Franz Kafka
Writer
"People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'."
Adjectives quotes
Adjectives
91 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Sufjan Stevens
Musician
"A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the Modifier's Madness. A lot of adjectives working overtime."
Artie Shaw
Musician
"'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music."
Henry James
Author
"Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt."
Harper Lee
Novelist
"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside adjectives — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Adjectives quotes (page 1 of 5)
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"The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate."
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"Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework."
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"Clothing sizes are weird, they go: small, medium, large and then extra large, extra extra large, extra extra extra large. Something happened at large, they just gave up. They were like, 'I'm not doing any more adjectives; you just keep putting extras on there.' We could do better than that: small, medium, large, whoa, easy, slow down, stop it, interesting, American."
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"They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs."
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"First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives."
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"The adjective is the enemy of the noun. Variant: The adjective is the enemy of the substantive."
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"Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it."
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"In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names."
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"To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun."
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"As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out."
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"Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something."
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"Human, Allen, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable."
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"Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude."
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"The word heterosexual is an adjective, the word homosexual is an adjective. They describe an activity. Of course there's a homosexual activity; of course there's a heterosexual activity. But there's no homosexual person. There's no heterosexual person. Everybody is everything."
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"Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective."
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"Normal" isn't an adjective you wish to hear after putting that much effort into making sure it was spectacular."
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"I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days."
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"Adjectives are the curse of America."
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"I've got an adjective that just fits you."
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"The supermoon is a 16-inch pizza compared with a 15-inch pizza. It's a slightly bigger moon; I ain't using the adjective 'supermoon.'"
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