Lines

Famous quotes containing the word lines:

    Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and alteration; some words go off, and become obsolete; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense or notion, which in tract of time makes an observable change in the air and features of a language, as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.
    Richard Bentley (1662–1742)

    Your letter is come; it came indeed twelve lines ago, but I
    could not stop to acknowledge it before, & I am glad it did not
    arrive till I had completed my first sentence, because the
    sentence had been made since yesterday, & I think forms a very
    good beginning.
    Jane Austen (1775–1817)

    We stand in the tumult of a festival.
    What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
    These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
    These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,
    A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:
    That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)