Syntactic Quotes & Sayings

She wore a dress the same color as her eyes her father brought her from San Francisco. — Danielle Steel

I looked out the window at walls of moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we we were at the bottom of some, gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea ...
But, with whatever hindsight, I suppose the reason that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid progress through high, drifting cumulus is - read them again - at the very opposite of what we perceive on a liquid's tilting and untilting top, and so becomes the other privileged pole among the images of this study, this essay, this memoir.
Or perhaps, as it is only a clause whose syntactic place has been questioned by my own unscholarly researches, I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light, like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word motion. — Samuel R. Delany

The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. — Noam Chomsky

Good software results from the proper organization of components, not from syntactic or semantic restrictions. Meanings — Alexander Stepanov

Those girls have nothing on the March sisters, Silas says, leaning in so close that I can feel his breath on my shoulder. A strange shiny feeling ripples through me and I wheel toward him, accidently ramming my shopping basket into Silas's side. A few Ace bandages toppled to the floor and the girls looked up from their polish dilemma to snicker at me. Nice one, Rosie. I can feel the blush starting as I duck to grab the bandages, and when my hand brushes against Silas's leg, the heat spreads down my neck. Calm down. It's just Silas. I rise and force a smile that I hope doesn't look as goofy as I suspect. — Jackson Pearce

You can't see the semantic wood for the syntactic trees. — Christopher Strachey

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project. — Hilary Putnam

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon. — Alan Perlis

Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components ... the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second, by the phonological component. — Noam Chomsky

Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis. — Noam Chomsky

To the casual observer, the Dropbox demo video looked like a normal product demonstration, but we put in about a dozen Easter eggs that were tailored for the Digg audience. References to Tay Zonday and 'Chocolate Rain' and allusions to 'Office Space' and 'XKCD.' It was a tongue-in-cheek nod to that crowd, and it kicked off a chain reaction. — Drew Houston

Does the Japanese race, wonders Jacob, derive gratification from self-inflicted misery? — David Mitchell

Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochures and brilliance, memo and memoir, a ship's log and The Old Man and the Sea. The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language-the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences. — Constance Hale

I can change a tire, but I couldn't change a fuse on the computer panel on my car. — Mike O'Malley

I left the White House in 2007. You know, I knew when I went there that it would be for a limited period of time. I was grateful that the average tenure of a white house senior aide is 18 to 20 months. I was there for nearly seven years. — Karl Rove

A completely different aspect, however, the thoroughly incommensurable one, lies in the imposition of accepting that the torso sees me while I observe it - indeed, that it eyes me more sharply than I can look at it.
The ability to perform the inner gesture with which one makes space for this improbability inside oneself most probably consists precisely in the talent that Max Weber denied having. This talent is 'religiosity', understood as an innate disposition and a talent that can be developed, making it comparable to musicality. One can practise it, just as one practises melodic passages or syntactic patterns. In this sense, religiosity is congruent with a certain grammatical promiscuity. Where it operates, objects elastically exchange places with subjects. — Peter Sloterdijk

A lot of things appearing under my byline were written in one draft. But when I started to write poetry, I started getting fussy about every syllable. I wouldn't allow the work to be seen unless it felt perfect. Not clunky at all, no clunky syllables. So, really, for the printed page, it had to have a feeling of rhythmic and syntactic verisimilitude or something. — Richard Meltzer

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend. — Eric S. Raymond

Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia. — Brian Kernighan

To be a success in business, be daring, be first, be different. — Kenny Marchant