Quotes of Inflection - somelinesforyou

“ I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections. Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling. Or just after. ”

- Wallace Stevens

“ By bouncing a word, visually, you're putting in an inflection, you know, the way a sentence should be if somebody heard it spoken. And I think a lot of humor depends on inflection, how a person says something. Certain things you could say as a question, and as a statement. ”

- Johnny Hart

“ There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly. ”

- Annie Dillard

“ It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame… ”

- Lewis H. Lapham
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