Quotes About Words

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Politics and the English Language," George Orwell concluded with six emphatic rules, including "never use a long word where a short one will do" and "never use the passive where you can use the active.

And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to "cellar door": "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me—'cellar door,' say. From that, I might think of a name, 'Selador,' and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.

Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can kill you.

Words have weight, something once said cannot be unsaid. Meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what back they wash against.

here are the lost years won back with words,

Las palabras son complicadas. Apenas he hablado en mi vida. Escribo «en mi vida», como si ya estuviera muerto. En el fondo, es verdad. Es la pura y única verdad. Hace mucho tiempo queme siento muerto. Hago como si siguiera viviendo. Mi sentencia está en suspenso, eso es todo.

It's always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in open air, they fly away from me.

Sticks and stones are hard on bones, aimed with angry art, words can sting like anything but silence breaks the heart.

Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go. What excites me about his metaphor is that is makes writing much more than a lifesaving venture.

Ecco quindi la mia conclusione: la rassegnazione non ha nulla da invidiare all'eroismo.

Provò una gioia dolcissima perché gli sembrò che quelle prime parole che aveva scritto avessero il sapore del pane e il profumo di un buon rossetto.

Symbolic power is a power of creating things with words. It is only if it is true, that is, adequate to things, that a description can create things. In this sense, symbolic power is a power of consecration or revelation, a power to conceal or reveal things which are already there.

I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided.

I hope that by going to visit the pope I have enabled everybody to see that the words Catholic and Protestant, as ordinarily used, are completely out of date. They are almost always used now purely for propaganda purposes. That is why so much trouble is caused by them.

When we visited with legislative counsel, they told us that the only way to effectively accomplish what we were trying to do was to put the words in the legislation.

When I was first in the hospital, some of my visitors seemed so intent on not upsetting me that they avoided the topic of cancer altogether. Others just couldn't seem to find any words.

At any filmmaking class, you learn the power of the visual medium and are always trying to minimise the words.

When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.

I think it's good to have switched to a much more visual world and that people are not all that interested in words.

What's great is that each medium has a unique set of things that it does and does well. Film is a visual medium, and obviously, you can't fit a whole book into two hours unless you're really economical about it. Obviously, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and on some level, it's sort of true.

I guess standup is really painting pictures with words - especially for me, as I describe quite fantastical, visual things. My art teacher, Dexter Dalwood, always seemed to think they were linked. We bonded over our love of Vic Reeves.

The beauty of a Tarantino film is that the visuals match the rhythm of the words. That's his goal. And that's my goal.

Visuals are compelling, but sometimes the only way to get your point of view and purpose across is through words. Great copy can be embedded in any medium, any technology.