A Quote by Charles Murray

The feminist revolution has tied writers into knots when it comes to the third-person singular pronoun. Using the masculine pronoun as the default has been proscribed. Some male writers get around this problem by defaulting to the feminine singular pronoun, which I think is icky.

Charles Murray

Quote Topics

Around Been Default Feminine Feminist Get Knots Male Masculine Person Problem Revolution Singular Some Think Third Tied Using Which Writers

Quote Author

Charles Murray
American - Scientist
Born: January 8, 1943

[After being corrected by a grammarian for using the feminine pronoun instead of the pseudogeneric masculine:] As you please, but for my part, if I were to express myself so, I should fancy I had a beard.

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sevigne

In Buddhist ideology, the conventional self is that which is constructed in a way by the use of the pronoun, and when you realize there is no absolute ego there, no disconnected one, self, or ego, then that actually strengthens your conventional ego. It does so in the sense that then you realize it's a construction, and you can strengthen it in order to help others, or do whatever you're trying to do, it's not like you no longer know who you are. Then you can organize your behavior by using your ego, as it's now the pronoun.

Robert Thurman

The point is that you free the ego. The ego is only a pronoun. It's a Greek first person pronoun, ergo. When you're in Greece you say, Ergo wants to take a bus, and you don't mean your ego wants to take a bus, like some big entity, you only mean I want to take a bus.

Robert Thurman

I've been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun.

Ann Leckie

I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility).

Chelsea Manning

The personal pronoun "I" should be the coat of arms of some individuals.

Antoine Rivarol

I see the wielding of a pronoun as something that can be freeing for some members of society but a shackle to others like myself.

Rain Dove

I find that, often, when I tell people what pronoun I use, I don't get a lot of backlash. I'm really lucky in that respect.

Asia Kate Dillon

I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering.

Shane McCrae

As a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour. Men who transgender cannot occupy such a position.

Sheila Jeffreys

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

John Fowles

When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.

Lawrence Wright

The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.

Ulysses S. Grant

For many years I used the pronoun 'we.' Now, as in my youth, I go to sleep and wake up alone.

Nina Berberova

A pronoun, too, will aptly reflect the number of its antecedent: "they" does not refer to one person, no matter how many personalities she or he has, or how eager you are to skirt the gender frays.