Word with quite in them

This is probably because I am American, but to me, the only time quite means anything like extreme is when it is negated. Then it means exactly, entirely, completely; so that not quite means not exactly, not entirely. This is very common, and you don’t have to memorize words that collocate with it because negated quite can modify just about anything:

I wasn’t quite ready to do it.

That’s not quite what I intended.

We tried to find other projects to do and never quite managed to pull anything together.

Otherwise, to me, it means markedly, to an unusual degree: He’s quite tall. But quite tall isn’t necessarily as tall as extremely tall.

Quite can mean exactly, entirely, completely even without negation, but then it strikes me as a bit British:

Quite right. / Quite so. (British stock phrases meaning yes, exactly)

I’d quite forgotten I had it. (British)

He knows how busy you are, of course, and quite understood. (oh so very British)

In American English, when quite modifies a verb, it is almost always negated.

Setting aside the negated uses, in American English quite appears most often in: quite different, quite frankly/honestly/simply, quite sure, quite well/good, quite possible/possibly/likely/often, quite surprised, and you’re quite welcome.

Quite out of the hooks. [ Proverb ]

That’s quite another matter. [ French ]

The dead are got quite away from fortune. [ Proverb ]

Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed. [ William Cowper ]

Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. [ Lowell ]

The man that blushes is not quite a brute. [ Young ]

Stumbling often is a sign of falling quite. [ Proverb ]

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite over-canopies with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine. [ William Shakespeare ]

In form so delicate, so soft his skin.
So fair in feature, and so smooth his chin.
Quite to unman him nothing wants but this;
Put him in coats, and he’s a very miss. [ Horace ]

Perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. [ Shakespeare ]

Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved. [ Lamb ]

His genius quite obscured the brightest ray
Of human thought, as Sol’s effulgent beams
At morn’s approach, extinguished all the stars. [ R. Wynne ]

He’s so full of himself that he is quite empty. [ Proverb ]

Fat paunches make lean pates, and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits. [ William Shakespeare, Love’s Labor Lost ]

Twas a public feast and public day —
Quite full, right dull, guests hot, and dishes cold,
Great plenty, much formality, small cheer.
And everybody out of their own sphere. [ Byron ]

He that stumbles, and falls not quite, gains a step. [ Proverb ]

Good men must die, but death cannot kill them quite. [ Proverb ]

The horse that draws his halter is not quite escaped. [ Proverb ]

My dear, your everlasting blue velvet quite tires me. [ Thackeray ]

He is wide of the mark; has gone quite out of his sphere.

Better be up to the ankles, than quite over head and ears. [ Proverb ]

Enemies carry a report in a quite different form from the original. [ Plautus ]

Taste is something quite different from fashion, superior to fashion. [ Thackeray ]

You must be mad with the insane unless you wish to be left quite alone. [ Petronius ]

Only Zweifel (doubt) rhymes to Teufel (devil); here am I quite at home. [ The Sceptic in Faust. ]

Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say one should always be quite candid. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating. [ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest ]

Eloquence dwells quite as much in the hearts of the hearers as on the lips of the orator. [ Lamartine ]

It is always easy to shut a book, but not quite so easy to get rid of a lettered coxcomb. [ Colton ]

Nature cannot but always act rightly, quite unconcerned as to what may be the consequences. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

We are hampered, alas! in our course of life quite as much by what we do as by what we suffer. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan ]

The man of meditation is happy, not for an hour or a day, but quite round the circle of his years. [ Isaac Taylor ]

I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left. [ George Eliot ]

If a man is a gentleman he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman whatever he knows is bad for him. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

If one could only teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen society would be quite civilized. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

It is quite as much of a trade to make a book as to make a clock. It requires more than mere genius to be an author. [ Bruyere ]

Liberty is quite as much a moral as a political growth, — the result of free individual action, energy, and independence. [ Samuel Smiles ]

When one has never heard a man’s name in the course of one’s life it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

The law is a pretty bird, and has charming wings. It would be quite a bird of paradise if it did not carry such a terrible bill. [ Douglas Jerrold ]

We should remember that it is quite as much a part of friendship to be delicate in its demands as to be ample in its performances. [ J. F. Boyes ]

Those who injure one party to benefit another are quite as unjust as if they converted the property of others to their own benefit. [ Cicero ]

It is quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables, and they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway. [ Ouida ]

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

The very thrills of genius are disorganizing. The body is never quite acclimated to its atmosphere, but how often succumbs and goes into a decline. [ Henry D. Thoreau ]

Stories first heard at a mother’s knee are never wholly forgotten — a little spring that never quite dries up in our journey through scorching years. [ Ruffini ]

