Quotes About Words

In the glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast's card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed.

scarify, a six-hundred-year-old word that only Churchill would use in crucial diplomatic correspondence—" would scarify their names for a thousand years of history.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists.

Non lo disse ad alta voce perché sapeva che a dirle, le cose belle non succedono.

The tyranny of words is only slightly less absolute than that of men; but whereas elections, revolutions, or just the dreary passage of time can do away with human tyranny, patient analysis and redefinition are required to remedy the linguistic affliction.

Die Rache der Sprache ist das Gedicht

Unfortunately, the people who have the greatest influence in our lives rarely understand the power of their words to shape who we become. They never fully understand that what informs us forms us. Words spoken into a soul are like the hands of a potter pressed against wet clay.

Todo libro ha de hacer pedazos el silencio.

Music is constructed in notes. Language in words. Both are communicating. Music is a language of feeling, the heart. Words are the music of the mind. Theater is their marriage.

Shakespeare could do anything with words. You are not more intelligent than he--so don't try to fix his writing. Try to understand it. If the language is clumsy or contradictory--consider why? Every word was deliberately chosen. Trust me.

Legrand shares with his predecessor that rare ability to joke in music just as his librettist jokes in words. The composer has in fact termed Amour "an opéra-bouffe"—Offenbach's own form.

She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.

It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It's all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing--ambiguity is a fact of life.

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street.

And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight.

Says Robert Roth in Story and Reality: "For the Greeks . . . words were definitions. . . . For the Hebrews, on the contrary, words were descriptions." 14

Hãy nói n?u b?n có nh?ng l?i l? m?nh hÆ¡n. N?u không, hãy im l?ng.' (_Euripide_)

There are things you can describe in life and things you just can't. There are dangers and adventures, miseries and fear that you can tell about… well, then there's hope and joy and love – and those are beyond the power of words to describe.

There are things you can describe in life and things you just can't. There are dangers and adventures, miseries and fears that you can tell about and then . . . well, then there's home and joy and love—and those are beyond the power of words to describe.

Love changes everything. Days are longer, words mean more. Love changes everything. Pain is deeper than before. Love can turn your world around, and that world will last forever.