Quotes About Words

The best antidote to writer's block is...to write.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.

The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

the linguist David Dalby suggests that the use of bad and wicked to convey positive rather than negative feelings originates in African languages such as Bambara, where there are 'frequent uses of negative terms … to describe positive extremes'. Dalby traces the habit of saying uh-huh to the same source.6 Another

I can remember being surprised to find that kiosk is Turkish – as may be the card game bridge – and that berserk, like geyser and narwhal, is Icelandic: it seems to derive from the name of the bearskin coats worn by the fiercest Norse warriors.

easy'. Yet sometimes an easy word is translated into a bafflingly polysyllabic alternative. 'Rust', we are assured, is 'the red desquamation of old iron' or 'the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal', while a 'scale' is 'any thing exfoliated or desquamated'. Confusingly, when we turn to the entry for 'desquamation', we are told that it is 'the act of scaling foul bones'.

Johnson insists: It must be remembered, that while our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it, … words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water. Perhaps

Here in this moment we are beautiful, nocturnal creatures and our thoughts and words are jewels guarded by the moon.

I will never be able to pound words into lines To match the velocity of your presence

Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.

What shall I say to you? What can I say Better than silence is?

A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child.

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw.

The subject of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words--that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people, appears to be impossible.

If you get a hard word from any one, keep silent, and his own conscience will accuse him.

All the cruellest words a coarse man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as if he had actually said them to her.

How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her.

Konstantin Levin non amava parlare delle bellezze della natura né sentirne parlare. Le parole, secondo lui, toglievano la bellezza alle cose che vedeva.

I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him. If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside our door.

For each of us is A separate miracle In a collective miracle Brought together For a moment By a group of notes And a scan of words From the heart Of one Who dares To think That others Might feel As he feels

Thought for the Week "Refrain from littering the landscape with unkind, cynical, mean-spirited words, and you can return the world to a civility that was lost when human beings began deifying indiscriminant thoughts as if they were the truth." Leonard Perlmutter (Ram Lev)