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21 " The only place you will find love before sacrifice is in the dictionary. "
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22 " My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next. "
― Grace Paley , Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories
23 " If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet. "
― Billy Collins
24 " (...) this first-approximation reification of language very easily passes over unnoticed into a harder idealization, especially in everyday parlance. It is this idealization that, for instance, leads people to say that " the language" is degenerating because teenagers don't know how to talk anymore (they were saying that in the eighteenth century too!). It is also behind seeing the dictionary as an authority on the " correct meanings" of words rather than as an attempt to record how words are understood in the speech community. Even linguists adopt this stance all the time in everyday life (especially as teachers of students who can't write a decent paragraph). But once we go inside the heads of speakers to study their own individual cognitive structure, the stance must be dropped. "
25 " The language of mathematics differs from that of everyday life, because it is essentially a rationally planned language. The languages of size have no place for private sentiment, either of the individual or of the nation. They are international languages like the binomial nomenclature of natural history. In dealing with the immense complexity of his social life man has not yet begun to apply inventiveness to the rational planning of ordinary language when describing different kinds of institutions and human behavior. The language of everyday life is clogged with sentiment, and the science of human nature has not advanced so far that we can describe individual sentiment in a clear way. So constructive thought about human society is hampered by the same conservatism as embarrassed the earlier naturalists. Nowadays people do not differ about what sort of animal is meant by Cimex or Pediculus, because these words are used only by people who use them in one way. They still can and often do mean a lot of different things when they say that a mattress is infested with bugs or lice. The study of a man's social life has not yet brought forth a Linnaeus. So an argument about the 'withering away of the State' may disclose a difference about the use of the dictionary when no real difference about the use of the policeman is involved. Curiously enough, people who are most sensible about the need for planning other social amenities in a reasonable way are often slow to see the need for creating a rational and international language. "
26 " I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me. "
― Zadie Smith , NW
27 " There's a Palestine that dwells inside all of us, a Palestine that needs to be rescued: a free Palestine where all people regardless of color, religion, or race coexist; a Palestine where the meaning of the word " occupation" is only restricted to what the dictionary says rather than those plenty of meanings and connotations of death, destruction, pain, suffering, deprivation, isolation and restrictions that Israel has injected the word with. "
28 " Damn," Crystal sputtered, looking up from the dictionary in disbelief. " Oenophlygia: the state of being dunk. It really is a word" .Johnny gloated unabashedly. " Just wouldn't listen, would you? Just couldn't stand that I might be way ahead of the game. Word to the wise," he added with a superior smirk. " Don't mess with a man of my experience in that arena. "
29 " Whatever wisdom I have has been hard-earned – each meaning carefully culled out of the dictionary of human experiences and emotions and put in its precise place in the matrix. Meaning doesn’t come easy. The Great Crossword Setter in the Sky is capricious and wilful, demanding absolute obedience. You can waste the better part of a lifetime arguing about the randomness of the clues, the setting of the squares, why a certain square is black and not white as you need it to be, question the whole point of doing the crossword – what, after all, is to be gained by solving it. Only after all the chattering is over and you give your complete attention to it, does the perfection of the pattern reveal itself. As is, where is, everything fits. And at the end, when it’s all done, there is no reward to be had – the joy of doing it right is all the reward there ever is. (A Deepavali Gift) "
30 " What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113 "
― Miles Harvey , The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime
31 " If you look up the definition of greatness in the dictionary and found it saying;" Greatness is something lives within you" Only that moment you are ready to say I AM UNSTOPPABLE "
32 " Love?' he asked himself, giving no sense of recognition for that word in the dictionary of his mind. It was the only battle he had lost in life, the only thing that had been snatched away from him, before he could even claim it. "
― Faraaz Kazi , Truly, Madly, Deeply
33 " I hate to read books but a friend said he read the dictionary and that the Zebra did it. "
34 " The first book of the nation is the dictionary of its language. "
35 " Impossible is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools. "