Subordinate Clause Quotes & Sayings

The alternative, should you, or any writer of English, choose to employ it (and who is to stop you?) is, by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after, to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted invention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander for ever, amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop. — Mark Forsyth

The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive. — Robertson Davies

There's a kind of radar that you get, after years of being talked about and made fun of by other people. You can almost smell it when it's about to happen, can recognize instantly the sound of a hushed voice, lowered just enough to make whatever is said okay. I had only been in Colby for a few weeks. But I had not forgotten. — Sarah Dessen

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.' — Gloria Steinem

But we need not make a scene in front of my guests. The queen's charcoal eyes flashed with the warm ballroom light. "It seems you're perfectly capable of making a scene without my help. — Marissa Meyer

[Did you] ever know a sincere emotion to express itself in a subordinate clause? — Dorothy L. Sayers

Sharon Stone. She is one of the most dedicated people I know, but also highly unedited. — Richard Gere

There's always SOMEONE in support as long as he can be assured or he himself feels confident of getting, in return, SOMETHING beneficial of any sort. — Anuj

Give it enough time, brother, and gossip's history. — Anonymous

With this recitation of paraphernalia and detritus, O'Brien manages to encapsulate the experience of an army and of a particular war, of a mined and booby-trapped landscape, of cold nights and hot days, of soaking monsoons and rice paddies, and of the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause. — Francine Prose

I don't impose any word count or number-of-hours quota on myself, or have any rules, except one: persistence. Nothing glamorous. No epiphanies. Just revisiting and rewriting. For me, momentum is far more important than inspiration. — Pam Munoz Ryan

When you've waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred; — Italo Calvino