Quotes About Words

There's another quote on the act of writing letters, have a look: Letter writing is a truly anachronistic genre, a sort of tardy inheritance of the eighteenth century; those who lived at that time believed in the pure truth of the written word. And we? Times have changed; words are lost with ever greater ease; you can see them float on the waters of history; sink, come up again, mixed in by the current with the water hyacinths.

Mi papá va dejando regadas sílabas por el camino de la conversación, «claro», «normal», «obvio», como migas de pan para que yo no me pierda.

Words and actions are transient things, and being once past, are nothing; but the effect of them on an immortal soul may be endless.

They called in medics, but two got killed trying to get to Dole.

The ministerial students were the worst—they were maybe one-third to one-half of each class, and this was their trade school. They came to learn the right words, all the proper formulae ... which they wrote down and memorized from the lectures of their profs.

Inspiring words are potent, and sometimes dangerous, things. They can inspire idiots and devils as well as great man.

Eyes are vocal, tears have tongues, And there are words not made with lungs

All words that are important in history have been picked up and used by all kind of characters, for all kinds of reasons.

But to talk of the world that is hidden in every woman is a journey of pain, for the words are not in use to tell of it, and to use the words that are is only a hopping on uneven crutches.

I heard the blood in Mr. Gruffydd voice and searched libraries of words in hot seconds of emptiness only to give him comfort.

Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments?

With words I have knit my shroud and will bury myself therein

Miró hacia la biblioteca. Aquella sabiduría no calmaría nunca su fuego; siglos y siglos de palabras no podían satisfacer aquel deseo imperativo e irracional.

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

We process information so efficiently that we don't dwell on thoughts and words anymore—we flit incoherently from one set of distractions to the next.

Yet this rumble is cartoon thunder.

He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters.

People who still love words have to be forgiven everything.

I, too, had nothing to say, and I tried to say it as well as I could. What harm could so small a thing as saying nothing do to anyone?

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

Without meaning we are surely less than human and deeply discontented. Most meaning is largely preconceptual and not subject to words, and in that sense it is nonrational, but meaning lies in wait to appear and grab onto the right symbol in the right moment.

If you can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then you will find that when you speak, your words will be more well-chosen and calm. Francis