Mark Forsyth · 205 pages
Rating: (3.1K votes)
“John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a “green great dragon.” He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn’t have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.
The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“The alternative, should you, or any writer of English, choose to employ it (and who is to stop you?) is, by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after, to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted invention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander for ever, amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He’s like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“The importance of English word order is also the reason that the idea that you can't end a sentence with a preposition is utter hogwash. In fact, it would be utter hogwash anyway, and anyone who claims that you can't end a sentence with up, should be told to shut. It is, as Shakespeare put it, such stuff as dreams are made on, but it's one of those silly English beliefs that flesh is heir to.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy, and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. ... Clothes and language can be things of beauty, I would no more write without art because I didn't need to than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“The period is one of the most complicated and concepts of classical rhetoric. Nobody in the ancient world could quite decide what it meant, but they were united in the belief that it was terribly, terribly important.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“If you're too overcome to even finish your sentence then you must be sincere, you must really mean what you're not saying, you must...I'm sorry. I cannot type. My fingers are crying.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“Most people can improvise in unrhymed dactyls for hours. It's just that you lose all your friends if you do.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“So popular is alliteration that in the 1960s it actually made a grab for political power. In the 1960s a vast radical youth movement began campaigning to do things for the sole reason that they began with the same letter. Ban the bomb. Burn your bra. Power to the people. For a moment there it seemed as though alliteration would change the world. But then the spirit of idealism faded and those who had manned the barricades went off and got jobs in marketing.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“The lawyer's lucky phrase is 'including but not limited to', which gets you out of the utterly unnecessary trouble that the unnecessary trouble merism got you into in the first place.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine and is technically known as a progressio. It was a favorite of God and Dickens”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them... These lists are almost universally awkward.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“Requited love is only a pleasing symmetry, and symmetry is a kind of justice.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He's like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“Human beings, for some reason or another, like symmetry. You leave a bunch of them next to a jungle for a couple of days and you'll come back to find an ornamental garden. We take stones and turn them into the Taj Mahal or St. Paul's Cathedral.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing, and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It's the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy, and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“Now some people will tell you that great writing cannot be learnt. Such people should be hit repeatedly on the nose until they promise not to talk nonsense any more.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“The Bible is chock-a-block with such unnecessary but beautiful antitheses. God, whatever his other failings, is a great rhetorician.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a good dose of rough Enlightenment pornography.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“They don’t have to be sentences, they could be divided by commas, they could be divided by semi-colons; there’s a class of people who get very worked up about such things - they’re lonely people - they tend to have stains down the front of their shirts - they’ll tell you that dashes should be used only to subordinate complete sentences. You must forgive them.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn’t need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“The point of all this is not so that the copper in question can learn more about your motivations and beliefs. They lack such psychoanalytic curiosity. That's why they're traffic policemen. By making you answer a question to which they already know the answer, they are asserting their authority, and belittling yours. That's also why they're traffic policemen.”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“That A Lot More became a mile, and then the inch was dropped because it doesn’t begin with an M, and we were left with ‘A miss is as good as a mile’, which, if you think about it, doesn’t really make sense any more. But who needs sense when you have alliteration?”
― Mark Forsyth, quote from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
Mark Forsyth
See more on GoodReads
“Its extremely potent active ingredient is an opioid called oxycodone, synthesized from the raw material of opium. The substance was a hot topic among doctors in the Weimar Republic because many physicians quietly took the narcotic themselves. In specialist circles Eukodal was the queen of remedies: a wonder drug. Almost twice as pain-relieving as morphine, which it replaced in popularity, this archetypal designer opioid was characterized by its potential to create very swiftly a euphoric state significantly higher than that of heroin, its pharmacological cousin. Used properly, Eukodal did not make the patient tired or knock him out—quite the contrary.”
― quote from Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany
“Era já de madrugada
E eu acordei sem razão,
Senti a vida pesada.
Pesado era o coração.”
― Fernando Pessoa, quote from Poems of Fernando Pessoa
“The ability to feel is a strength, not a weakness.”
― Margaret Rogerson, quote from An Enchantment of Ravens
“Everyone is an autobiographer nowadays, it’s like everyone is actively writing their own biography all the time,”
― James Wallman, quote from Stuffocation: Living More with Less
“It fascinates her, to see a creature so busy in an act of creation.”
― Mira T. Lee, quote from Everything Here Is Beautiful
The Catastrophic His...
Pale Demon
Little Big Man
Percy Jackson and th...
Complete Works
The Perfect GameBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
