Idiom quotes:

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  • I try to use the Australian idiom to its maximum advantage. -- Paul Keating
  • As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise. -- George Will
  • Unfortunately or fortunately, in order to become acquainted with the idiom of country or rock music, it is necessary to occasionally play in a bar. Bars are a rehearsal place. -- Garth Hudson
  • Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards. -- Ralph Bakshi
  • Yes, but I view Frank's music as fully composed. In other words, the arrangements can work for any idiom such as a rock band or an orchestra. Frank was a brilliant arranger and could make his music work in any context. He proved that tour after tour and album after album. -- Dweezil Zappa
  • Idiom is larger than geography it is the hot breath of a people singing, slashing, explorative. Imagery becomes the magic denominator, the language of a passage, saying the ancient unchanging particulars. -- Mari Evans
  • You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. -- Charlaine Harris
  • You can't buy time or save it, common idioms notwithstanding. You can only spend it. -- Eric Zorn
  • Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species. -- Gordon Allport
  • Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species. -- Gordon Allport
  • Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal - 'translatable' into any cultural idiom. -- Nancy Pearcey
  • The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music. -- George Crumb
  • To make the bloody thing talk the way I do when I'm on a verbal roll, in my idioms and rhythms. -- Gary Lucas
  • A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made completely clear: no matter what idiom it may be written or expressed in... -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
  • I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner. -- Jacques Derrida
  • By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. -- George Orwell
  • Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms. -- John Millington Synge
  • You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed. -- Nick Clegg
  • Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom. -- Linton Kwesi Johnson
  • As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it. -- Terry Teachout
  • The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. "Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process ? -- Christopher Hitchens
  • The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. -- George Orwell
  • A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them. -- Gilbert Ryle
  • If you're playing with somebody from another idiom, you can't react to them in the same way that you react to somebody that is closer to your idiom. You don't fall into the same habits. You find a new way of communicating. -- David Sanborn
  • A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? -- George Orwell
  • Cranking the Auto-Tune is so easy to do that there's almost no systemic resistance to trying it. So when someone's stuck for an idea, that's what they do. I mean, to the extent that it's been embraced by an entire idiom of club music and culture. -- Steve Albini
  • Psychobabble is... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems. -- Richard Rosen
  • When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use. -- Jim Woodring
  • Music is a manifestation of the human spirit, similar to language. Its greatest practitioners have conveyed to mankind things not possible to say in any other language. If we do not want these things to remain dead treasures, we must do our utmost to make the greatest possible number of people understand their idiom. -- Zoltan Kodaly
  • Nine times out of 10 when people do a tribute album or tribute songs for somebody, it's what I call 'white boys playing reggae'. They know they can't, we know they can't, so they sing like they can't and play like they can't. They gently make fun of the idiom or sing in a false accent. -- David Lee Roth
  • Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of 'like' has spread through the idiom of the young. And it's true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables. -- Christopher Hitchens
  • For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art. -- James Fenton
  • Pheromones are Earth's primordial idiom. -- Karen Joy Fowler
  • The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher. -- Jorge Luis Borges
  • It's all through the actors; I cannot write in that idiom -- Woody Allen
  • People still have existential anxiety. It just may not be expressed in Hebraic idiom. -- Woody Allen
  • Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language. -- Walter Savage Landor
  • The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of -- William Carlos Williams
  • On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity. -- Albert Einstein
  • Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory. -- William A. Dembski
  • Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible. -- Alexander P. de Seversky
  • Whatever coast he's on, a man should be himself. I don't write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus. -- Charles Mingus
  • There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus. -- Peter Medawar
  • Style, in the broadest sense of all, is consciousness. More specifically it is a consistent idiom arising spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained. -- Quentin Crisp
  • And from the first declension of the flesh I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts Into the stony idiom of the brain.... -- Dylan Thomas
  • My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices. -- Sergei Prokofiev
  • As far as the style, I can't say there is one definite style. I probably feel most comfortable writing in a tonal idiom, with considerable, if not extreme chromaticism. -- Marc-Andre Hamelin
  • It will be a sad day for the world when the Oriental gent realizes that Western bumbling is only Eastern guile in a different idiom. Well, a lot of it, anyway. -- Kyril Bonfiglioli
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