Single Phrase Quotes & Sayings

Together and separately, we as speakers disproved another description used to disqualify feminists: that we were all "whitemiddleclass," a phrase used by the media then (and academics who believe those media clippings now) as if it were a single adjective to describe the women's movement. In fact, the first-ever nationwide poll of women's opinions on issues of gender equality showed that African American women were twice as likely as white women to support them.8 If the poll had included Latinas, Asian Americans, Native Americans, — Gloria Steinem

It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death. — Richard K. Morgan

He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet's phrase, like the world hurts God. — William Gibson

His father looked up at him, his mind straining to force his disobedient body into activity. Each movement of his mouth took incredible effort. Just breathing in and out enough to generate sound appeared nearly impossible. Still, his fingers gripped Henry's so slightly it was almost imperceptible And a single phrase slipped out. "Saang jan."
It meant "stranger". As in "You are a stranger to me. — Jamie Ford

I guess if I had to put it into a single phrase, the moral of the Frank stories is that the hammer never really falls. — Jim Woodring

Whether one is remaining alert (mindfulness), focusing on a single thought or phrase (mantra), or mentally exploring ones inner world (visualization), all are one form of concentration or another. — Gudjon Bergmann

In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land. — Barbara Holland

Vonnegut along with critically acclaimed novelists like Lawrence Durrell and Iris Murdoch, Scholes explained that Vonnegut uses the rhetorical potential of the short sentence and short paragraph better than anyone now writing, often getting a rich comic or dramatic effect by isolating a single sentence in a separate paragraph or excerpting a phrase from context for a bizarre chapter-heading. The apparent simplicity and ordinariness of his writing mask its efficient power ... — Kurt Vonnegut

There are few things more powerful than a name. A single phrase that somehow becomes a symbol for an entire existence. — Lance Conrad

Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993. However, it certainly appears that the main thing the Internet has accomplished is the normalization of amateur pornography. There is no justification for the amount of naked people on the World Wide Web, many of whom are clearly (clearly!) doing so for non-monetary reasons. Where were these people fifteen years ago? Were there really millions of women in 1986 turning to their husbands and saying, 'You know, I would love to have total strangers masturbate to images of me deep-throating a titanium dildo, but there's simply no medium for that kind of entertainment. I guess we'll just have to sit here and watch Falcon Crest again. — Chuck Klosterman

there's a single phrase to describe Sister Simone, it is "compassionate conviction." With bravery, with courage, with optimism, she is focused on the common good. She is a champion for the cause of peace and justice. She has the will and the drive to do right. — Simone Campbell

If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn't, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those "mature" people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. — Alexei Panshin

Some delightful inscriptions are found in second-hand books. One, the most famous of all, may be found in every bookshop in the nation, repeated in a thousand and one volumes with only a single change of phrase in each. It is this: ', with love from Momma. — Vincent Starrett

Every single answer starts with the phrase 'I don't know.' But most of the time she does know, if I give her the time and the space in which to answer. — David Levithan

In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction. — I. A. Richards

I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase. — Doris Lessing

When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it. — Salman Rushdie

Brothers and sisters, with the blessings of modern technology, we can express gratitude and joy about God's great plan for His children in a way that can be heard not only around our workplace but around the world. Sometimes a single phrase of testimony can set events in motion that affect someone's life for eternity. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

As she spoke, Isabel found herself thinking of the power of words. A single word, a phrase, a sentence or two could have such extraordinary power; could end a world, break a heart or, as in this case, consign another to moral purdah. — Alexander McCall Smith

Every single one of us who has been a 'Woman in Film' for more than five minutes is sick of the phrase 'Women in Film.' — Lynda Obst

The eternal task of song can never be finished in a single lifetime. That is the beauty and fascination of the art. Once you begin to phrase finely, you will feel more joy in the beautiful finish of a beautiful phrase than that caused by the loudest applause of an immense audience. The latter excites for a moment; the former endures forever. — Nellie Melba

Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not-there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage. I had that courage. — Oscar Wilde

The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if passing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging the flour. In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase "nose to the grindstone": a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work as much as attentiveness.) A wooden spout at the bottom of the mill emitted a gentle breeze of warm, tan flour that slowly accumulated in a white cloth bag. I leaned in close for a whiff. Freshly milled whole-grain flour is powerfully fragrant, redolent of hazelnuts and flowers. For the first time I appreciated what I'd read about the etymology of the word "flour" -- that it is the flower, or best part, of the wheat seed. Indeed. White flour has little aroma to speak of; this flour smelled delicious. — Michael Pollan

A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on you mind. (It's another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini. It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! — Steven Pinker

This rule is difficult to apply; it is frequently hard to decide whether a single word, such as however, or a brief phrase, is or is not parenthetic. If the interruption to the flow of the sentence is but slight, the writer may safely omit the commas. But whether the interruption be slight or considerable, he must never omit one comma and leave the other. Such punctuation as — William Strunk Jr.

