Not much of a challenge to find brilliant phrases in A.O. Scott's reviews; here's an irresistible observation on "Wuthering Heights," the novel.
(Brilliant phrase, dude.) And what if we make things super tense by having all the characters on the same short fuse, like they're suffering — I got it!
Sir Alex Ferguson was miles away, lost in the pure joy of achieving his lifetime's ambition, able only to utter the brilliant phrase "Football?
Full of brilliant phrase-making – "trailing clouds of glory", "like a guilty Thing surpriz'd", "splendour in the grass" – it is irresistibly quotable.
The hip-hop academic Tricia Rose has a brilliant phrase for the disconnect that songs can effect between heart/hips and head.
Pro-life is "a brilliant phrase, even though it's meaningless because it implies anti-life on the other side," said Lucy Ferriss, a writer-in-residence at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
He was always the master of the brilliant phrase with an ability to recall, even into his 90s, a remote phrase from some corner of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Swift or Heine.
Specifically, he could not take seriously the verbal expressiveness of the meditative passages in the stressed long lines, whose language is devoid of brilliant phrases and steps round and around a shifting point of view.
In a now legendary 1980 BBC radio broadcast about modern art, the cultural historian Robert Hughes coined a brilliant phrase – "the shock of the new" – to describe the artforms that began to erupt from Europe and Russia at the end of the 19th century.
A woman called Irene who has tricked guilty whites out of thousands of dollars by begging money to enable her to feel "the good old sweet ground of the United States under my old black feet" is said, in a brilliant phrase, to be "bitter, but completely happy about it".
