Quotes About Words

How can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly_they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

No basta que las frases sean buenas; también debe ser bueno lo que se hace con ellas.

Threequarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

de abrir esta Puerta en el Muro? La respuesta, a todos los efectos prácticos, es Ninguno. En un mundo donde la educación es predominantemente verbal, las personas muy cultas hallan poco menos que imposible dedicar una seria atención a lo que no sea palabras y nociones.

Look not so deeply into words and letters; for this Mystery hath been hidden by the Alchemists. Compose the sevenfold into a fourfold regimen; and when thou hast understood thou mayest make symbols; but by playing child's games with symbols thou shalt never understand.

Sí, que me ha dicho, mas ya sabéis que el hombre propone y Dios dispone, verba volant scripta manent.

hay cosas que dichas duelen a quien las escucha y no sanan a quien las comparte

Hard words are very rarely useful. Real firmness is good for every thing. Strut is good for nothing.

Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.

To use strong language, she thought, was a sign of bad temper and lack of concern for others. Such people were not clever or bold simply because they used such language; each time they opened their mouths they proclaimed I am a person who is poor in words.

did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause.

As she spoke, Isabel found herself thinking of the power of words. A single word, a phrase, a sentence or two could have such extraordinary power; could end a world, break a heart or, as in this case, consign another to moral purdah.

That was always the case, she thought: the perfect riposte, the mot juste, inevitably occurred well after the event, and one could not really write to somebody and tell them what you would have said had you thought about it in time.

That's the trouble with teachers—they spend a lot of their time saying things. If they said fewer things—hardly anything—then people would listen to them. But they don't.

there is always a very precise moment for words like that to be uttered; then it passes and it is too late. Just as the moment for words like sorry or I love you is a brief one, fleeting and irreplaceable; a moment of liminality, perhaps.

Computers change the way we deal with words," Dr. Macgregor continued. "They somehow unlock language in the mind. But they do so in a very particular way – they induce Ã¢â'¬Â¦ well, I suppose we should call it logorrhoea, a sort of verbal diarrhoea. The words come tumbling out and people feel they can go on and on. And they do. Poetry has to be much more disciplined, much more concise.

There are many words for push, take, shove, carry, load, and no words for love, or happiness, or the sounds which birds make in the morning.

am lucky that I can make somebody so happy just by saying something.

That sent her friends to the dictionary, which gave her additional satisfaction. To dispatch one's friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one's own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it.

The Germans had a word for everything—a word that could be very focused, very specific, because it could be constructed for a precise set of circumstances. They even had a word, it was said, for the feeling of envy experienced when one sees the tasty dishes ordered by others in a restaurant and it is too late to change one's own order. Mahlneid, meal envy, she believed that was the word—if it existed at all.

An Englishman was reflecting on the different words that people use for fish. 'Isn't it strange,' he said, 'that the French say le poisson, the Spanish say el pescado, and the English call it fish—which is what it is.' 

Talking about pumpkins doesn't make them grow.

There were words on our lips that in our loneliness alone wanted utterance, and the need by itself virtually created the feeling.

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....