Words Quotes

You ask me why I don't speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill'Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it's how it mends it

~ Criss Jami

More sailors have drowned in words than in the sea.

~ Marty Rubin

By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. ... What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.

~ Michael Richardson

Be a poet in action as well as in words.

~ Marty Rubin

Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.

~ Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

~ Anne Sexton

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?

~ Billy Collins

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloudThat's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapersThere are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteriesPortraits of great men and a thousand different headlines(Zone)

~ Guillaume Apollinaire

How can love's spaciousnessbe conveyed in the narrowconfines of one syllable?

~ Diane Ackerman

There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper...

~ Criss Jami

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

~ Aldous Huxley

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

~ Annie Proulx

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. (1980)]

~ Carl Sagan

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

~ Stephen King

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

~ Cornelia Funke

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

~ Anne Lamott

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

~ Oscar Wilde

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.

~ Craig Claiborne

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

~ Anne Carson

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

~ Henry Ward Beecher

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

~ Theodore Dreiser

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

~ Paul Auster

A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

~ Charles Péguy

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....

~ Alexander Trocchi

All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.

~ Jimi Hendrix

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

~ Adrienne Rich

Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon.

~ Joseph Bruchac

A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

~ E.l. Doctorow

…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….

~ A.s. Byatt

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

~ David Almond

Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.

~ Stephanie Connolly

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

~ David Foster Wallace

The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them.

~ Marcel Proust

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

~ Gaston Bachelard

To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.

~ Augusto Roa Bastos

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

~ Beth Kephart

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final. But I was always word-smitten.

~ Charles Frazier

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

~ Gregory Maguire