Quotes & Sayings About Stammering

this "gawky, stammering adventurer. — George Orwell

Art that means anything in the life of a community must bear some relation to current interpretations of the mystery of the universe. Our rigid separation of the humanities and the sciences has temporarily left our art stranded or stammering and incoherent. Both art and science ought to be blended in our early education of our children's emotions and powers of observation, and that harmony carried forward in later education. — Dora Russell

Yet we wanted human feeling, gestures free from suspicion, some sympathetic if stammering articulation, half syllables of mystification, a temporary eternal. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What about those Promises of yours to never leave me? she asked, stammering too much this time. His cruel smirk was as gut-wrenching as his words - Promises are meant to be broken, sweetheart. — Khadija Rupa

I tried to say something cool, wound up stammering something like, "WANNA YOU WANNA WEENIE ME?" The end kind of trailed off in a shrill, choking warble. — David Wong

Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can understand you. — J.C. Ryle

Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep. — Lev Shestov

Anger should be expressed. - Any anger that is not coming out, flowing freely, will turn into sadism, power drive, stammering, and other means of torturing. — Bruce Lee

Our prayers may be weak, stammering, and poor in our eyes. But if they come from a right heart, God understands them. Such prayers are His delight. — J.C. Ryle

The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. — G.K. Chesterton

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity. — Mary McCarthy

am in so much trouble! I'm ruined! I'm just a human being - fallible and stammering. My lips are encrusted with filth; and I live among people just like me. But here I am, and I've seen with my very own eyes none other than the King, the Eternal, Commander of heavenly armies. — Anonymous

This club's no place for you, tibby," he had told her with gruff fondness. "You has to stay away from a milling cove like me, and find some rum cull to marry."
"Papa," she had begged, stammering desperately, "d-don't send me back there. Pl-please, please let me stay with you."
"Little tangle-tongue, you belong with the Maybricks. And no use to hop the twig and run back here. I'll only send you off again. — Lisa Kleypas

I could see exactly what must have happened. Insert a liberal dose of mixed spirits in a normally abstemious man, and he becomes a force. He does not stand around, twiddling his fingers and stammering. He acts. I — P.G. Wodehouse

Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles; elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them. — Thomas Frank

The Poor Children

Take heed of this small child of earth;
He is great; he hath in him God most high.
Children before their fleshly birth
Are lights alive in the blue sky.

In our light bitter world of wrong
They come; God gives us them awhile.
His speech is in their stammering tongue,
And his forgiveness in their smile.

Their sweet light rests upon our eyes.
Alas! their right to joy is plain.
If they are hungry Paradise
Weeps, and, if cold, Heaven thrills with pain.

The want that saps their sinless flower
Speaks judgment on sin's ministers.
Man holds an angel in his power.
Ah! deep in Heaven what thunder stirs,

When God seeks out these tender things
Whom in the shadow where we sleep
He sends us clothed about with wings,
And finds them ragged babes that weep — Victor Hugo

In saying that the truth is both said and not said by the philosopher (said and not said in the form of stammering), Aristotle was still close to the methods of interpretation used by grammarians in their commentaries on the poets. Symbolic or allegorical methods pointing out what was deliberately hidden by Homer behind the figure of Nestor or Ulysses.

But there is a difference however - and a crucial one - which is that for Aristotle the equivocation of the said and the not-said, this distance without gap which means that the truth is both hidden and present in the philosopher's words, this light that is shadow, is not the effect of an oracular kind of intentional secret or prudent reserve. If philosophers do not speak the truth, this is not because their indulgence wishes to protect men from its terrible face; it is because they lack a certain knowledge (savoir). — Michel Foucault

Don't believe I've had the pleasure," she began. "Are you mad? I had you last year at Lord Addington's spring formal! We went behind his pagoda and I took you from the rear. You said I was the best you'd ever had!" The color drained from her face - clearly she didn't find my scenario entirely implausible. Stammering an explanation she hurried off, leaving me to watch the celebration solo. — Daniel Polansky

Because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false. — Saint Augustine

