Famous quotes containing the words standard, galactic and/or alphabet:
“This unlettered man’s speaking and writing are standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before, he has made standard American; such as “It will pay.” It suggests that the one great rule of composition—and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this—is, to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not. This demands earnestness and manhood chiefly.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory—horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene—and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I wonder, Mr. Bone man, what you’re thinking
of your fury now, gone sour as a sinking whale,
crawling up the alphabet on her own bones.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)