"Diction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his verse is scabrous and hobbling, and his words not everywhere well chosen (the purity of Latin being more corrupted than in the time of Juvenal, and consequently of Horace, who wrote when the language was in the height of its perfection), so his diction is hard, his figures are generally too bold and daring, and his tropes, ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... despatched the Portuguese ambassador to Catherine—from this time styled queen—in order to make arrangements for her journey into England. Likewise he wrote a letter, remarkable for the fervour of its sentiments and elegance of its diction, which da Ponte was commissioned to convey her. This courtly epistle, addressed by Charles to "The Queen of Great Britain, my wife and lady, whom God preserve," is dated July 2nd, 1661, and ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... agreeable to them." (Hume's Hist. vol. i. p. 9.) In this passage Mr. Hume has given a summary of the Life of Agricola. It is extended by Tacitus in a style more open than the didactic form of the essay on the German Manners required, but still with the precision, both in sentiment and diction, peculiar to the author. In rich but subdued colors he gives a striking picture of Agricola, leaving to posterity a portion of history which it would be in vain to seek in the dry gazette style of Suetonius, or in the page of any writer ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... for a few minutes. Mrs. Cullom had said but little, but John noticed that her diction was more conventional than in her talk with David and himself in the morning, and that her manner at the table was distinctly refined, although she ate with apparent appetite, not to say hunger. Presently she said, with an air of making conversation, "I suppose ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... drama is removed from that of actual life, the nearer the spirit of it will approach to the ideal. An unwarrantable assumption, if there ever was one; and an assumption, as will be seen, that contains the seeds of the whole eighteenth-century theory of poetic diction. In the second place—but this is, in truth, only the deeper aspect of the former plea—Dryden comes perilously near to an acceptance of the doctrine that idealization in a work of art depends purely on the outward form and has little or nothing to do with the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
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