#phrases

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#nails #similes #well-worn-phrases #christmas

They should." "Should be like a wood bee," she said. It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut-in twins, each other's best and, most often, only audience. ↗

— Stewart O'Nan

#conversation #hope #movies #pop-culture #tv-shows

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. ↗

— Harold Ross

#back #day #few #filled #his

No, I didn't forget Samoan - I understand it when you talk to me but, you know, to put phrases together I sound like I do in English. ↗

— Junior Seau

#forget #i #i do #know #like

[T]he wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#quotations #similes #well-worn-phrases #wisdom #simile

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. ↗

— Charles A. Beard

#best #citizen #dangerous #days #fathers

Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life. ↗

— Maeve Binchy

#always #any #fancy #life #phrases

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy. ↗

— George Eliot

#even #experience #human #human experience #incongruous

I have become increasingly used to the Tory party mimicking our policies and phrases in a desperate effort to pretend to their members they are still Eurosceptic. ↗

— Nigel Farage

#desperate #effort #i #increasingly #members

You use words like 'introvert' and 'extrovert,' various traits of a personality. A lot of that stuff, we used in drama school, and that was kind of interesting, to realize my teachers sort of ripped off a lot of Jung. And how much of it is part of our society now, these phrases, introvert and extrovert, where it actually came from. ↗

— Michael Fassbender

#came #drama #drama school #extrovert #how