phrases

Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.

It's strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.

As he once wrote of Kipling, his own enduring influence can be measured by a number of terms and phrases__oublethink, thought police, 'Some animals are more equal than others'__hat he embedded in our language and in our minds. In Orwell's own mind there was an inextricable connection between language and truth, a conviction that by using plain and unambiguous words one could forbid oneself the comfort of certain falsehoods and delusions. Every time you hear a piece of psychobabble or propaganda_'people's princess,' say, or 'collateral damage,' or 'peace initiative'__t is good to have a well-thumbed collection of his essays nearby. His main enemy in discourse was euphemism, just as his main enemy in practice was the abuse of power, and (more important) the slavish willingness of people to submit to it.

Nothing is ever certain.

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style._ We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre__armonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods__ut this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words._ We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure._ From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised._ We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

In 5 minutes, 1 minute and many other phrases most of them are a lie..., but why do we say them?