quotations about words
Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
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The Stone Gods
Deeds not Words: I say so too!
And yet I find it somehow true,
A word may help a man in need,
To nobler act and braver deed.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Facta non Verba"
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present
Words [are] more beautiful than a found fall leaf.
WILLIAM H. GASS
A Temple of Texts
I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.
TAD WILLIAMS
Otherland: City of Golden Shadow
Twas a special gift of God that speech was given to mankind; for through the Word, and not by force, wisdom governs.
MARTIN LUTHER
"Of God's Word", Table Talk
My method is to find a word with a gesture.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
An Evolution in Aphorisms
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
Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence -- by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present -- but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word "quarters" the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
There have been countless nights now that I have sat at my computer staring at a blank screen, in hopes I could find some words to describe the feelings and thoughts that have been going through my head. Countless nights where I lay awake disappointed with the fact another night went by, and still I was stuck with nothing. I never really understood why kids in my classes over the years hated writing papers, but now I understand more than ever. Not being able to find the right words to describe the thoughts going through you head absolutely sucks.
SAM WAKITSCH
"I write because to me, words are beautiful", Chicago Now, January 25, 2016
In the increasingly convincing darkness
The words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat.
JOHN ASHBERY
Houseboat Poems
Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Words are soldiers of fortune
Hired by different ideas.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Impulsive Dialogue"
How charming it is that there are words and sounds: are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things eternally separated?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Not content with the million or so words they already have at their disposal, English speakers are adding new ones at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Recent dictionary debutants include blog, grok, crowdfunding, hackathon, airball, e-marketing, sudoku, twerk and Brexit.
ANDY BODLE
"How new words are born", The Guardian, February 4, 2016
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
The same words
come from each mouth
differently.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Fifteen Pebbles"
The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
When you write you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it and it digs a path you follow.
ANNIE DILLARD
The Writing Life