Quotes & Sayings About Thesaurus

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. — Stephen King

As a person with the retentive mental capacity of a goldfish and a dislike of repetition, I frequently make use of the thesaurus built into my Microsoft Word U.K. Software. — Meg Rosoff

The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.
Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends ... — Hunter S. Thompson

What I need is an Urban Thesaurus. I know what money is what I need is 600 different ways to say it. — Gary Gulman

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory ... dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it. — Rumer Godden

Knavery?" Art3mis said after she'd finished reading it. "Were you using a thesaurus when you wrote this? — Ernest Cline

The dictionary feeds me daily, thesaurus always adds the gravy, big words I bite, so very tasty. — Delano Johnson

My view is that homosexual acts, not homosexuality, but homosexual acts are wrong. They're intrinsically wrong. And I think in a natural law based country it's appropriate to have policies that reflect that They don't comport with natural law. I happen to think that it represents (to put it politely; I need my thesaurus to be polite) behavior that is not healthy to an individual and in aggregate is not healthy to society. — Ken Cuccinelli

You don't want to sound as though you used a Sharper Image catalogue for a thesaurus. — Renni Browne

I heard that Mayor Rivers' speeches are absolutely riveting," Ethan joked, winking.
"Oh, definitely." My words were drenched in sarcasm. "I believe he called us strong, clever, and capable. There may even have been some irreplaceable, brilliant, and extraordinary thrown in there as well. Most of the speech was one big, fake thesaurus recitation. — Ada Adams

Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards. — Toni Morrison

Not to sound corny, but intelligence is big. Everything fades, and everything can be modified. But intelligence is something you can't fake. I'm not even talking about whether you can read a thesaurus backwards. But there is a beauty in common sense. — Wale

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small slim volumes of literary criticism. — Terry Pratchett

My son's always showing me pictures of dinosaurs and asking me what their names are. I dont know so I make stuff up: That son is a thesaurus. — Craig Ferguson

I entered the word "crisis" into Thesaurus, it suggested "hot potato" as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know that Thesaurus lists "hot potato" as a synonym for "crisis. — Aziz Ansari

I am bravery. I am courage. I am valor. I am daring. I am holding a thesaurus. — Demetri Martin

What is another name for a Thesaurus? — Steven Wright

In all its myriad manifestations, the language of anti-Semitism through the ages is a dictionary of non-sequiturs and antonyms, a thesaurus of illogic and inconsistency. — Paul Johnson

It's funny, this - so many words to describe the same thing," she smiled..."Penis is simply an anatomical appendage, as exciting as a finger or a phalange. A willy is something small and flaccid, and at least slightly humorous. Prick is the organ as viewed with distaste, perhaps with so much as to describe the entire body it's attached to, like a dick, but more so. Phallus is a symbol of fertility, but my favourite...is the cock, which is only ever the hard, real thing, unleashed and ready to dive head-first into any waiting orifice. Or hole, while I'm in thesaurus mode. — Morgana Blackrose

It seems that, depending upon which side of the thesaurus-writer's gaze we sit, one's uniqueness can be deemed to be either eccentric or distinctive. Both, in my opinion, are good. — Fennel Hudson

The Librarian swung on. It was slow progress, because there were things he wasn't keen on meeting. Creatures evolved to fill every niche in the environment, and some of those in the dusty immensity of L-space were best avoided. They were much more unusual than ordinary unusual creatures.
Usually he could forewarn himself by keeping a careful eye on the kickstool crabs that grazed harmlessly on the dust. When they were spooked, it was time to hide. Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving behind them piles of small literary criticism. And there were other things, things which he hurried away from and tried not to look hard at ...
And you had to avoid cliches at all costs. — Terry Pratchett

What's another word for thesaurus? — Steven Wright

Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment. — Amy Tan

I keep a hotel room in my town, although I have a large house. And I go there at about 5:30 in the morning, and I start working. And I don't allow anybody to come in that room. I work on yellow pads and with ballpoint pens. I keep a Bible, a thesaurus, a dictionary, and a bottle of sherry. I stay there until midday. — Maya Angelou

it's going great. Two months in, and I've created three apps."

"Apps?"

