Quotes About Words

And the people listened, and their faces were quiet with listening. The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them.

These were words to clothe a naked thing, and the thing is ridiculous in clothes.

A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you.

I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent.

I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.

The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little why.

Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure porous stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. "You have it pretty good.

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't.

Meaningful prayer is a matter of the heart, not the eloquence of the words.

I like to write scenes in the middle of the night. We could change every word of Family Ties between Monday and Friday.

He raised his brows. "You're drunk." "Am not!" He gave me a bland look. "A drunk's famous last words before they fall flat on their face.

I started off like everyone else does, slogging but having a compulsion to put words on paper. I didn't write or read horror or fantasy, other than children's fantasy, until I was in my teens

Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words since I first called my brother's father dad.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

Fear-filled words will defeat you, but faith-filled words will put you over!

Thoughts are the gun, words are the bullets, deeds are the target, the bulls-eye is heaven.

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

hate has no literature: real fear and real hate have no words

I suffer from two phobias: 1) Phobia-Phobia, the fear that you're unable to get scared, and 2) Xylophataquieopiaphobia, the fear of not pronouncing words correctly.

I said, "I do not fear those pants with nobody inside them." I said, and said, and said those words. I said them but I lied them.

Fears, indecision, and frustration feed on words. Without words they usually stop. . . . Words are at times good for looking back, but they are confining when I need to act in the present.

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.