“Words are not deeds. In published poems — we think first of Eliot's "Jew", words edge closer to deeds. In Céline's anti-Semitic textbooks, words get as close to deeds as words can well get. Blood libels scrawled on front doors are deed.
In a correspondence, words are hardly even words. They are soundless cries and whispers, "gouts of bile," as Larkin characterized his political opinions, ways of saying, "Gloomy old sod, aren't I?" Or more simply, "Grrr."
Correspondences are self-dramatizations. Above all, a word in a letter is never your last word on any subject. There was no public side to Larkin's prejudices, and nothing that could be construed as a racist — the word suggest a system of thought, rather than an absence of thought, which would be closer to the reality, closer to the jolts and twitches of self response.”
"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)
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Martin Amis 136
Welsh novelist 1949Related quotes

The Lover's Progress (licensed 6 December 1623; revised 1634; published 1647), Act iii. Sc. 4. Compare: "Deeds, not words", Samuel Butler, Hudibras, part i, canto i, line 867.

Worte sind Taten.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 50e

“It's deeds we need, not words.”
To Lyuben Karavelov, January 27, 1872
Original: (bg) Дела трябват, а не думи.

“Words are women, deeds are men.”
"In the Name of the Bodleian"
In the Name of the Bodleian, and Other Essays

“Words that do not match deeds are unimportant.”
As quoted in Seeds of Revolution: A Collection of Axioms, Passages and Proverbs, Volume 1 (2009) by Iam A. Freeman

“837. Words are women, deedes are men.”
Jacula Prudentum (1651)
“Justice is a constant uprightness in words and in deeds.”
Four Discoveries of Praise to God, eds. C. Matthew McMahon and Therese B. McMahon (Puritan Publications, 2012), Ch. 2, p. 28