With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

She talked thus, bent double, shaken with sobs, blinded by tears, her neck bare, clenching her hands, coughing with a dry and short cough, stammering very feebly with an agonised voice. Great grief is a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched. At that moment Fantine had again become beautiful. At certain instants she stopped and tenderly kissed the policeman's coat. She would have softened a heart of granite; but you cannot soften a heart of wood — Victor Hugo

Demosthenes overcame and rendered more distinct his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. — Plutarch

Failure is another emotion I cannot stand to feel, because in adult life I have conditioned myself not to fail at anything. Failure takes me straight back to the feelings of worthlessness I grew up with as a stammering, reclusive little boy. — Jake Wood

He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides bring him into eloquence. — Don DeLillo

A stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of delicacy, excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow creature, that makes him stammer. — Thomas Carlyle

Who thinks his great achievements poor
Shall find his vigour long endure.
Of greatest fulness, deemed a void,
Exhaustion ne'er shall stem the tide.
Do thou what's straight still crooked deem;
Thy greatest art still stupid seem,
And eloquence a stammering scream. — Lao-Tzu

Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You're a tiger, a lion, a cat. You spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied. You're twenty five. If rings had been fastened to the earth and sky, you'd have seized them and pulled the sky down to earth — Isaac Babel

We would be blind, Auk. As blind as I. Because I have never had eyes of my own, I could not look out through yours. But I shall go with you, and guide you, and use your body to heal you, if I can. Look upon me, Auk." "There's nothing to see," Auk protested. But there was: a stammering light so filled with hope and pleasure and wonder that Auk would willingly have seen nothing else, if only he could have watched it forever. — Gene Wolfe

Drunk people, loud people, obvious and angry people, people stammering and stumbling, spilling drinks and scarfing small burned sausages and cheese cubes on toothpicks. They had surrendered all power and direction, they they were yelling and gasping. They strengthened me. I did not want to be that way. I stood calmer, observing them. — Paul Theroux

Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants. — Olivia Laing

True, they were broken and stammering syllables; but they were human speech. My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and all faith. — Helen Keller

Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down — Elizabeth Bishop

Me, too." Dove looked at him and smiled.
Johnson missed his mouth when he went for a sip of wine, so Dove passed him her napkin. He began to blush, stammering, "Sorry, your smile made me forget where my intake orifice was."
All my orifices know where you are - especially the ones that grow hair. — Debra Anastasia

God tolerates even our stammering, and pardons our ignorance whenever something inadvertently escapes us - as, indeed, without this mercy there would be no freedom to pray. — John Calvin

Anything with the ability to reduce my world-weary husband to a stammering mess while giving him such pleasure deserved a serious time investment. — Kylie Scott

In books, in songs, in stories, love is floating thing. A falling thing. A flying thing. A good-bye to all your little earthbound worries, as you soar heart-first toward a light pink sky and your dangling feet forget the feel of the ground.
Only I know, now: it isn't like that at all.
Love is a sense of place. It's effortless balance, no stumbling, no stammering. It's your own voice, quiet but strong, and the sense that you can open your mouth, speak your mind, and never feel afraid. A known quantity, a perfect fit. It's the thing that holds you tight to the earth, fast and solid, and sure. You feel it, and feel that it's right and true, and you know exactly where you are:
Here. — Kat Rosenfield

We believe that our salvation depends solely upon God's work in us, and not upon our testimony; and the little child with stammering lips, but wrought upon by the Holy Spirit, will precede vain scribes into the Kingdom of Heaven. — Abraham Kuyper

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite "The boy stood on
the burning deck." Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy. — Elizabeth Bishop

Her tongue flailed around all the questions stammering to get out, and she finally landed on: "When did you have time to take a mistress?"
His smile faltered. "Don't talk about Cress like that."
"What?"
"Oh - wait! You mean Darla. I won her in a hand of cards."
Cinder gawked.
"I thought she'd make a nice gift for Iko."
"You ... what?"
"For her replacement body?"
"Um."
"Because Darla's an escort-droid? — Marissa Meyer

I had a terrible stammering problem when I was young, and as a result I spent a lot of time alone. — Ken Venturi

In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat. — F Scott Fitzgerald

What I learned about stammering was that, when as a young child you lose the confidence of anyone who wants to listen to you, you lose confidence in your voice and the right to speech. And a lot of the therapy was saying, 'You have a right to be heard.' — Tom Hooper

