“Somehow the word started coming back - some people still had breath to spare, apparently. The word was this hill was a quarter of a mile long. The word was it was two miles long. The word was that no Walker had ever gotten a ticket on this hill. The word was that three boys had gotten tickets here just last year. And after that, the word stopped coming back.”

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.”

“She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.”

“Probably she should not have gotten away with it for as long as she had…but sometime, he had often thought, the retribution will come: reality denied comes back to haunt.”

“His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.”

“No miles of level desert, no jagged mountain heights, no sea of endless blue
Neither words nor tears, nor silent fears
will keep me from coming back to you.”

“Visible management attention, rather than management exhortation, gets things done. Action may start with the words, but it has to be backed by symbolic behavior that makes those words come alive.”

“Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.”

“Lessee… he'd gone off after the funeral and gotten drunk. No, not drunk, another word, ended with "er." Drunker. that was it.”

“During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.”