Pentameter Quotes & Sayings

The hardest part of writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was probably the sheer amount of iambic pentameter and tiptoeing around certain scenes I knew would be hot-button issues for 'Star Wars' fans. — Ian Doescher

Why do you think they don't like me? They hired me for God's sake. It's not like there was any mystery about my history."
"I heard you used iambic pentameter once when you should have used a catalexis."
"Huh?"
"Believe me, whatever the reason is, it will make as much sense."
Swift thought this over. Max was probably right, but it was still a weird, unhappy feeling. His mouth curved. "Do you really know what catalexis is?"
"Not a clue. I heard you mention it once. It stuck in my memory because it sounds like a cross between a Cadillac and a Lexus. — Josh Lanyon

A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations! Shouts of delight and horror as the wonders of the world are discovered or the lies of the heavens are uncovered or the wild adventures of devil-knows-who sent romping out of the pages. A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong. It should positively vibrate with laughing at comedies and sobbing at tragedies, it should echo with gasps as decent ladies glimpse indecent things and indecent ladies stumble upon secret and scandalous decencies! A Library should not shush; it should roar! — Catherynne M Valente

I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower. — Ian Doescher

I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don't mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don't want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed. — Bill Nighy

With Shakespeare, if you're not going to do the iambic pentameter, do some other play. — John C. McGinley

To break the pentameter, that was the first heave — Ezra Pound

Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium. — David Quammen

Why didn't vandals ever quote Shakespeare? I'd love to see graffiti in iambic pentameter. — J.A. Konrath

You know, I used to say, when people say, 'How do you think about what to write about in the poems every week?' And I say, 'Well, I have to turn it in on Monday, so on Sunday nights I turn the shower to iambic pentameter and it sort of works out that way.' — Calvin Trillin

The conventional wisdom with David Mamet is, you do not change a word. And that agrees with me. If you want to change any of David's words, it's like wanting to change the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare - you should do something else. — John C. McGinley

Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not "This is misfortune," but "To bear this worthily is good fortune. — Marcus Aurelius

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. — Howard Nemerov

He drained a bar dry last night and is managing to speak in iambic pentameter. I have two glasses of wine with dinner and I can barely decipher the TV Guide the next day. I'm so freaking old." "Join — Lucy Parker

I realized that if my thoughts immediately affect my body, I should be careful about what I think. Now if I get angry, I ask myself why I feel that way. If I can find the source of my anger, I can turn that negative energy into something positive. — Yoko Ono

Sweetheart, darling, dearest, it was funny to think that these endearments, which used to sound exceedingly sentimental in movies and books, now held great importance, simple but true verbal affirmations of how they felt for each other. They were words only the heart could hear and understand, words that could impart entire pentameter sonnets in their few, short syllables. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Code never lies, comments sometimes do. — Ron Jeffries

In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you'd still be the same grotesque you'd always been. — Karen Joy Fowler

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme. — James Fenton

Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building. — Anita Nair

Her life had been squandered, and whether she said it in pentameter or not didn't seem to matter much. — James S.A. Corey

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style. — Sydney Smith

Live finding each other in what you haven't yet found, seeing each other in a way that you haven't yet seen, reaching within to find the more. In the more you find the more of each other. — John De Ruiter

But if all else fails, I can always write her a sonnet." "A sonnet?" said Hugh. "No woman can resist having her name rhymed with a flower in iambic pentameter," said Daniel. — Helen Simonson

She was beautiful and seemingly quite intelligent, what with her pentameter search system. There wasn't a reason in the world not to find her appealing. — Haruki Murakami

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?. — David Ogilvy

What Hamlet suffers from is a lack of zombies. Let us say Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up - Ho-HO! Now you've got something that stirs the, um, something that stirs things that are stirrable. BOOM! A pack of ravenous flesh-eaters breaks open their heads and sucks out their eyeballs. No need for iambic pentameter because they are grunting, groaning annihilators of humanity with no time for meter. You're not asleep in the back of English class anymore, are you? This is what I'm talking about. Zombies. Learn it, live it, love it. — Libba Bray

The mark of a legitimate revolution - the scientific, for example - was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. — Jonathan Franzen

It's good to have a lot of once-in-a-lifetimes in your lifetime. If you get the chance to skydive, go skydiving. If you're offered a part in a weird Shakespeare play in San Diego, slap on some tights and rock out some iambic pentameter. — Neil Patrick Harris