quotations about words
Just pick words and put one of them after the other like a baby learning to walk, like a drunk carefully crossing the street.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined. Actually, every word has a great burden of memories, not only just of one person but of all mankind. Take a word such as bread, or war; take a word such as chair, or bed or Heaven. Behind every word is a whole world. I'm afraid that most people use words as something to throw away without sensing the burden that lies in a word.
HEINRICH BÖLL
The Paris Review, spring 1983
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
The proof of battle is action, proof of words, debate.
HOMER
The Iliad
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Truly speech has wonderful strength and power, that through a mere word, proceeding out of the mouth of a poor human creature, the devil, that so proud and powerful spirit, should be driven away, shamed and confounded.
MARTIN LUTHER
"Of God's Word", Table Talk
Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Conversations with God
If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
One mild word ... will quench more heat than a bucket of water.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
If you can express yourself so as to be perfectly understood in ten words, never use a dozen.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow -- leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it.
CONRAD AIKEN
The House of Dust
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Criticism
It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.
ELIZABETH STROUT
Newsweek, July 13, 2009
Words are soldiers of fortune
Hired by different ideas.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Impulsive Dialogue"
No man weighs his words who has but a moment to live.
PHILIP MOELLER
Helena's Husband
Words are mere sound and smoke, dimming the heavenly light.
GOETHE
Faust
Desires and words go hand in hand ... they are moved by the same intention to join together, to communicate, to establish bridges between people, whether they are spoken or written.
LAURA ESQUIVEL
Swift as Desire