Quotes About Words

Fire hath its force abated by water, not by wind; and anger must be allayed by cold words, and not by blustering threats.

Sweet words are like honey, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

Her marble tears run down her marble face. A stranger is someone who has no handkerchief. Who has no words to say. Whose shadow mind is burning as he sits watching her hands and thinks how rare! to see a Roman talk with no gestures at all.

Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied.

What are you afraid of? The more I struggled and resisted, the stronger the ghost echoes grew and the more a possibility took shape in my mind just as the patio took shape beneath my hands. The saints were ordinary people. You do paint saints. Wherever I went these words of Father Gervase's stayed with me, a ghost staking out territory in my head as certainly as I had staked out the space for the bricks I now

Or reading poetry. Now there was a job that should exist. To spend one's days in the company of Blake and Dickinson, Yeats and Hopkins, Auden and Milton. To fill one's mind with their wisdom, the music of their words. Today

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

Really, nobody worth anything gives tuppence about my background. Oh, some might whisper about it behind my back, but how does that hurt me? It's who you are and what you do and say that's important, not where you come from. Are you listening to me, gel?

To adventure into the figurative meanings of his words was where the inherent danger resided.

Harper, treat your words with care For they may cause joy or despair Sing your songs of health and love Of dragons flaming from above

One thing I know about death is that it touches my psyche and mumbles in her magnificently unknown words; it floats within me and wanders through my bones every day.

The words kept coming and he could not stop them, not while Callie was standing there so indecipherably, and so he was going to keep talking until he used up all the words there were and then no one would be able to talk to anyone else anymore and then all anyone would have left were one another's unintelligible faces, and maybe some weird gesturing, too, and it would be all Oscar's fault.

His words sounded foolish to his own ears. He was not impressive. He was small like the world.

Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act.

All'inizio ho creduto che avrei scritto in fretta. In realtà passo molto tempo a interrogarmi sull'ordine delle cose da dire, la scelta e la disposizione delle parole, come se esistesse un ordine ideale, l'unico capace di restituire una verità su mia madre – ma non so in cosa consista –, e nel momento in cui scrivo non conta nient'altro per me che la scoperta di quell'ordine.

My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.

Comedians are innately programmed to pick up oddities like mispronounced words, upside-down books on a shelf, and generally undetectable mistakes in everyday life.

There is people who make stuff with words. There is people who make stuff with programs. And I really believe that that whole creative culture, people didn't realize how creative programming is. And anybody who's done it of course knows that not only is it creative, but it's incredibly absorbing.

I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.

Promise is most given when the least is said.

Never make a promise - you may have to keep it.

Of course a politician's promise isn't worth the paper it's written on.