Phrase Quotes

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

Poor but happy is not a phrase invented by a poor person.

There is a phrase in French, which means 'to miss.' To pass by. To not be able to stop. You love someone and someone loves you, but it just can't work for different reasons.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

The very phrase 'foreign affairs' makes an Englishman convinced that I am about to treat of subjects with which he has no concern.

The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now.

I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as 'do-gooders.' This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.

I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.

I still think in this country, and this might surprise you, the one thing that George Bush said as president that I do agree with, I love that phrase, 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.'

The most used phrase in my administration if I were to be President would be "What the hell you mean we're out of missiles?"

The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.

Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I'd like to rephrase something I've already written.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.

To change your phrase somewhat, I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity.

Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

The noun phrase straw man, now used as a compound adjective as in 'straw-man device, technique or issue,' was popularized in American culture by 'The Wizard of Oz.'

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

In a sense there is no 'opposition' in Bahrain, as the phrase implies one unified block with the same views. Such a phrase is not in our constitution, unlike say the United Kingdom. We only have people with different views and that's ok.

I've always had a will to succeed, to win, however you phrase it.

There are things that Scotsmen get and other people don't get in the dialogue. Scottish characters can be pinpointed by a phrase, targeted very quickly.

Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.

When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

I don't know what 'operational control' of the border means, but I do understand the English language. And as I understand that phrase, that's not true. We do not have operational control.

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.