Quotes About Words

Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.

In an age that persecutes deviants, you can yet lose your life for being the possessor of a dangerous or unacceptable story. Words are powerful, which means that words can also be fatal.

Women's Tongues are as sharp as two-edged Swords, and wound as much, when they are anger'd.

Appreciation can make a day - even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary. -- Margaret Cousins

Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.

He searched for words to poison the shaft of his disdain.

I would take care you speak of her with respect for, of course, I will interpret any disrespect for her as disrespect for me.

Watch your thoughts for they become words. Watch your words for they become actions. Watch your actions for they become habits. Watch your habits for they become your character. And watch your character for it becomes your destiny. What we think, we become. My father always said that... and I think I am fine.

You have got a sharp tongue, haven't you honey? You'll have to watch it or you'll go to a lonely spinster's grave.

I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!

At night, forgotten words tried to reach me. I listened with my skin. Words tore my skin off, crept inside me, and nestled down. I was a mass of wounds. When I opened my mouth in front of the mirror, beasts lay asleep in my throat; they'd made it their home.

These words came, quite clear, like small, evil people, across the cobbles to Branza's ankles, where they stood and smirked up at her.

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

Looping. Some days are so dark I can't see anything but a miserable fog of number after number, word after word, clouds of verbs and nouns and none of them the ones that will make time go backward.

Side note: invalid. Whoever invented that word, and made it the same word as not-valid? That person sucked.

Words have not just the astonishing capacity to banish boredom and create wonders. They also enable contact with the lives of others and with story worlds, arousing endless curiosity about ourselves and the places we inhabit.

There is very little pleasure in being snubbed over a task for which one is well qualified. There is, however, quite a bit of pleasure in watching the ones who did the snubbing later eat their own words.

Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

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Everyone who writes with care, who treats words with respect and allows even the humblest its historical and grammatical dignity, participates in the exhilarating work of reclamation. Each essay or poem is its own "raid on the inarticulate," and every written work that forestalls the slow death of speech is a response to Wendell Berry's challenge to "practice resurrection.

There are generous and inventive ways to enjoy words and to reclaim them as instruments of love, healing, and peace. All of us who speak, read, write, and listen to each other have opportunities to do that and to foster the kinds of community that come from shared stories and surprising sentences.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Words speak to the the mind through the ears and actions speak to the mind through the eye

I did not want to appear before the world as pathetic, deprssed, and psychologically ill. So I erected a barrier of words and wit around myself, so that nobody could see how needy I really was.