Quotes About Words

it's their own unplanned words, their own thoughtless gestures and inflections, which have clung to my memory like flies caught on flypaper.

Godliness is more easily feigned in words than in actions

He'd inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who's uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they're used to in everyday life;

In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.

Things said and done innocently should never be used as weapons.

SADNESS OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [ sic ]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds, Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness...

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

He talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor of his sadness.

I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn't be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jews have four hundred for schmuck.

We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.

The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity.

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.

To speak is to fall into tautology.

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, as water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it further with words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

He intentado, no se con que fortuna, la redacción de cuentos directos. No me atrevo a afirmar que son sencillos; no hay en la tierra, una sola página, una sola palabra, que lo sea, ya que todas postulan el universo, cuyo más notorio atributo es la complejidad.

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?

Distance and antiquity (the emphases of space and time) pull on our hearts. If we are already sobered by the thought that men lived two thousand five hundred years ago, how could we not be moved to know that they made verses, were spectators of the world, that they sheltered in light, lasting words something of their ponderous, fleeting life, words that fulfill a long destiny?

Lo sucesivo del lenguaje indebidamente exagera los hechos que indicamos, ya que cada palabra abarca un lugar en la página y un instante en la mente del lector...

Andere mögen sich der Bücher rühmen, die sie geschrieben haben, mein Ruhm sind die Bücher, die ich gelesen habe.

las palabras últimas fueron ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum.

Os meus livros Os meus livros (que não sabem que existo) São uma parte de mim, como este rosto De têmporas e olhos já cinzentos Que em vão vou procurando nos espelhos E que percorro com a minha mão côncava. Não sem alguma lógica amargura Entendo que as palavras essenciais, As que me exprimem, estarão nessas folhas Que não sabem quem sou, não nas que escrevo. Mais vale assim. As vozes desses mortos Dir-me-ão para sempre.

Parlare é incorrere in tautologie.