Indirect Speech

Famous quotes containing the words indirect and/or speech:

    An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet’s bombast!
    —Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)