quotations about words
There are words which are worth as much as the best actions, for they contain the germ of them all.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
MARY OLIVER
"Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver", O Magazine, March 2011
Into the vortex of this sea of messaging comes not an afterthought but very possibly the cause, the universal values that are necessary for a world tied together by what? By words. Words are not dying now, merely moving forward. Books are not dying. "In the beginning was the word" suggests that very foundation of reality begins with how we see and express it.
STEPHEN C. ROSE
"Cybercommunities will require a revolution based on messaging", Blasting News, April 3, 2017
Words never can express the whole that we feel: they give but an outline.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Our generation throws a lot of slang around only to demand that other words be chosen with a pinpoint precision. Words today are both malleable as silly putty and hard as bricks.
ISABEL DRUKKER
"Sticks and stones", Campus Times, April 2, 2017
You take many words to say simple things.
LILLIAN HELLMAN
The Autumn Garden
As a free people, we must respect those who speak honestly and forthrightly and be suspect of those who would torture the language, and otherwise misrepresent facts. Words are thoughts; protect them.
JONATHAN HOFFMAN
"Words are thoughts; protect them", Arizona Daily Star, March 11, 2017
You can stroke people with words.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Notebooks
Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb! for I suppose he was dumb at the Creation, and must go round an entire circle in order to return to that blessed state.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, April 1841
A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
introduction, Three Soldiers
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
Weigh words, don't count 'em.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Raven's Shadow
The proof of words are sometimes the effect of them on others; words are not proofs without effect.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
There was a magic in the words. I suppose their power lay in their utter futility.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
EDMUND BURKE
letter to Richard Burke
Word and picture are correlatives which are continually in quest of each other, as is sufficiently evident in the case of metaphors and similes. So from all time what was said or sung inwardly to the ear had to be presented equally to the eye. And so in childish days we see word and picture in continual balance; in the book of the law and in the way of salvation, in the Bible and in the spelling-book. When something was spoken which could not be pictured, and something pictured which could not be spoken, all went well; but mistakes were often made, and a word was used instead of a picture; and thence arose those monsters of symbolical mysticism, which are doubly an evil.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The words fell as the axe of a skillful woodman falls at the root of a young tree and brings it down at a single blow.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief
So powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer