Quotes About Words

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

O! many a shaft, at random sent, Finds mark the archer little meant! And many a word, at random spoken, May soothe or wound a heart that's broken!

Words are really powerful. I don't believe that axiom at all - words can absolutely hurt you. Words can wound. They can do a lot of damage. I think they can do way more damage than sticks and stones. I'll take sticks and stones.

Words, especially when yelled in anger, can be very damaging to a child's self-confidence. The child probably already feels bad enough just from seeing the consequences of his or her behavior. Our sons and daughters don't need more guilt and self-doubt heaped upon their already wounded egos.

Kind words are the music of the world. They have a power which seems to be beyond natural causes, as if they were some angel's song, which had lost its way and come on Earth, and sang on undyingly, smiting the hearts of men with sweetest wounds, and putting for the while an angel's nature into us.

The sword the body wounds, sharp words the mind.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them.

Never regret what you don't write.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.

Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

Rapping was kind of hard. It's so many words. When you sing you can kind of stretch the words out. I didn't have to write as much as everybody else.

My inspiration for songs is just everyday life. I just write down words about things that have happened to me, people I've met.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.

It's hard to tell writers, especially in movies, that words are secondary. Behavior is important.

What I take from writers I like is their economy - the ability to use language to very effective ends. The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical.

Writers should be respected.

Shakespeare teaches you how to act. You come out of this process as a better actor. It's just the nature of the words he writes.