"For people who buy my book as an e-book --which will be everybody. The first is called Don't Look. It's for the overly sensitive. It blurs and turns the type red when a dog dies or a baby is born with a birth defect. Stuff like that. My second is It's Not Okay When You Say It, and it delivers an electrical zap if the reader laughs at a racial slur. My third is Jesus Thesaurus, which replaces explicit sexual language with church words. So, when one of my characters 'saints' a guy's 'disciple', He'll beg her to 'cavalry' his 'Baptists' and 'shout amen'. — Helen Ellis

You are a cad,' he told himself. 'A cur. A bounder. A scoundrel. A ... human thesaurus. — Sarah M. Eden

Charlotte slammed the paper down onto her desk with an exclamation of rage. "Aloysius Starkweather is the most stubborn, hypocritical, obstinate, degenerate - " She broke off, clearly fighting for control of her temper. Tessa had never seen Charlotte's mouth so firmly set into a hard line.
"Would you like a thesaurus?" Will inquired. "You seem to be running out of words. — Cassandra Clare

This advice has been given often and more compellingly elsewhere, but my specific piece of wrong procedure back then was, incredibly, to browse through the thesaurus and note words that sounded cool, hip, or likely to produce an effect, usually that of making me look good, without then taking the trouble to go and find out in the dictionary what they meant — Thomas Pynchon

One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home. — Ben Yagoda

I'm running out of things to say.
I've stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you and could only find rain
and more rain
and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, an orchestra. — Shinji Moon

Diction is not memorizing vocabulary, not memorizing word lists, not overusing the thesaurus, not replacing all the short words with long ones. — Jeff Anderson

It is understandable how this shame came into being. The nation made the black man's color a stigma. Even linguistics and semantics conspire to give this impression. If you look in Roget's Thesaurus you will find about 120 synonyms for blacK, and right down the line you will find words like smut, something dirty, worthless, and useless, and then you look further and you find about 120 synonyms for white and they all represent something high, noble, pure, chaste - right down the line. In our language structure, a white lie is a little better than a black lie. Somebody goes wrong in the family and we don't call him a white sheep, we call him a black sheep. We don't say whitemail, but blackmail. We don't speak of white-balling somebody, but black-balling somebody. The word 'black' itself in our society connotes something that is degrading. It was absolutely necessary to come to a moment with a sense of dignity. It is very positive and very necessary. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Happiness requires courage, stamina, persistence, fortitude, perseverance, bravery, boldness, valor, vigor, concentration, solidity, substance, backbone, grit, guts, moxie, nerve, pluck, resilience, spunk, tenacity, tolerance, will power, chutzpah, and a good thesaurus. — Peter McWilliams

She grinned. "This is the fun part."
She didn't even look, but a moment before the demon hit, massive wings snapped out of her back with lightning speed and a thundercrack, smacking the demon and flicking it over the rooftops like it was a ... gnat.
Okay, so the thesaurus in my head wasn't cranking out the synonyms because I was too busy gawking at the enormous white wings checkered with several feathers the same brilliant blue as her hair and shirt. They fluttered with a whispering grace, sending a soft breeze to cool my sweaty skin.
I blinked when she snapped her fingers in my face.
"Did you hear anything I just said?"
"You have wings?"
She sighed. Her shoulders and wings slumped. "I need you to focus, dear, so listen up. You must stick close to the Hex Boys. They'll protect you whilst - "
"Where did the wings come from? — A&E Kirk

I realized with horror that I'd left my thesaurus in English class, and so wouldn't be able to describe their beauty in suitably poetic terms, but let me tell you, they were smokin' hot and no bullshit. — Stephfordy Mayo

So. Her husband-to-be was a philanderer. A smooth operator. A debaucher. A rake. A frisker. (Jane was something of a walking thesaurus when she was upset, a side effect of too much reading.) — Cynthia Hand

I was like 14 and decided I wanted to be a rapper, so I needed a hip rapper name. I was with one of my friends in class and literally went through a thesaurus. I saw "temper" and thought, "I like this, but it's too much." My friend was like, "What about Tinie for tiny," and that was that. — Tinie Tempah

His eyes searched hers. I'd rather just be me. Feel comfortable in my own skin and be able to speak my mind without having to carry a damned thesaurus. Sure doesn't seem worth giving up who you are to please others. Far as I'm concerned, they either like me or they don't. Their choice. — Leah Braemel

Carrying his books from one life into the next was nothing new to Zuckerman. He had left his family for Chicago in 1949 carrying in his suitcase the annotated works of Thomas Wolfe and Roget's Thesaurus. Four years later, age twenty, he left Chicago with five cartons of classics, bought secondhand out of his spending money, to be stored in his parents' attic while he served two years in the Army. In 1960, when he was divorced from Betsy, there were thirty cartons to be packed from the shelves no longer his; in 1965, when he was divorced from Virginia, there were just under sixty to cart away; in 1969, he left Bank Street with eighty-one boxes of books. — Philip Roth

