Quotes About Words

behind each word is a meaning. Some words are friendly; some are not. Some will cause you pain. Some will make you cry. Some will protect you. Some will deceive you. Still, words and their meaning can be indispensable in preparing you for the battles you must win in order to survive. The

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren't often fists.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

We can check on what people say by seeing what they do.

the book typographer's job was building a window between the reader inside a room and that landscape which is the author's words. He may put up a stained glass window of marvelous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be look at, not through.

A leader must be constantly aware of the power of his words .... and his silences.

A private face behind every public mask, a hidden meaning peeking through whatever words they choose to share with you.

I know you don't like to admit it, Happy, but it's all science, all of the time. Ghosts, demons, the afterworlds- all of existence and everything beyond- it's all science. We don't always understand it yet, that's all. Now hush like a good bunny and let me get on with my work, or I'll start throwing words like -quantum- around, and you know how you hate that.

One might—if one were, say, a gay sex writer—make a case that there's still a vibrant role for queer dirty words. While highly commodified mass-market DVD porn and its kinkier "specialty" cousins shows how sex looks , erotic texts are still the best mode to convey how sex—and its pesky cousin, desire—feels, and what it all means.

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. G.H. Hardy

And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and set them down.

Ieder woord dat ze spreekt is waar. Het is alleen niet de waarheid die me pijn doet, maar het gebrek aan medeleven.

What you say to your children will matter, later!

Today's words and deeds are tomorrow's testament.

But words came halting forth, wanting Inventions stayInvention, Natures child, fled step-dame Studys blows...Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,Fool, said my Muse to me look in thy heart and write.

No sword bites so fiercely as an evil tongue.

the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.

Silence in love bewrays more woeThan words, though ne'er so witty;A beggar that is dumb, you know,Deserveth double pity.

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

MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.