Quotes About Words

If I knew words enough I could write you the longest love-letter in the world—and never get tired.

But the space between heaven and earth had cooled his mind, destroyed the impulsiveness that had led him to bring her here, and made him aware of the too obvious appeal, the struggle with an unrehearsed scene and unfamiliar words.

He strolled out onto the wide, semidark veranda, where couples were scattered at tables, filling the lantern-hung night with vague words and hazy laughter.

After the boy at the supermarket had called her those names, Evelyn Couch had felt violated. Raped by words. Stripped of Everything.

Palabras. No hay manera de quitárselas de encima. No le dejan a una estar verdaderamente sola. Plaga de bichos molestos, oye. Debería abrir las ventanas de par en par para que salgan a la calle las palabras, los lamentos, las viejas conversaciones tristes atrapadas entre los tabiques del piso deshabitado.

How I'd love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life's purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else's soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?

All it would take to make a catalogue of monsters is to photograph in words the things the night brings to drowsy souls unable to sleep. These things have all the incoherence of dreams without the alibi of sleeping. They hover like bats over the soul's passivity, or like vampires that suck the blood of submission.

We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss. We read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound.

É tão difícil descrever o que se sente quando se sente que realmente se existe, e que a alma é uma entidade real, que não sei quais são as palavras humanas com que possa defini-lo.

It seems that civilizations exist only to produce art and literature; words are what speak for them and remain. How do we know that these extra-human figures aren't truly real? It tortures my mind to think this might be the case…

to say that, or something similar, might lend colour to the tedium, the way a child draws something then clumsily colours it in, blurring the edges, but to me it's just words echoing around the cellars of thought.

When I put away my artifices and lovingly arrange in a corner all my toys, words, images and phrases, so dear to me I feel like kissing them, then I become so small and innocuous, so alone in a room so large and sad, so profoundly sad!

The truth is that nothing changes anything and what we say or do only brushes the tops of the mountains in whose valleys all things sleep.

No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper. The Book of Disquiet is the world's strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes. Richard Zenith, 2001 NOTES

Action disconcerts us, partly because of our physical incompetence, but mainly because it offends our moral sensibility. We consider it immoral to act. It seems to us that every thought is debased when expressed in words, which transform the thought into the property of others, making it understandable to anyone who can understand it.

I'm a massive fan of the dictionary.

I'm a big 'Countdown' fan.

My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

I remember as a child of five or six lying in the bath marvelling at the different languages displayed on the shampoo bottles around me. From that moment on it was always words not numbers that held a fascination for me.

As people who know me know, probably to a fault, I am usually not without thoughts and words.

Change is one of my favourite words.

Most people understand that the more words children are exposed to, the stronger their vocabularies will be. But fewer people are aware that the quality of the words also significantly affects brain development.

Words about Lincoln fill a small but ever-growing library.

To chase an athlete that really doesn't want to speak with you and when you finally get him, gives you three words and you have to write a story based on three words of information he gave you, that's pretty tough.