Passives Quotes & Sayings

A dog's love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one's ability to hold that one's interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion - from dogs we presume an eternal adoration. — Jennifer Egan

What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw. — David Hockney

AuthorZoom- You do the writing, let us do the rest. — Christopher Seufert

They'd tried, him and Snow. They'd tried and they'd failed, and that felt so much better than not having tried at all. — Stephen Deas

There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves. — Linda Grant

I didn't need the insurance. I do it again if my DP tells me it didn't look good in the camera or if the actors didn't hit their marks. But if everything was working why do it again? — Debbie Allen

I am compelled, because of my faith, to have compassion for the weak and vulnerable in our midst. — Frank Wolf

I had worn that gold ring for nearly thirty years; token of vows taken, forsaken, renewed, and at last absolved. A token of marriage, of family; of a large part of my life. And the last trace of Frank - whom, in spite of everything, I had loved. Jamie — Diana Gabaldon

Who gives is positive; who receives is negative; still there remains an immense class of mere passives. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

Every time Paul and Gene use my makeup, they have to pay me a royalty check. I think they changed the makeup so they didn't have to pay me. — Ace Frehley

If you go through any newspaper or magazine and look for active, kicking verbs in the sentences, you will realize that this lack of well used verbs is the main trouble with modern English writing. Almost all nonfiction nowadays is written in a sort of pale, colorless sauce of passives and infinitives, motionless and flat as paper. — Rudolf Flesch

There is always place for if not music, then travelling and books. — Robert Pattinson

It is something that I always found quite unfair: wondering why the Jews never rebelled when deported. — Roselyne Bosch

When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults. — Daniel Bell

You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it. — Saul Bellow

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.
— Richard Mitchell

As long as there are Japanese tourists, there will be a market for the Old South. — John Shelton Reed