quotations about words
Leave words to them whom words, not doings, move.
ARTHUR SYMONS
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"Variations Upon Love"
In silence you can't hide anything ... as you can in words.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
The Ghost Sonata
Last words are only words.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Suttree
I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
November
All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room--a complete mess--so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Paris Review, summer 1977
Words were too clumsy, sometimes; treacherous, too, always trying to twist around and mean something slightly different.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Jargon of Authenticity
Flaubert's famous search for the "mot juste" was not a search for words that glow alone, but for words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.
STANLEY FISH
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
Words are so last year.
BEANO
Twitter post, March 31, 2017
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophical Investigations
Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
Words were like objects, making the idea more solid -- less a poisonous gas and more a ... cube of crystallized thought.
DAN SIMMONS
Olympos
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...
ANNE CARSON
Nox
It is the stillest words that bring the storm.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Words Fail Me", BBC Radio, April 29, 1937
Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
JAMES JOYCE
"The Dead", Dubliners
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
PHILIP ROTH
Portnoy's Complaint
Concerning speech and words, the consideration of them hath produced the science of grammar. For man still striveth to reintegrate himself in those benedictions, from which by his fault he hath been deprived; and as he hath striven against the first general curse by the invention of all other arts, so hath he sought to come forth of the second general curse (which was the confusion of tongues) by the art of grammar.
FRANCIS BACON
The Advancement of Learning
Words like violence
Break the silence
Come crashing in
Into my little world
DEPECHE MODE
"Enjoy the Silence"