Quotes About Words

Chaque parole a des retentissements. Chaque silence aussi.

When you say a word—negative or positive—you release powerful forces. Every word you say has power. There is no such thing as a powerless word. —Marianne Williamson I

Concepts need their physical sounds, their scripted marks, etc. Even if we can imagine words "inside our head", we are conjuring their signifiers, their sensory aspects.

Now, if the trace is a constant sliding between presence and absence, those philosophical words cannot establish full, replete presence.

it, the idea seemed wrong, like singing the real words to "Barnacle Bill" in church.

eager' and 'anxious' aren't the same, or how 'disinterested' doesn't mean 'uninterested.

Someone once asked him why he didn't just use a tape recorder or at least type answers into a computer or tablet. His response: Speaking or typing creates just a glancing relationship with the words. Only when you write by hand do you truly possess them.

When you write something by hand, slowly, you own the words. You type them, less so. You read them, even less. And you listen, hardly at all.

three-horse-power van with the words

Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.

Our thoughts become our words, our words become our beliefs, our beliefs become our actions, our actions become our habits, and our habits become our realities.

I just don't know which is worse, to say nothing or to say too much.

If she'd just kept her mouth shut, she would have been perfect, but no...

Of course he's always know that the Odyssey and the Illiad are stories that were passed on orally long before Homer - or whoever it was - wrote them down. But never before has the connection between space, time, and words revealed itself so clearly as at this moment. The bad drop of the desert shows it off in sharp relief, but really it's always just the same all over the world: without memory, man is nothing more than a bit of flesh on the planet's surface.

the disorders of your hearts, and their sinful workings are as words before God.

Now it is fashionable to be democratic, to pretend that no virtue or wisdom can exist outside corduroy, and to abuse the middle classes. One season we go slumming, and the next we are all socialists. We think we are thinking; we are simply dressing ourselves up in words we do not understand for the gods to laugh at us.

What does it matter what any of us says about anything? Nobody takes much notice of it, luckily for everybody. This reflection must be of great comfort to editors and critics. A conscientious man who really felt that his words would carry weight and influence with them would be almost afraid to speak at all. It is the man who knows that it will not make an ounce of difference to anyone what he says, that can grow eloquent and vehement and positive.

Choice words in precise order bear power unmatched by amplified images and sound and technical magic (Writing for the Soul, p. 54).

Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.

There was a sense that things - words, feelings, laughs - were forever brawling inside her to be the first one out. Now, beside me, I sensed... emptiness. Emptiness in such a person is not nothing, is not small. It is enormous. -Cammie

In a way more felt than thought, he sensed a connection between Nipper's absence and Dorothy's words, which had been haunting him without letup.

I remember how, as a boy, I used to collect the cork tips of my father's cigarettes and stick them in my stamp albums. I believed they contained his unspoken words, which one day would explain everything. I have not changed. Now I explore my memories, trying to discover the substructure hidden beneath my past actions, searching for the link to connect them all.

You can't just say that, Pasquale. Those words have tremendous power. It's how people end up married.

She had mailed them a few days before she died, wishing everyone a great future. It was a powerful lesson in creating a legacy by choosing your words with intention. We are on this earth such a short time, cruelly short in Sarah's case. What message did I want to leave behind?