Syntax Quotes

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

Destroy the Museums. Crack syntax. Sabotage the adjective. Leave nothing but the verb.

The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax

Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them.

To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

I'm still uncertain about the language declaration syntax.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

A letter is always better than a phone call.

People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.

Mr Robert Montgomery's genius [is] far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax? [His] readers must take such grammar as they can get and be thankful.

Don't you hate code that's not properly indented? Making it [indenting] part of the syntax guarantees that all code is properly indented.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words.

Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal.

They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious;

but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

Amid chaos of images, we value coherence.

We believe in the printed word. And we believe in clarity. And we believe in immaculate syntax. And in the beauty of the English language.

If the nails are weak, your house will collapse.

If your verbs are weak and your syntax is rickety, your sentences will fall apart.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us.

Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is syntax, grammar and logical continuity, which together form the carrier-wave of plain sense within which its deeper meanings are broadcast.

I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page.

I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

A computer program is a message from a man to a machine.

The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.

We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and trameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than... is where it all comes from.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.

Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

Dance design is not simply one element;

it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.

who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you

A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.