Famous quotes containing the words ancient, greek, grammar, tables, contracted and/or verbs:
“It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. Being the backbone of speech and writing, it should, we think, be eminently logical, make perfect sense, like the human skeleton. But, of course, the skeleton is arbitrary, too. Why twelve pairs of ribs rather than eleven or thirteen? Why thirty-two teeth? It has something to do with evolution and functionalism—but only sometimes, not always. So there are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.”
—John Simon (b. 1925)
“Eddie Felson: Church of the Good Hustler.
Charlie: Looks more like a morgue to me. Those tables are the slabs they lay the stiffs on.
Eddie Felson: I’ll be alive when I get out, Charlie.”
—Sydney Carroll, U.S. screenwriter, and Robert Rossen. Eddie Felson (Paul Newman)
“[If a woman athlete who had contracted the AIDS virus admitted that she] had been with one hundred or two hundred men, they’d call her a slut, and the corporations would drop her like a lead balloon.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“He crafted his writing and loved listening to those tiny explosions when the active brutality of verbs in revolution raced into sweet established nouns to send marching across the page a newly commissioned army of words-on-maneuvers, all decorated in loops, frets, and arrowlike flourishes.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)