Things Pronoun Quotes & Sayings

Her. One word. A simple pronoun that seems like an entire vocabulary. — Autumn Doughton

The only way you can communicate at a high level is to be conscious of everything you write - every comma, every pronoun, every word, and all their implications. — David Foster Wallace

In Buddhist ideology, the conventional self is that which is constructed in a way by the use of the pronoun, and when you realize there is no absolute ego there, no disconnected one, self, or ego, then that actually strengthens your conventional ego. It does so in the sense that then you realize it's a construction, and you can strengthen it in order to help others, or do whatever you're trying to do, it's not like you no longer know who you are. Then you can organize your behavior by using your ego, as it's now the pronoun. — Robert Thurman

I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three. — Richard Ford

I still use the pronoun she for my publicity materials, and for mainstream media stuff, for two reasons: the first is that I do a lot of work in public schools, and I want those young women and girls to see every kind of she there can be. I want them to see my biceps and my shorn hair and shirt and tie and for some of them to see me as a possibilityI want them to see me living outside of the boxes, because they might be asphyxiating in their own box and need to see there is air out here for them to breathe, that all they have to do is lift the lid a little. — Rae Spoon

They found the corpse in the closet of Alcide's apartment, and they hatched a plan to hide his remains." Eric sounded like that had been kind of cute of us.
"My Sookie hid a corpse?"
"I don't think you can be too sure about that possessive pronoun."
"Where did you learn that term, Northman?"
"I took 'English as a Second Language' at a community college in the seventies. — Charlaine Harris

The worst of all was to be faced with the interrogation technique of Thirty Seconds. The interrogator would say something and you had to respond quickly, without once repeating yourself or using the personal pronoun. Very few dissidents could last the full thirty seconds, and a refusal to comply was taken as equal proof of dissidence. — H.M. Forester

The stars dehisce.
By "stars" I mean, of course, tradition,
and by "tradition" I mean nothing at all.
A pronoun disembowels his antecedent.
Stop me if you've heard this one before. — Ben Lerner

Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in — Iain M. Banks

I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility). — Chelsea Manning

he - I do wish somebody would think up a new collective pronoun - — Charlotte MacLeod

The light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as he again met it; and he completed his demonstration. — Henry James

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say. — Jose Saramago

Narcissists (and often, by contagion, their unfortunate victims) don't talk, or communicate: they fend off, hide and evade . . . [They] perfect the ability of saying nothing in lengthy Castro-like speeches. Their locution is impregnated with first person pronouns ("I", "me", "my", "mine" - aka "high pronoun density").

The ensuing convoluted sentences are .. a lack of commitment elevated to an ideology. The narcissist prefers to wait and see what procrastination brings: postponement of the inevitable leads to the inevitability of postponement as a strategy of survival. — Sam Vaknin

I think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own. — Sufjan Stevens

In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, 'she' is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of 'woman'. The ancient, dimorphic form 'he', once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of 'she', during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to. — Samuel R. Delany

His use of the plural pronoun made me very suspicious. — Matthew Quick

I've been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun. — Ann Leckie

I arrived in Dallas two days before the party and planned on leaving the day after. I hated the city as much as I thought I would. All anyone could talk about were the Cowboys and their chances in the playoffs. Charlene was happy. Joe was not, or so it seemed to me, in spite of the fact that he had finally gotten exactly what he thought he wanted from a wife: she gave him an adorable boy, she did everything in their home including laundry, and most important, she did not embarrass him. Whenever I was alone with Joe during the two days I was there, Charlene would send her son into the room with us. The first time I carried him, Charlene made sure to mention how surprised she was that I had motherly instincts. She probably used the pronoun we more in one day than I have in my whole life. I did not blame her. Most plain women stake their claims clumsily. — Rabih Alameddine

Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago. — Terry Pratchett

I like the way he says we and am amazed, as I often am by language as power, at the way a simple pronoun can upend a relationship. — Fiona Maazel

This is the last time you'll read the phrase "his or her" or "he or she"; from this point on, I'll use one or the other pronoun and assume you understand that any sex could apply. — Mark Steven Bosko

The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three. — Ulysses S. Grant

There we go, I see a human and immediately ascribe to them a pronoun and a sexuality. Be the change. — Mark William Lindberg

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. — Alasdair Gray

All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection. — Joseph Devlin

For many years I used the pronoun 'we.' Now, as in my youth, I go to sleep and wake up alone. — Nina Berberova

My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I — Ursula K. Le Guin

I remember that I wanted to kill It,' Bill said, and for the first time (and ever after) he heard the pronoun gain proper-noun status in his own voice. — Stephen King

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented. — John Fowles

In the 1950s I rarely went to a community meeting without Jimmy and would usually just listen or ask questions. Now, having worked in the city and socialized with Jimmy's friends and Correspondence readers for years, I felt I had something to contribute. I was beginning to feel comfortable with the we pronoun, so comfortable that in FBI records of that period I am described as Afro-Chinese. — Grace Lee Boggs

It wasn't that dwarfs weren't interested in sex. They saw the vital need for fresh dwarfs to leave their goods to and continue the mining work after they had gone. It was simply that they also saw no point in distinguishing between the sexes anywhere but in private. There was no such thing as a Dwarfish female pronoun or, once the children were on solids, any such thing as women's work. — Terry Pratchett