then rewritten, then edited again, the re-re-re-re-rewritten again ... all based on stories that were told orally 30 to 90 years AFTER they happened.. to people who didnt know how to write ... so ... — David Cross

On the above matters there is much to be orally transmitted, as these are our deepest secrets and are kept within our family. Even between a father and a son or brothers, it should never be passed down to anyone who is undeserving, or without due consideration. To people other than those in the family, never show or give away even a word, without exception... This manuscript has the deepest secrets and the core principles of the correct way, and it should be kept inside, deep in one's mind. — Yoshie Minami

Don't seat quiet kids in high interaction areas of the classroom, says communications professor James McCroskey. They won't talk more in those areas; they'll feel more threatened and will have trouble concentrating. Make it easy for introverted kids to participate in class, but don't insist. Forcing highly apprehensive young people to perform orally is harmful. It will increase apprehension and reduce self-esteem. — Susan Cain

No. I tell you, it is Holy Church which instructs Christians how to live, not the Bible. Christians could be pure in their faith even if the Bible had never been written. Doctrine has passed orally from one generation to the next, through Holy Mother Church, God's instrument on earth. 'Quod semper, quod ubique, quod omnibus.' 'What has been believed always, everywhere, and by all.' Tradition. Founded by the Apostles and continuing, unbroken, to the present day. Christ founded a church. He did not write a book! — Barbara Kyle

This doctrine of Christ and of the apostles, from which the true faith of the primitive church was received, the apostles at first delivered orally, without writing, but later, not by any human counsel but by the will of God, they handed it on in the Scriptures. — Martin Chemnitz

Oral storytelling goes back so long ago, and those stories that were told orally were always layered and changed with time. — Ashwin Sanghi

The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille. — B.B. King

Marchand dreams that in one magical and endless night the rejected manuscripts make love every way possible with his abandoned manuscript: they sodomize it, rape it orally and genitally, come in its hair, on its body, in its ears, in its armpits, etc., but when morning comes, his manuscript hasn't been fertilized. It's sterile. In that sterility, Marchand believes, lies its uniqueness, its magnetism. — Roberto Bolano

I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories. — Maxine Hong Kingston

The more I learn, the more I am convinced that there are no original stories. On several occasions I have "invented" an incident, and then come across it in an obscure fragment of Hebridean lore, orally collected, and privately printed, a hundred years ago. — Alan Garner