Quotes About Words

A lot of the time writers are just sponges... for what's around them, and so books are helpful for focusing your mind and literally putting it into words.

I lay in bed that March morning, listening to noises from below stairs and priding myself on the fact that I had kept peace in the house since January. If I didn't, we might all kill each other. Not with guns, no. We'd had our fill of guns with the war. But with words, the way civilized people kill each other every day.

I know who we are, and how we got that way. We are writers. We danced with the words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers. Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.

Plato feared the "false and braggart words" of the demagogue, and suspected democracy might be nothing more than a staging point on the road to tyranny.

I have omitted to give a detail of his words, from a notion that they would not interest the reader as they did me, and not because I have forgotten them.

Those whose actions are forever before our eyes, whose words are ever in our ears, will naturally lead us, albeit against our will, slowly, gradually, imperceptibly, perhaps, to act and speak as they do.

a soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger."  It isn't only in them you speak to, but in yourself.' 'Very true

a soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger.

believed in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

We know fewer words, and the ones we know are less beautiful. The words we've lost tend to be connotative, and the ones we've gained tend to be denotative. I've never seen modem used in a poem.

La carta è più paziente degli uomini.

But there's one thing I can't do, and that's to love Mother with the devotion of a child. I soothe my conscience with the thought that it's better for unkind words to be down on paper than for Mother to have to carry them around in her heart.

if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent.

Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your hearts, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible.

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.

It is the case with too many books, I fear. Old leather, fine paper are all very well, but it is the words that matter. They are the wealth of the mind and the heart.

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.

Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover…

Silence. All around him silence, wrapping up his spoken words and making them loud. Making them sharp in the stillness, like a movement, like a drop in temperature. Silence. There