Language Quote by Christina Baker Kline

“She copies vocabulary words down in a notebook because she likes the way they sound: Harridan. Pusillanimous. Talisman. Dowager. Enervating. Sycophantic . . .” quote by Christina Baker Kline — Download Open image

““She copies vocabulary words down in a notebook because she likes the way they sound: Harridan. Pusillanimous. Talisman. Dowager. Enervating. Sycophantic . . .””

Christina Baker Kline

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 2.5 out of 5 (10 ratings)

Language

More by Christina Baker Kline

“Mr. Grote shows me how he grows wild rice in the stream and collects the seeds. The rice is nutty and brown. He plants…

Christina Baker Kline

Image

“I try to forget the horror of what happened. Or—perhaps forget is the wrong word. How can I forget? And yet how can I move forward even a step without tamping down the despair I feel? When I close my eyes, I hear Maisie’s cries and Mam’s screams, smell the acrid smoke that must have started from that pile of…

Christina Baker Kline

“don’t know how much of my memory of this time is affected by my age now and how much is a result of the age I was then—seven when we left Kinvara, nine on that night when Maisie wouldn’t stop crying, that night that, even more than leaving Ireland, changed the course of my life forever. Eighty-two years later, the…

Christina Baker Kline

“The stark gray sky and bare tree limbs feel more suited to her than the uncomplicated promise of sunny spring days.”

Christina Baker Kline

Image

“Sometimes these spirits have been more real to me than people, more real than God. They fill silence with their weight, dense and warm,…

Christina Baker Kline

Image

“Every Easter she and her mother planted those crocuses near the fence beside the driveway, and soon enough a whole cluster of them, white…

Christina Baker Kline

Image

“Babies pay no attention to the clock.”

Christina Baker Kline

Image

“Mr. Kaminski pulled a chain hanging from the pressed-metal kitchen ceiling, and light seeped from a bulb, casting a wan glow over a scarred…

Christina Baker Kline

Image

“Before we leave the gravesite, Mary sings Mother's favorite gospel hymn ... Mary's lovely voice rises and lingers in the air, and by the…

Christina Baker Kline

Image

“for the first time since the fire, my worries are gone. I feel a joy so strong it’s almost painful—a knife’s edge of joy.”

Christina Baker Kline

Image

“What was it the teacher in her Legal Issues class said the other day? Never bring up a point you don’t have an answer…

Christina Baker Kline

Image

“Mrs. Scatcherd raps Dutchy's knuckles several times with a long wooden ruler, though it seems to me a halfhearted penalty. He barely winces, then shakes his hands twice in the air and winks at me. Truly , there isn't much more she can do. Stripped of family and identity, fed meager rations, consigned to hard wooden seats until we are…

Christina Baker Kline

Explore all 281 Christina Baker Kline quotes

More Language quotes

I put myself in the student's place and remember the frustrations, doubts, determination, and desires I felt when I was going through the initial…

Ted Martinez

Image

Usually male directors have to use foul language to get the job done. But I never came down to that level as being a…

Divya Khosla Kumar

Image

A man walks down the street. It's a street in a strange world. Maybe it's the third world. Maybe it's his first time around. He doesn't speak the language. He holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is surrounded by the sound, sound of cattle in the marketplace, scatterlings and orphanages. He looks around, around he sees angels…

Paul Simon

“I only have two words to say More or Less”

TimBur

Image

It's like saying French shouldn't be taught because you don't understand it because it's new. Shakespeare is just like learning a new, exciting language.

Samuel Barnett

Image

I am attracted to looking at the different things language can mean even in one sometimes quite ordinary utterance. Writing is partly about listening closely to yourself as you think or compose and being aware of the different tensions and weights among the words, the different directions any one of them could lead. I like to play with the multiplicity…

Rae Armantrout