According to the thesaurus... and according to me... there are over thirty different meanings and substitutions for
the word
mean.
(I quickly yell the following words; the entire class flinches- including Will)
Jackass, jerk, cruel, dickhead, unkind, harsh, wicked,
hateful, heartless, vicious, virulent, unrelenting, tyrannical, malevolent, atrocious, bastard, barbarous, bitter, brutal, callous, degenerate, brutish, depraved, evil, fierce, hard, implacable, rancorous, pernicious, inhumane, monstrous, merciless, inexorable.
And my personal favorite - asshole. — Colleen Hoover

Every artist needs canvass, mine just happens to be Microsoft Word and a Thesaurus. — Lori Lesko

Don't ya'll have anything better to do than to mess with Myles?" she asked. "Sadly, Mom, they don't," Myles said. It's the only respite they have from their monotonous, inconsequential tedium of an existence." Amir's eyes widened. "Duck, Pop! He's gonna big word us to death." Amir lifted his forearm. "Thesaurus-shields up! — Marcus Major

Generations of British writers would look up to Roget as a kindred soul who could offer both emotional as well as intellectual sustenance. In the stage directions to Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie includes an homage to Roget: The night nursery of the Darling family, which is the scene of our opening Act, is at the top of a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury. We might have a right to place it where we will, and the reason Bloomsbury is chosen is that Mr. Roget once lived there. So did we in the days when his Thesaurus was our only companion in London; and we whom he has helped to wend our way through life have always wanted to pay him a little compliment. For Barrie, Roget's masterpiece was synonymous with virtue itself. To describe the one saving grace of the play's villain, Captain Hook, Barrie adds, "The man is not wholly evil--he has a Thesaurus in his cabin. — Joshua Kendall

Many Spirit-filled authors have exhausted the thesaurus in order to describe God with the glory He deserves. His perfect holiness, by definition, assures us that our words can't contain Him. Isn't it a comfort to worship a God we cannot exaggerate? — Francis Chan

I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses. — Scott Westerfeld

I also decided I want to have a meaningful relationship. But only with one person. And then stay with that person for a long time. Like, uh, monography."
Stephen types a few keys in a quick rhythm. "It's shame your epiphany wasn't accompanied by a thesaurus. — Valerie Z. Lewis

Her efforts received encouragement. In fact, they were welcomed as the Tallises began to understand that the baby of the family possessed a strange mind and a facility with words. The long afternoons she spent browsing through the dictionary and thesaurus made for constructions that were inept, but hauntingly so: the coins a villain concealed in his pocket were 'esoteric,' a hoodlum caught stealing a car wept in 'shameless auto-exculpation,' the heroine on her thoroughbred stallion made a 'cursory' journey through the night, the king's furrowed brow was the 'hieroglyph' of his displeasure. — Ian McEwan

Sometimes I think people think poetry must be filled with flowery language, thesaurus-driven vocabulary or the dreaded "purple prose," which is often prevalent in my genre...But oftentimes the best poetry isn't difficult to understand at all. It's the juxtaposition of the words. The line breaks. The enjambs. The shape of the poem. Or the double meanings the positioning of the words make the reader feel or think or do. — R.B. O'Brien

English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. "Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist" [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. — Bill Bryson

No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you. — Dorothy Fields

You have that expression on your face that speaks of incipient moral dubiousness,' Torin observed, making me glad I'd bought that thesaurus a few years back. — Rachel Hawkins

I don't like ten dollar words. Anybody can do anything with a thesaurus. Make me feel a certain way with the least amount of words possible and I respect that. — Rude Jude

Apparently, this really was Kill Charley Davidson Week. Or at least Horribly Maim Her ... It would probably never get government recognition, though, destined to be underappreciated like Halloween or Thesaurus Day. — Darynda Jones

I tried to find a word for it in my thesaurus, but there isn't one. At least, not one that doesn't belittle the plight of POWs and victims of famine. I guess we can just call it beyond suck. -Lulu Dark — Bennett Madison

I wrote it three times - with a Thesaurus. — Gypsy Rose Lee

I had recently come into the possession of a Thesaurus. You would not believe how many words there are! When I opened that book, I was like, whoa! Word party! — The Harvard Lampoon

Last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you but could only find rain and more rain and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, like an orchestra. — Shinji Moon