He that would reproach an author for obscurity should look into his own mind to see whether it is quite clear there. In the dusk the plainest writing is illegible. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

He who would reproach an author for obscurity should look into his own mind and see whether it is quite clear there. In the dusk the plainest writing is illegible. [ Goethe ]

So long as idleness is quite shut out from our lives, all the sins of wantonness, softness, and effeminacy are prevented; and there is but little room for temptation. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the finite. [ Carlyle ]

Women always want one to be good. And if we are good when they meet us, they don’t love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad and to leave us quite unattractively good. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan ]

Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what if I was an ant, and she fell on me. Then it wouldn’t seem quite so funny. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, the usages, and the arts of his times shall have no share. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

What consoles one nowadays is not repentance, but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date, and beside, if a woman really repents, she has to go to a bad dressmaker, otherwise no one believes in her. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan ]

It is quite as easy to give our children musical and pleasing names as those that are harsh and difficult; and it will be found by the owners, when they have grown to knowledge, that there is much in a name. [ Locke ]

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews’s Sermons? [ Lamb ]

The absent one is an ideal person; those who are present seem to one another to be quite commonplace. It is a silly thing that the ideal is, as it were, ousted by the real; that may be the reason why to the moderns their ideal only manifests itself in longing. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Society is a necessary thing. No man has any real success in this world unless he has women to back him, and women rule society. If you have not got women on your side you are quite over. You might as well be a barrister, or a stock-broker, or a journalist at once. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

It is quite deplorable to see how many rational creatures, or at least who are thought so, mistake suffering for sanctity, and think a sad face and a gloomy habit of mind propitious offerings to that Deity whose works are all light and lustre and harmony and loveliness. [ Lady Morgan ]

To a man who is uncorrupt and properly constituted, woman always remains something of a mystery and a romance. He never interprets her quite literally. She, on her part, is always striving to remain a poem, and is never weary of bringing out new editions of herself in novel bindings. [ James Parton ]

The works of nature and the works of revelation display religion to mankind in characters so large and visible that those who are not quite blind may in them see and read the first principles and most necessary parts of it, and from thence penetrate into those infinite depths filled with the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. [ Locke ]

As there are some flowers which you should smell but slightly to extract all that is pleasant in them, and which, if you do otherwise, emit what is unpleasant and noxious, so there are some men with whom a slight acquaintance is quite sufficient to draw out all that is agreeable; a more intimate one would be unsatisfactory and unsafe. [ Landor ]

In most old communities there is a commonsense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity. [ Whipple ]

Promising is the very air of the time; it opens the eyes of expectation: performance is ever the duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable; performance is a kind of will, or testament, which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it. [ William Shakespeare ]

The mind of the greatest man on earth is not so independent of circumstances as not to feel inconvenienced by the merest buzzing noise about him; it does not need the report of a cannon to disturb his thoughts. The creaking of a vane or a pully is quite enough. Do not wonder that he reasons ill just now; a fly is buzzing by his ear; it is quite enough to unfit him for giving good counsel. [ Pascal ]

It is particularly worth observation that the more we magnify, by the assistance of glasses, the works of nature, the more regular and beautiful they appear, while it is quite different in respect to those of art, for when they are examined through a microscope we are astonished to find them so rough, so coarse and uneven, although they have been done with all imaginable care, by the best workmen. [ Sterne ]

Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Everyone must be challenged. A day dawns, quite like other days; in it a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet the supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised. [ Maltbie Babcock ]

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father’s lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an example to others, and — not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake. It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite well that it wouldn’t answer for everybody that’s trying to get to be seventy. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

В одной из недавних статей мы с вами говорили о разнице между quiet и quite. Однако слово quite интересно само по себе: с его помощью образуется несколько весьма неочевидных конструкций, которые тем не менее часто используются носителями языка. Помимо само-собой разумеющихся плюсов вроде понимания книг и сериалов, знание этих конструкций с quite сделает вашу речь богаче и интересней.

Конструкции с quite в английском языке

1. Что такое quite?

Напомню, quite имеет значение: «достаточно, довольно-таки» и употребляется с прилагательными (словами, обозначающими признаки).

Например:

Однако помимо «достаточно» quite также может переводиться как «абсолютно, полностью», если его употребить со следующими словами:

• С прилагательными, которые несут эмоциональную окраску и потому обозначают крайнюю степень проявления признака: exhausted (‘истощенный, очень усталый’ [ɪgˈzɔːstɪd]/[игз`остид]), hilarious (‘уморительный, очень смешной’ [hɪˈleərɪəs]/[хил`эриэс]) и т.д.

  Подробнее о таких прилагательных читайте в этой статье.