With that single phrase, the color of the world changed ... to something so vivid ... so dramatic ... so loving that it almost hurts ... — Minari Endou

Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life. — Robert C. Solomon

The first thing he taught me was how to make love.
Before you laugh, know that I'd always hated that phrase. It sounded so corny, so old. Hippies made love. People my mom's age, though I preferred to believe I was an immaculate conception.
People my age hooked up, fucked, had sex. We didn't attach frilly ideas of oneness and eternity to a basic biological act. Most of us were from single-parent homes. Those who weren't wished they were when their parents screamed and beat the shit out of each other. We grew up sexualized, from toddler beauty pageants to the constant reminder that adults were waiting to lure us into vans with candy. The invention of MMS gave us a platform for the distribution of amateur porn.
That's a lot of conditioning to break through. — Leah Raeder

Yet the Kingdom of God in Jesus's teachings is not a celestial kingdom existing on a cosmic plane. Those who claim otherwise often point to a single unreliable passage in the gospel of John in which Jesus allegedly tells Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). Not only is this the sole passage in the gospels where Jesus makes such a claim, it is an imprecise translation of the original Greek. The phrase ouk estin ek tou kosmou is perhaps better translated as "not part of this order/system [of government]." Even if one accepts the historicity of the passage (and very few scholars do), Jesus was not claiming that the Kingdom of God is unearthly; he was saying it is unlike any kingdom or government on earth. — Reza Aslan

The people of that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of their servitude is incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in words greater than the conjurer's art. So befuddled and chaotic were their minds that the utterance of a single word could negative the generalizations of a lifetime of serious research and thought. Such a word was the adjective UTOPIAN. The mere utterance of it could damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of economic amelioration or regeneration. Vast populations grew frenzied over such phrases as "an honest dollar" and "a full dinner pail." The coinage of such phrases was considered strokes of genius. — Jack London

Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition. — Yukio Mishima

In our own lives the voice of God speaks slowly, a syllable at a time. Reaching the peak of years, dispelling some of our intimate illusions and learning how to spell the meaning of life-experiences backwards, some of us discover how the scattered syllables form a single phrase. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Galison uses the phrase "critical opalescence" to sum up the story of what happened in 1905 when relativity was discovered. Critical opalescence is a strikingly beautiful effect that is seen when water is heated to a temperature of 374 degrees Celsius under high pressure. 374 degrees is called the critical temperature of water. It is the temperature at which water turns continuously into steam without boiling. At the critical temperature and pressure, water and steam are indistinguishable. They are a single fluid, unable to make up its mind whether to be a gas or a liquid. In that critical state, the fluid is continually fluctuating between gas and liquid, and the fluctuations are seen visually as a multicolored sparkling. The sparkling is called opalescence because it is also seen in opal jewels which have a similar multicolored radiance. — Freeman Dyson

Religion can be condensed in a single phrase: total freedom to be oneself. — Rajneesh

I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation. — Dave Barry

If the general attitude of Canadians toward their mighty neighbor to the south could be distilled into a single phrase, that phrase would probably be "Oh, shut up." The Americans talked too much, mainly about themselves. Their torrid love affair with their own history and legend exceeded-painfully-the quasi-British Canadian idea of modesty and self-restraint ... They were forever busting their buttons in spasms of insufferable yahoo pride or all too publicly agonizing over their crises. — Bruce McCall

As he clambered back and picked up the paddle, he was still muttering furiously in his own language and glaring at her. Without deciphering a single word, she knew he was scolding her for her carelessness, trying to explain that one had to be alert the whole time in the jungle.
"Idiota!" he said finally, and though Senhor and Senhora Olvidares in the phrase book had not used the word, Maia understood it well enough. — Eva Ibbotson

Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it's a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner. — Jeff Lindsay

Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger - which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you. — Greil Marcus

In the old legend the wise men finally boiled down the history of mortal affairs into a single phrase: 'This too will pass.' — Benjamin Graham

Are you lecturing me again, Orion? Is that what this is?' ... 'I would never dream of lecturing you. I just thought it was interesting to think about.'
'Mmm-hmm. And how many times did you practice how you'd phrase this little gem of wisdom when you told me/'
He runs a had through his thick, dark curls. 'Ah, umm ... who says I practiced it?'
I raise a single eyebrow at him.
'Two. Maybe three. Five. Not more that five — Kiersten White

It's true most superheroes have funny names. But they have to come up with these names by themselves. Think about how hard it is. Try it, right now; boil down your personality and abilities to a single phrase or image. If you can do that, you're probably a superhero already. — Andrew Kaufman

It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please ... Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It [the Constitution] was intended to lace them up straightly within the enumerated powers and those without which, as means, these powers could not be carried into effect. — Thomas Jefferson

If I had to define life in a single phrase, I should clearly express my thought of throwing into relief one characteristic which, in my opinion, sharply differentiates biological science. I should say: life is creation. — Claude Bernard

Justification by grace through faith' is the theologian's learned phrase for what Chesterton once called 'the furious love of G-d.' He is not moody or capricious; He knows no seasons of change. He has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only G-d man has ever heard of who loves sinners. False gods- the gods of human manufacturing- despise sinners, but the Father of (Yeshua) loves all, no matter what they do. — Brennan Manning

Choose a single, sacred word or phrase that captures something of the flavor of your intimate relationship with God. A word such as Jesus, Abba, Peace, God or a phrase such as "Abba, I belong to you." ... Without moving your lips, repeat the sacred word inwardly, slowly, and often. — Brennan Manning

If the women's movement can be summed up in a single phrase, it is 'the right to choose'. — Beatrice Faust

Here is one optimists reason for believing unity will prevail ... within the next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century
citizen of the world
will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st. All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary. — Strobe Talbott

To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe. — Craig D. Lounsbrough