Subjunctive Quotes

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact. (Donna Leon)
We who scream exist ecstatically. We stand out beyond ourselves, we exist in two dimensions. The scream implies a tension between that which exists and that which might conceivably exist, between the indicative (that which is) and the subjunctive (that which might be). View quote
John Holloway
Now, maybe you thought you could get clever by adding an "-ing" to your favorite curse word. Well, the bill also prohibits "compound use, including hyphenated compounds ... and other grammatical forms including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms." Fortunately for me, they didn't include the pluperfect subjunctive. So all you stuffed shirts can just have been having had to bite me. View quote
Lewis Black
The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive. View quote
Robertson Davies
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined. View quote
Alan Bennett
Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame. View quote
Mark Twain