No writer, no matter how gifted, immortalizes himself unless he has crystallized into expressive and original phrase the eternal sentiments and yearnings of the human heart.
A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must, in practice, be a bad government.
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.
Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.
I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.
If this phrase of the 'balance of power' is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure.
President Reagan, expanding on President Lincoln's phrase, referred to America as 'the last, best hope of man on Earth.' But this last, best hope is beginning to fade.
I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.
To not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice, which I've done all my life, and not to be able to phrase lyrics and give people that kind of joy, I think I would be totally devastated.
The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
Writers begin changing the instant they append 'The End' to a novel. Readers begin changing the moment they encounter that same phrase. And even the novels themselves, through the strange transmutations of time and shifting tastes and mores, exhibit changes as we look backward upon them, acquiring retroactive meanings and tonalities.
People started coining the phrase, 'Bubba Golf,' whatever you want to call it, which I like. 'Bubba Golf' is going to be fun. I mean, why do what everybody else does? That's boring.
After you've read a novel, you only retain a vague memory of its contents. You remember the atmosphere, the odd image or phrase or vivid cameo.
You always hear the phrase, money doesn't buy you happiness. But I always in the back of my mind figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it's not really true. I got a new car because the old one's lease expired.
The most common phrase bandied about these days is 'Oh my God'. People say it automatically all the time - not realising that that's a form of prayer.
After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.
I don't have any contempt for the men who have to have jobs and have to commute and have to pay the mortgage and have to get their kids an education. To me, that's the backbone of America, to coin a phrase.
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.
There's no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I'm performing.
I've noticed that some Democrats, who seldom mention their faith or maybe never mention their faith, will seize on to a phrase that Pope Francis may have said, and they want to attach themselves to that agenda. Political opportunists is what they are.
I think 'having it all' is a phrase I don't particularly like. You need to have what you want. 'All' seems to me to be an imposed list, an imposed definition by society of what 'all' is supposed to be.
The phrase 'private option' itself has become politically toxic.
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.
But in this Congress, accountability is just a catch phrase, usually directed elsewhere. Demands to personal responsibility or corporate accountability abound, but rarely congressional accountability or fiscal responsibility.
If ask 100 Arkansans about the phrase, 'the public option,' or 'a public option,' you'll get 100 different impressions about what that means.
You can still have chemistry on screen without getting on with the person. But it just makes your job a lot easier if you don't have to gird your loins, if that's not quite the right phrase, every time you're going to do a scene with that person.
In a phrase: I always hope it keeps getting better.
Music is a lens through which to see who we are. Every phrase of every piece of music is trying to tell a story.
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.
If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war.
A lot of people use the phrase 'underage violence,' which, to me, is meaningless.
I have an idea that the phrase 'weaker sex' was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm.
Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position.
I think we're much harder on ourselves than other people are. This is not a unique situation here... But I never liked the 'Celtic Tiger' as a phrase.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
I have to tell you, I'm a happy man. I've lived the life I wanted to live. I've written the books I wanted to write. No publisher has ever even suggested that I change so much as a phrase - commas and periods, yes - and I suspect that I have a lot of serious readers; in fact, I know.