Words Quotes

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly and language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language... I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”? “It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

~ Elie Wiesel

I know so many words. It's perplexing to come across so many I don't.

~ Emily Murdoch

Many who have learnedfrom Hesiod the countless namesof gods and monstersnever understandthat night and day are one

~ Heraclitus

To be read. To be heard. To be seen. I want to be read, I want to be heard. I don't need to be seen. To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones. Words have a weight to them. How you choose to present them and to whom is a matter of style and choice.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

Once your words fly out of your mouth, you sometimes can't control whether they fly straight or crooked, Grandma Augustine says. They can get bent in the strangest ways. Grandma Augustine says that the only way to straighten out bad words is to keep making good ones until you say what you need to say to who you need to say it to.

~ Lori Aurelia Williams

The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.

~ Ayn Rand

That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.

~ Jeanette Winterson

I wish I could read what she's written there. Instead, I pretend the letters are stars. The words, constellations.

~ Isaac Marion

My cheeks are red hot,my lip still trembles,because I sent my heartto speak; every word of itdelusional and awkward,an exuberance, an abrupt sound.That's how I spoke, oh, it stillshows on my hot cheeksI'm now carrying home.I look down at the snowand walk past many houses,past many hedges, many trees,the snow adorns hedge, tree and house.I walk on, staring downat the snow, on my cheeksnothing but red-hot memoryreminding me of my wild talk.

~ Robert Walser

A teacher of mine once said there are no true synonyms.

~ Roy Peter Clark

People can go on telling themselves things like “Think before you speak!” or “You don’t believe that yourself” or “Forget it!” But they can also say, “Oh, what lovely flowers!” or “Are you a phone freak or something?” or “Suit yourself,” or “This record makes me feel so happy!’ Wonderful! Words are delightful little gifts we exchange like the Easter eggs we paint and hide for others to find and enjoy. I’d forgotten that, but you reminded me of it.

~ Thomas Brussig

You're like a dictionary. You know the word is in there, but you need to know how to spell what you want first

~ Aaron Withers

Na, it's not about what I say; It's about what I can't express in words.

~ Saurabh Sharma

Words are just words. The evidence is in how you act, how you react.

~ Maya Banks

The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can understand you.

~ J.c. Ryle

It wasn't supposed to. It was just supposed to stop you from hurting yourself.” “It helps—” “No it doesn't. It just pushes it away temporarily. Just like the booze.” “But I need—” “You need to let yourself feel. Feel it, own it. Then move on.” “You make it sound so easy.” Bitterness drips from each syllable. “It’s not. It’s the fucking hardest thing a person can do.” I smooth a damp strand out of her face and away from my mouth. “It’s the hardest fucking thing. It’s why we drink and do drugs and fight. It’s why I play music and build engines.

~ Jasinda Wilder

The word lethologica describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.

~ Sarah Addison Allen

Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do.

~ Neil Gaiman

Words have power. The power to soothe. The power to skewer someone through the heart. The power to render someone speechless.

~ Ellen Hopkins

To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

...at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.

~ Ben Jonson

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

~ Joseph Conrad

The words ran away with me.

~ Edna O'brien

The body is poisoned through the mouth, even so is the heart through the ear ... And even if we do mean no harm, the Evil One means a great deal, and he will use those idle words as a sharp weapon against some neighbor's heart.

~ Francis De Sales

The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn't quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they'd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up. All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion. Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid... Soon, exhausted, she was done. No, she had said weakly, I don't want to go home. I'll be all right now.

~ Alice Walker

Music pulls words from the heart and inspires brilliance.

~ Court Young

If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.

~ J.b. Phillips

Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said...no, I'd be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar's a roar and no one is hard put to miss its meaning.

~ Philip Roth

With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I'd been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen.

~ Denis Johnson

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I know how you are with your words, and, Will- I love all of them. Every word you say. The silly ones, the mad ones, the beautiful ones, and the ones that are only for me. I love them, and I love you. - Tessa Gray

~ Cassandra Clare

TELL THE WORLD WHAT YOU INTEND TO DO, BUT FIRST SHOW IT.This is the equivalent of saying deeds, and not words, are what count most.

~ Napoleon Hill

I don’t know: perhaps it’s a dream, all a dream. (That would surprise me.) I’ll wake, in the silence, and never sleep again. (It will be I?) Or dream (dream again), dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of murmurs (I don’t know, that’s all words), never wake (all words, there’s nothing else).You must go on, that’s all I know.They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I?You must go on.I can’t go on.You must go on.I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.You must go on.I can’t go on.I’ll go on.

~ Samuel Beckett

Who knew paper and ink could be so vicious

~ Kathryn Stockett

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.

~ Zadie Smith

Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters

~ Pema Chödrön

Why do you have to be so damn cryptic?

~ Amanda Hocking