WORDS QUOTES IV

quotations about words

Flaubert's famous search for the "mot juste" was not a search for words that glow alone, but for words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.

STANLEY FISH

How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

Tags: Gustave Flaubert


He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.

JOHN LOCKE

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Tags: John Locke


Through words we come to know the other person--and to be known. This knowing is at the heart of our deepest longings for intimacy and connection with others. How relationships unfold with the most important people in our lives depends on courage and clarity in finding voice.

HARRIET LERNER

The Dance of Connection

Tags: Harriet Lerner


I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

LEWIS H. LAPHAM

Harper's Magazine, November 2010

Tags: Lewis H. Lapham


No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

ROGER ZELAZNY

Lord of Light

Tags: Roger Zelazny


Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

ANNE CARSON

Nox

Tags: Anne Carson


Word -- that invisible dagger.

EMIL CIORAN

History & Utopia


I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook


Words once sequenced into phrases were never done with but recycled themselves in perpetuity.

WILLIAM GAY

Provinces of Night


Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Stone Gods

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


Words are not necessary to one's experience of the true life.

DON DELILLO

Point Omega


Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden -- a secret language.

ROBERT ALTMAN

Esquire, March 2004

Tags: Robert Altman


Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.

DAN SIMMONS

Olympos

Tags: Dan Simmons


A good word costs as little as a bad one, and is worth more.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE

Moral and Religious Aphorisms

Tags: Benjamin Whichcote


Words have not the color of the rose
Nor the beauty of the morn!

EDWIN CURRAN

"The Depths of Love"


Words frequently surrender power to the opposer.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.

NEALE DONALD WALSCH

Conversations with God

Tags: Neale Donald Walsch


If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe


All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Thoughts on Art and Life

Tags: Leonardo da Vinci


If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.

GEORGE ELIOT

The Mill on the Floss

Tags: George Eliot