Words Quotes - Page 14

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.

Christopher Hitchens

A single word can brighten the faceof one who knows the value of words.Ripened in silence, a single wordacquires a great energy for work.War is cut short by a word,and a word heals the wounds,and there’s a word that changespoison into butterand honey.Let a word mature inside yourself.Withhold the unripened thought.Come and understand the kind of wordthat reduces money and riches to dust.Know when to speak a wordand when not to speak at all.A single word turns the universe of hellinto eight paradises.Follow the Way. Don’t be fooledby what you already know. Be watchful.Reflect before you speak.A foolish mouth can brand your soul.Yunus, say one last thingabout the power of words –Only the word “I”divides me from God.

Yunus Emre

Land and water are not really separate things, but they are separate words, and we perceive through words.

David Rains Wallace

Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

The thing he said aloud did not succeed.

Tony Burgess

Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.

Joan Aiken

I wish I could remember the moment when I was a kid and I discovered that the letters linked into words, and that the words linked to real things. What a revelation that must have been. We don't have the words for it, since we hadn't yet learned the words. It must have been astonishing, to be given the key to the kingdom and see it turn in our hands so easily.

David Levithan

Strong words resonate.

Toba Beta

She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)

Ron Rash

Are you watching the boats?" Cornelia guessed. She craned her neck to see if there was any excitement on the river.Heavens no, I'm spying on people," Virginia responded unrepentantly.-Cornelia E and Virginia Somerset

Lesley M.M. Blume

I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other.

Sue Monk Kidd

The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also—more so—for beauty.

Ellen Meloy

There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.

Victor Pelevin

Dictionopolis is the place where all the words in the world come from. They're grown right here in our orchards.""I didn't know that words grew on trees," said Milo timidly."Where did you think they grew?" shouted the earl irritably. A small crowd began to gather to see the little boy who didn't know that letters grew on trees."I didn't know they grew at all," admitted Milo even more timidly. Several people shook their heads sadly."Well, money doesn't grow on trees, does it?" demanded the count."I've heard not," said Milo."Then something must. Why not words?" exclaimed the undersecretary triumphantly. The crowd cheered his display of logic and continued about its business.

Norton Juster

Harper, treat your words with careFor they may cause joy or despairSing your songs of health and loveOf dragons flaming from above

Anne McCaffrey

All words are written in the same ink,'flower' and 'power,' say, are much the same,and though I might write 'blood, blood, blood'all over the page, the paper would not be stainednow would I bleed.

Philippe Jaccottet

Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?But at this moment, the mystery seemed greater than usual, for these were words he hadn't even known yesterday morning.

Pascal Mercier

I thought I would be understood without words.

Vincent van Gogh

How true it is that 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

He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

Robert Cormier

The paper burns, but the words fly free.

Akiba Ben Joseph

Words are memes that can be pronounced.

Daniel C. Dennett

...choosing words is harder than I thought.

Cynthia Lord

And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere.

Bill Bryson

Besides, I always feel safer when I've got words against my heart.

Zoe Trope

I will tell these stories...because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.

Dave Eggers

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.

José Saramago

who did I think we were.who did I thinkI could make you.this is the oldest mistake,to confuse wantingwith magic. silence is the undoingof every spell, and we are expertsin the unsaid. even now, I forgetto put us in past tense. as ifthe air in this city were the same.as if love is anything like its speaking.

Marty McConnell Emily Kagan Trenchard

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

Siri Hustvedt

Memories fade but words hang around forever.

Daniel H. Wilson

The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.

Helmut Newton

All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.

Nora Raleigh Baskin

-It's extremely cool how the words can stay the same but their meaning can change.-Because the reader changes.-EXACTLY

Doug Dorst

One should therefore not rely on mere words, but everywhere search for the intention behind them. (121)

Edward Conze

Better than a thousand sayings Made up of useless wordsIs one word of meaning Which calms you to hear it.

Anonymous

She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.

Tad Williams

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

Alberto Manguel

Words have consequences.

Albert Marrin

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

Jim Rohn

Because sometimes silence speaks much louder than words possibly could.

Elizabeth Eulberg

I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.

Carol Ann Duffy

We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

José Saramago

How could an alphabet—letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves—be impo

Linda Sue Park

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.

Ari Marmell

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

Seamus Heaney

Words', he said, 'is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.

Roald Dahl

Say something worth the words.

Tracy Chevalier

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

John Dewey

nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

sometimes every word i write is 'love' but the letters are rearranged, the sounds are different. all the words are red.

Zoe Trope

Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Samuel Johnson

Elodin pointed down the street. "What color is that boy's shirt?""Blue.""What do you mean by blue? Describe it."I struggled for a moment, failed. "So blue is a name?""It is a word. Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man's will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself."My head was swimming by this point. "I still don't understand."He laid a hand on my shoulder. "Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating." He lifted his hands high above his head as if stretching for the sky. "But there are other ways to understanding!" he shouted, laughing like a child. He threw both arms to the cloudless arch of sky above us, still laughing. "Look!" he shouted tilting his head back. "Blue! Blue! Blue!

Patrick Rothfuss

I got words in me, Jess, fighting to find a way out. Sometimes there's so many words and they get so crowded in my skull I think my head is gonna explode. I want to write them down. I've tried, but most of the time my thoughts and my feelings are bigger than what I can get on paper.

Carolee Dean

Dictionaries stop where the heart starts.

David Foenkinos

When you feel like throwing rocks, make sure they're ones no one can throw back.

Rebecca McKinsey

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.

Jodi Picoult

And he would listen, making only a few comments, always sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he had solved everything for me.

Anne Rice

How unladylike of you to mention such a thing.

Melina Marchetta

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

Confucius

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Words Quotes - Page 14

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