• C прилагательными, означающими признак, который всегда проявляется только полностью. Например: different (‘другой’ [ˈdɪfrənt]/[д`ифрэнт]), honest (‘честный’ [ˈɒnɪst]/[`онист]), clear (‘понятный’ [klɪə]/[кл`иэ]).

То есть, на самом деле все проще: речь идет о словах, с которыми мы не можем сказать very («очень»). Здесь без проблем можно использовать русский язык для проверки. Мы говорим по-русски «очень отличный»? «Очень восхитительный»?

Если вещь «отлична» или «восхитительна» — это уже достаточно яркий признак, поэтому «очень» звучит излишне. В этих случаях quite переводится как «совершенно, абсолютно».

А как насчет «очень честный»? «Очень понятный»?

Человек может быть либо «честен», либо нет: он честен лишь когда полностью говорит правду, он не может быть «очень честен», правда? То же самое с «понятный»: нам либо понятно, либо нет, «понятно» — это уже наивысшая возможная степень понимания; «очень понятной» информация быть не может :). Здесь, опять таки, quite следует переводить как «совершенно, абсолютно»:

2. Quite с предметами

А теперь перейдем к интересному: помимо прилагательных quite можно употребить в конструкциях с существительными. То есть, словами, обозначающими предмет, а не признак.

Делается это для того, чтобы подчеркнуть качество или необычность предмета, придать ему важность во фразе.

Конструкция при этом выглядит так: quite + a/an + существительное.

Например:

Можно немного модифицировать эту конструкцию и добавить прилагательное. Выглядеть это будет так: quite + a/an + прилагательное + существительное.

НО так как здесь quite снова относится к признаку (а не к предмету), то переводиться он будет как «довольно-таки, достаточно»:

3. Quite a bit, quite a few, quite a lot

Quite часто используется со словами, обозначающими количество и частоту, чтобы подчеркнуть их.

Речь идет о: a bit (‘немного’ [ə bɪt]/[э бит]), a few (‘несколько’ [ə fjuː]/[э фью]), a lot (‘много’ [ə lɒt ]/[э лот]).

В паре с quite все они будут значить «довольно много».

Единственное, что нужно запомнить: quite a bit употребляется только с вещами, которые мы не можем посчитать: вода, кофе, информация, мясо и т.д.

Quite a few используется с предметами, которые, наоборот, посчитать можно: люди, яблоки, книги, письма и т.д. — все, что измеряется в «штуках».

Quite a lot of используется с любыми предметами: и исчисляемыми, и неисчисляемыми:

Quite a bit и quite a lot может также обозначать «часто»:

4. Quite с действиями

После всего, что мы обсудили, вы наверняка не удивитесь, когда я скажу, что в разговорном английском quite можно использовать даже с глаголами (словами, означающими действия). Далеко не каждый глагол позволяет такое сочетание — в основном quite присоединяется к следующим словам:

• Agree (‘соглашаться’ [əˈgriː]/[эгр`и])
• Enjoy (‘наслаждаться’ [ɪnˈʤɔɪ]/[индж`ой])
• Like (‘нравиться’ [laɪk]/[лайк])
• Understand (‘понимать’ [ˌʌndəˈstænd]/[андэст`енд])

В зависимости от ситуации, получившееся сочетание будет значить «довольно-таки», «очень» или «абсолютно»:

5. Not quite

Раз quite имеет значение «полностью», значит, «not quite» должен означать «не до конца», логично, правда?

С глаголами такое тоже возможно:

I don‘t quiet understand what he meant by saying this.
Я не очень понимаю, что он имеет в виду, говоря это.

I didn‘t quite agree with Jim but I kept quiet.
Я не особо был согласен с Джимом, но я молчал.

Вот и все! Надеюсь, статья была для вас quite interesting :).

Задание на закрепление

Переведите данные предложения на английский язык. Свои ответы оставляйте в комментариях под статьей. 

1. Я не хочу идти на вечеринку, я очень устал!
2. Мы довольно часто ездим во Вьетнам.
3. Я совершенно согласен с твоим мнением.
4. Я был совершенно напуган этим пауком!
5. Обед еще не совсем готов.
6. Этот отель очень дорогой.
7. Ну и денег же сегодня был! Столько много разных событий!
8. Компания наняла для меня довольно-таки неопытного ассистента.
9. Я не особо понял, что сказал диктор.
10. Я в общем-то люблю играть в покер, хотя я всегда проигрываю.
11. Я получил достаточно интересное предложение.
12. Мы потратили довольно-таки много денег.
13. Твой ответ абсолютно верен!
14. Фильм получил достаточно много хороших рецензий.
15. Жаль, что ты не видел свою бабушку на сцене! Она был очень хорошей актрисой!
16. Извинись! Еще не совсем поздно!