Words Quotes

Naming enables the noble-minded to speak, and speech enables the noble-minded to act. Therefore, the noble-minded are anything but careless in speech.

~ Confucius

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind.

~ Teresa Jordan

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.

~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I used to be such a nice person.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

If you believe what you say, words become reality.

~ Ingrid Betancourt

His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.

~ Roberto Bolaño

I appricated that Nell was talking to me like a grown-up, but I had no idea what she meant. Still, I could see that the words flowed together like water over a riverbed.

~ Silas House

Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.

~ Max Barry

But the more I think about it, the more I think PC words are a crock of shit. If I want to describe something using a stupid word, I should.

~ Mark A. Rayner

She goes on to explain about how need to not only listen to what the other person is saying but try to hear the meaning behind their words. But my thing is that if you want someone to understand what you're saying, you should say what you mean.

~ Susane Colasanti

Six Stars,' he exclaimed. 'Finding the right words is hard!

~ Louise Marley

So many thoughts ran through my head. Most of them contained the same, simply three words so often strung together that it was too much a classic cheese or cliche to say it, but they still had meaning, no matter how many times they had been repeated.

~ Alysha Speer

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

~ Siri Hustvedt

In soul of every newborn baby, words are waiting to be written.

~ Toba Beta

What are the thorns really telling her? It's why she won't let us see them, why she clings to them--or they cling to her--as though she got herself buried in a bramble thicket and she can't get out and we can't get in to free her.

~ Patricia A. Mckillip

Words make known. But we live in the unknown.

~ Marty Rubin

Nobody will ever be able to understand the meaning of the measure of his own words.

~ Sorin Cerin

Except that love - that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power - could not possibly be contained in a single word.

~ Mary Balogh

If every word introduces a new concept, the simple phrase all that which does not exist is sufficient to make everything that does not exist, exist.

~ Pablo Tusset

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

~ Richard Mitchell

Man will find his own structured words,which will transfigure his into immortal.

~ Toba Beta

She said the words, and then she had a strange moment of seeing them, hanging there over her head. You're going to vacuum up that squi

~ Kate Dicamillo

The innumerable worlds in the Milky Way, words.

~ Jack Kerouac

You flourish one hushed breath at a time. Imagine all you can build word by single word.

~ Laurie Seidler

Language is insight itself.

~ Confucius

Words are so very difficult to take back and forget. Memories fade with time, but words never do. They linger in our minds, our hearts, haunting us.

~ Charlotte Featherstone

He had walked on the beach and wished for icy winds to sweep away everything that sounded like mere linguistic habit, a malicious kind of habit that prevented thinking by producing the illusion that it had already taken place and found its conclusion in the hollow words.

~ Pascal Mercier

Disappear, she says. I love that word.

~ Will Christopher Baer

At first, all is black and white.Black on white.That's where I'm walking, through pages.These pages.Sometimes it gets so that I have one foot in the pages and the words, and the other in what they speak of.

~ Markus Zusak

She wished such words unsaid with all her heart

~ Jane Austen

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

~ Gerhard Richter

I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.

~ Isabel Allende

These are Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I am Tyler's mouth. I am Tyler's hands.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Jacopo, while I could still read, during these past months, I read dictionaries, I studied histories of words, to understand what was happening in my body. I studied like a rabbi. Have you ever reflected that the linguistic term `metathesis' is similar to the oncological term `metastasis'? What is the metathesis? Instead of `clasp' one says `claps.' Instead of `beloved' one says `bevoled.' It's the temurah. The dictionary says that metathesis means the transposition or interchange, while metastasis indicates the change and shifting. How stupid dictionaries are! The root is the same. Either it's the verb metatithemi or the verb methistemi. Metatithemi means I interpose, I shift, I transfer, I substitute, I abrogate a law, I change a meaning. And methistemi? It's the same thing: I move, I transform, I transpose, I switch cliches, I take leave of my senses. And as we sought secret meanings beyond the letter, we all took leave of our senses. And so did my cells, obediently, dutifully. That's why I'm dying, Jacopo, and you know it.

~ Umberto Eco

This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone, that's what I want to explain - one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to put them into words.

~ Dan Chaon

They're brainless girls, otherwise they wouldn't be seen dead here. They're pretty, with ugly, appealing smiles and conversations we can't hear. They breathe smoke and blow it out, and words drop from their mouths and get crushed to the floor. Or they get discarded, just to glow with warmth for a moment, for someone else to tread on later.

~ Markus Zusak

The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as snakes or roaches. This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image.

~ Immaculée Ilibagiza

The great words never die... and so does the soul of its author.

~ Toba Beta

I told her about school and how I sat on a wall there and felt stories and words move through me ...

~ Markus Zusak

Sometimes, when people speak, I cease listening to their words and zoom in instead on the cadence, and it can seem lovely, and at other times absurd, all this verbiage, these seemingly random consonants clattering on the string that is sound.

~ Rosie O'donnell