Quotes About Words

That's one strength that Stevie has. She's really not a strong instrumentalist in any way. Her instrument is her voice and her words. And it keeps her focused on the very center of that.

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page.

She loved him, but that wasn't good enough. The word "love" was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all. Since the love we distill for each beloved conforms to such a specific, rarefied recipe, with varying soupcons of resentment, pity, or lust, and sometimes even pinches of dislike, you really needed as many different words for the feeling as there were people whom you cared for in your life.

Se vio desconfiando instintivamente de las personas con las que contactaba y que más se deshacían en ayes y se ofrecían a ayudar «en todo lo que pudieran» sin especificar nunca en qué ni cuándo. La experiencia le decía que los que mejor expresaban sus sentimientos eran los menos aptos para hacerlo con algo que no fueran palabras.

There are things that once done can't be undone, things that once said can't be unsaid.

When you do choose to speak," she told me, "speak truths.

Writing is a struggle against the silence where words can have a powerful impact in just a split second and change your life forever........

Many times in life I've regretted the things I've said without thinking. But I've never regretted the things I said nearly as much as the words I left unspoken.

it was better to answer, no matter how ineptly, thank to withhold a reply. Because sometimes silence could wound someone nearly as badly as a bullet.

The atoms may be compared to the letters of the alphabet, which can be put together into innumerable ways to form words. So the atoms are combined in equal variety to form what are called molecules.

Various political parties, even if they're in direct opposition with one another, still say they are the spokesperson for the people. The writer must speak his own words and not get mixed up with politics.

Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning.

When the vastness of God meets the restriction of our own humanity, words can't hold it. The best we can do is find the moments that rhyme with this expansive heart of God.

Like Pinter and Orton, the writer, Clive Exton, catches the poetry of modern everyday speech, which, whether we like it or not, includes four-letter words used as verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives. But, God, is it difficult to learn.

Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb.

Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'

The messages that my work might contain, the verbal aspects, the use of words, certainly I never mean for it to be more than - shall we say? - fifty percent of the total, and sometimes my active interest is much less than that. It is the formal aspect of my painting which fascinates me most.

Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. They're all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. They're tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky.

Nearly all children have a feeling for rhythm in words, for the delicate pattern of nursery rhymes. Many adults have lost this feeling and, if they read verse at all, demand a far cruder music than that which they once appreciated.

in Marommes." And in reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one which gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning. "I

And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity. Absurdity: another word; I struggle against words; down there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity here. A movement, an event in the tiny coloured world of men is only relatively absurd: by relation to the accompanying circumstances.

Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns: I have to fi... I ex... Dead... M. de Roll is dead... I am not... I ex... It goes, it goes... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it.