Quotes About Words

That's the alchemy of adjectives: boiling down an excess of ideas to the essence of a thing. We want the words to be precise and evocative. If we pick our adjectives carefully, any description can surprise.

True prose stylists carry on an impassioned lifelong love affair with words, banishing mediocre ones like so many uninteresting suitors, burnishing the good ones till they shimmer. Be infatuated, be seduced, be obsessed.

Sharper than a serpent's fang is a woman's tongue

We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.

I miss you because memory is a kind editor. The past is a long scroll and in it is the story of us, told with gentle metaphor, and words that bring you back and back, even as you lie there, lying.

the new territories was inflammatory enough, and the

Sticks and stones can break our bones, but lies can break our hearts and our careers.

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.

In some ways, negative self-talk can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just as an athlete is more likely to make the shot after visualizing making it, she's also more likely to miss it after visualizing a miss. Your words, whether externally spoken or internally absorbed, shape your future.

Sticks and stones can bruise your body for a few days, but words can scar your soul for life.

Dog's ears went up at the word "ham": they say dogs have a vocabulary of about twenty words, and I was pretty sure that seventeen of Dog's were ham.

I just let him bungle through the words out loud. I wondered silently in my head whether that still counted as a real incantation or not. Or whether it was something else, something internal and having to do with the intentions of the heart that mattered, and if so, if that was the real hinge that would swing the door open to whatever was waiting on the other side. He

I collect words and lock them away, stored like a hoard of gems.

Whenever you speak negatively, you create a conflict between the good and bad seed that is in your heart.

We don't speak at night anymore, but she's left me her legacy nonetheless--a love for the sea and the smoothness of pearls, an appreciation of music and words, sympathy for the underdog, and a disregard for boundaries.

Poetry by its very nature is subversive . . . It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.

People say things all the time with the best of intentions but it's so easy not believe the words that come out of your own mouth.

Talk is cheap - except when Congress does it

Talk is cheap — except when Congress does it.

People seldom become famous for what they say until after they are famous for what they've done.

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet's mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it--but this in turn seems then a moral treason.

a "story" hangs together, is treated whole. But once you tell your story into the law, it becomes the object of a precise semantic dissection. The whole of the story is of no interest; instead, patient surgeons of language wait and watch, snip and assay, looking for certain phrases, certain words. Particular locutions trip particular legal switches, and set a heavy machine in motion.

The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.

I think quotes are very dangerous things.