I prefer my hesitations, my false paths, my stammering, to a preconceived idea. — Robert Doisneau

Each person has a Torah, unique to that person, his or her innermost teaching. Some seem to know their Torahs very early in life and speak and sing them in a myriad of ways. Others spend their whole lives stammering, shaping, and rehearsing them. Some are long, some short. Some are intricate and poetic, others are only a few words, and still others can only be spoken through gesture and example. But every soul has a Torah. To hear another say Torah is a precious gift. For each soul, by the time of his or her final hour, the Torah is complete, the teaching done. — Lawrence Kushner

Penelope gulped down the tea she'd been in the process of sipping. Colin had a way of looking at a person, his green eyes so focused and intent that you felt as if you must be the only two people in the universe. Unfortunately for Penelope, it also seemed to have a way of reducing her to a stammering imbecile. If they were in the midst of a conversation, she could generally hold her own, but when he surprised her like that, turning his attention onto her just when she'd convinced herself she blended in perfectly with the wallpaper, she was completely and utterly lost. — Julia Quinn

I would take school instruction out of the hands of the old order of decrepit, stammering, journeymen-teachers as well as from the new weak ones, who are generally no better for popular instruction, and entrust it to the undivided powers of Nature herself, to the light that God kindles and ever keeps alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interest of parents who desire that their children should grow up in favour with God and man. — Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

I'm Peter on the mountaintop, stirring to see The Glory in all its God-radiance, stammering out that it's good to be here; let's build shelters and never depart. But there's always the descent from the mount. The meeting of the crowd, the complaining, the cursing. Page 124 — Ann Voskamp

Kai caught himself before he could smile at the memory of Cinder, shy and stammering. — Marissa Meyer

Fear the soldier who stammers, for he is very fast at pulling the triger. — Michael Bassey Johnson

The Libertarian Party convention wasn't much better. You will never find a more stammering, awkward, inarticulate group of people than libertarians. I still remember the convention the previous year, entitled 'Women of Liberty.' All of the speakers were women, and all of the topics boiled down to 'Effectively Communicating Libertarian Ideas to Women' - in other words, 'How to talk to girls.' Looking around at the nearly entirely white male audience, it wasn't hard to see why they chose this tack. — Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

I don't like talking unnecessarily, and my communication skills are zilch. I just can't converse with people. Maybe it's because of my stuttering or stammering, but I'm not confident of talking with people. I only talk to very close friends and family. — Pritam Chakraborty

Sculpting them in a drizzle shawl,
I would have have weaved your dreams
in my distinct eyes;
I would have taken your cheeks,
and decorated them with full moon sights,
writing verses with starry eyes;
I would have invented diction suiting
your stammering tongue,
writing stories about your happy childhood;
I would have traveled beside western winds,
bringing roses from far lands, from Samarkand,
from the rose gardens touching Turkish valleys,
from mountains smelling of Azerbaijan.
I would have portrayed you a an honest mother,
buying your children a happy house, a giant sky;
I would have made orchards of your ripe smiles,
tending rains and sunlight into their broad borders;
Ah, I would have sown your braided hair
into almonds, saffron and homegrown walnuts,
into tufts of a lifelong breeze. — Ashfaq Saraf

When you see a stranger, your mouth start dancing like convulsion. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Stammering is different than stuttering. Stutterers have trouble with the letters, while stammerers trip over entire parts of a sentence. We stammerers generally think of ourselves as very bright. — Bob Newhart

Remaining relaxed in his seat, he murmured, "Take down your hood."
A slender white hand reached up, and she complied. The hood slipped away from hair so vividly red that it eclipsed the embers in the fireplace.
Sebastian shook his head in bemusement as he recognized the young woman. The ridiculous creature from the house party at Stony Cross Park. A shy, stammering twit, whose red hair and voluptuous figure might make her tolerable company as long as she kept her mouth shut. They had never actually spoken. Miss Evangeline Jenner, he recalled. She had the largest, roundest eyes he had ever seen, rather like the eyes of a wax doll... or a young child. — Lisa Kleypas

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

( ... ) I could "talk fast"
that's to say, without hesitating, stammering
most of the time
but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all. — Joyce Carol Oates