Quotes from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“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

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Popular quotes

“Then my hair was loose and his hands were buried in it, and he was kissing me so deeply his fangs grazed my teeth and I tasted blood. I was acutely aware of every inch of my body that was touching every inch of his: his forearm grazing the side of my neck, his hands cradling my skull, his mouth so soft yet ”
“hard, his powerful chest against the only part of me that wasn’t muscle, one of his thighs slipping between my legs, making my knees tremble and nearly buckle.
He kissed like he did everything, with exquisite skill, passion, and one hundred percent focus. Here was where Ryodan shed his aloof businessman attire, his cool facade, and came to life with the heat and intensity of a thousand suns. And I realized that was what had so entranced me on Level 4—I’d seen him drop all his guards and fuck like a man on fire, with nothing held back. Open, unguarded, just like he’d been when we’d talked.
Ryodan, controlled, is formidably fascinating.
Ryodan, open, is indescribably addictive.”
― Karen Marie Moning, quote from Feversong

“was a juvenile detention centre, called Liluah, housing”
― quote from A Long Way Home

“I think love is caramel. Sweet and fragant; always welcome. It is the gentle golden colour of a setting harvest sun; the warmth of a squeezed embrace; the easy melting of two souls into one and a taste that lingers even when everything else has melted away. Once tasted it is never forgotten.”
― Jenny Colgan, quote from Welcome to Rosie Hopkins' Sweet Shop of Dreams

“So, maybe I should let my heart break, just to prove that my heart can take it.”
― Becky Albertalli, quote from The Upside of Unrequited

“I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.”

“Wow,” I said. “Did the search pay off?”

“That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”

“Waiting for the perfect love?”

“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”

“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement.

“It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.”

“Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?”

“Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?”

“So then what?”

“So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.”

“Sounds crazy to me.”

“Well, to me, that’s what love is…”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria

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