Quotes About Words

How and when words escape from books and the books end up seeming like empty graves is something to think about.

A language is a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought.

It seemed to me - articulated in words of today - that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected with energy. But I also realized, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried and it came easily.

The hue itself, moreover, that certain emotions take on is of unimportant duration, the one who is writing knows. As soon as you look for words, the slowness becomes a whirlwind and the colors get mixed together like the colors of different fruits in a blender.

She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.

Alguna vez te encontrarás frente a tus acciones convertidas en piedras irrevocables como ésa, me dijeron de niña al enseñarme la imagen de un dios, que ahora no recuerdo cuál era. Todo se olvida, pero se olvida sólo por un tiempo. En aquel entonces también las palabras me parecieron de piedra, sólo que de una piedra fluida y cristalina. La piedra se solidificaba al terminar cada palabra, para quedar escrita para siempre en el tiempo

El contenido político no se lo daban las palabras sino las actitudes. Yo ya no creo en las palabras. Los priístas usan un lenguaje revolucionario, emplean términos muy avanzados, y sin embargo un campesino, si palabras, sin lenguaje, con su sola actitud, es más revolucionario que todos nosotros juntos. Pablo Gómez, estudiante de la Escuela de Economía de la UNAM y de las Juventudes Comunistas

Los priístas usan un lenguaje revolucionario, emplean términos muy avanzados, y sin embargo un campesino, sin palabras, sin lenguaje, con su sola actitud, es más revolucionario que todos nosotros juntos. Pablo Gómez, estudiante de la Escuela de Economía de la UNAM y de las Juventudes Comunistas.

Ha llegado el día en que nuestro silencio será más elocuente que las palabras que ayer callaron las bayonetas.

Let me write it down, quite unambiguously: paper could cut me open as a paper knife slits paper. I'd like to meet the person who could make a new woman of me out of the things I say.

Some sentences release their poison only after years.

Words shall not be hid nor spells buried might shall not sink underground though the mighty go.

History does not need explanatory principles, but only words to tell how things were.

the judge Don Achille speaks up, with sly and devastating irony, saying that the whole history of mankind is the history of rhetoric: that is, the history of moving masses of people by words, words, words. That is all there is in Political Life Under Compulsion. Words are not troves of truth or bands of friendship. They are tools, and the people who use them are tools, and so are the people upon whom they are used.

Words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express that regret.

What is not clear is not French.

There was the place where all the shouted words fall into the water. They're too weak to make it from shore to shore. I saw the words underwater, millions of them; they're lying there on the bottom of the sea, a whole load of wrecked sentences, sentences that never reached their destination, questions from one side and answers from the other…

The words that I will have to find for that explanation will be sharp and they will hurt, much worse than the thorns of roses.

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

As Justinian's Digest put it: A verbis legis non est recedendum1 ("Do not depart from the words of the law").

I've thought a great deal about the things I'd say to you, if I saw you again, but now I don't like having said any of it. We talk and words betray us. You think of them and when you say them out loud they mean something else.

Lo que dicen las palabras no dura. Duran las palabras. Porque las palabras son siempre las mismas y lo que dicen no es nunca lo mismo.

I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.

Usein käy niin, että liikoja puheitaan saa katua, mutta harvoin joutuu katumaan liian vähiä puheitaan.