Quotes about wording

page 18

“We are so used to releasing words. We don't know what to do with them if they stay.”

“Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.”

“What a strange world it is, where prisoners are left their weapons and the written word is a mortal danger.”

“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”

“Somebody incredibly attractive just came into the room, and I ceased to pay attention to a word you were saying.”

“All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.”

“Say something worth the words.”

“If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired”

“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.”

“Right now, though, I wanted not to think forward or backward, but only to lose myself in the words.”

“If you've lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it, and if you didn't - you will never understand.”

“In a low whisper she was certain only her friend could
hear, she said, "I specifically remember we both promised never to drink from any man's goblet of wine. From the looks of you, Frances Catherine, I'm thinking you broke your word.”

“If a man has to say trust me it's a sure sign you cannot. Trust him, that is. Trust is a thing you do without words.”

“We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.”

“Her silence was worth more to her than a thousand words. In that silence, she had peace and clarity. Except during the night, when her own jumbled thoughts would keep her awake.”

“Words have weight.”

“I said nothing. I’m good at saying nothing. I don’t like talking. I could go the rest of my life without saying another word, if I had to.”

“When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.”

“The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.”

“How to put this feeling, this certainty, into something as limited as words?”

“A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.”

“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.”

“The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring that person joy.”

“So I find words I never thought to speak

In streets I never thought I should revisit

When I left my body on a distant shore.”

“I could give you my word as a Spaniard," Inigo said.
"No good," the man in black replied. "I've known too many Spaniards.”

“Working with him was sort of like trying to defuse a bomb with somebody standing behind you and every now and then clashing a pair of cymbals together. In a word, upsetting.”

“… this time I didn't launch into my usual tirade. Was it a memory of Krishna, the cool silence with which he countered disagreement, that stopped me? I saw something I hadn't realized before: words wasted energy.”

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?”

“What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.”

“Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart”

“Do I really have to find a word for it? Can't it just be what it is?”

“it'll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night”

“Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?”

“My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.”

“I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”

“The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.

Reading not only educates, but is relaxing and allows you to feed your imagination - creating beautiful pictures from carefully chosen words.”

“I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.”

“O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away”

“The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.”

“Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.”

“Not to discuss with a man worthy of conversation is to waste the man. To discuss with a man not worthy of conversation is to waste words. The wise waste neither men nor words.”

“When he moves, a streetlight stabs him, and the words flow out like blood.”

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”

“The one word love means too little for what it is. It doesn't communicate even a fraction of the feelings involved. Love. The word is not enough for what it is. Love. Love.”

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.”

“He let her get almost all the way there, just staring, before he stumbled towards her. They ended in a rush and then fell to the ground together, arms locked around each other, each holding on as tightly as possible. Niether of them said a word.”

“I knew a girl, once, immortal like me-"

"And she was with someone mortal?" said Alec. "What happened?"

"He died," Magnus said. There was a finality to the way he said it that spoke of a deeper grief than words could paint.”

“Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound,
Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.”

“I think of myself as a freewheeling bisexual," added Magnus.
"Please never say those words in front of my parents," said Alec.”

“The only use she has for the word fun is to make the word funeral.”

“When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.”

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

“In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.”

“In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

“Achilles weeps. He cradles me, and will not eat, nor speak a word other than my name.”

“The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.”

“Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word's full octave”

“I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.”

“At first, all is black and white.
Black on white.
That's where I'm walking, through pages.
These pages.
Sometimes it gets so that I have one foot in the pages and the words, and the other in what they speak of.”

“In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.”

“You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.'
I answered you: 'Isolde.'
Isolde. The world became a word.”

“You can include me, too." William blew Olivia a kiss, and her cheeks heated with a blush. "No need to say anything. I already know what words are perched on your tongue. Stop me if I'm wrong, but my getting to know you will be your pleasure.”

“A sound waiting to be a word.”

“The injury of words.
Yes, the brutality of words.”

“Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

--From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954”

“Gestures, in love, are incomparably more attractive, effective and valuable than words.”

“Don't ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.”

“Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.”

“Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?”

“said Luke, as if it were the filthiest word he knew.”

“Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.”

“He bent to put his cheek against hers. His breath against her ear made her shudder with each deliberately spoken word. "I have wanted to do this," he said, "every moment of every hour of every day that I have been with you since the day I met you.”

“What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

“We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.”

“Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.”

“I feel like the word shatter.”

“Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.”

“Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.”

“Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.”

“words carry colors and sounds into the flesh”

“Please!’
That word didn’t make sense to Nico. The Underworld had no mercy. It only had justice.
‘You’re already dead,’ Nico said. ‘You’re a ghost with no tongue, no memory. You won’t be sharing any secrets.”

“We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.”

“A living poem" had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.”

“Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings… but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.”

“There were some things that needed to be said even if the person you were saying them to didn't understand; words that must be released from their trapped place where their flapping to get out could cause internal damage.”

“There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.”

“… the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.”

“It may sound corny, but what's wrong with wanting to fight for your country. Why are people reluctant to use the word patriotism?”

“I was never a man of great ambition
I cried too easily
I didn't have a head for science
Words often failed me
While others prayed I only moved my lips”

“… Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]…”

“He wasn't handsome. That was too calm a word. He was intensely masculine. He was sexual. He attracted.”

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”

“Love is a moment of stillness that sometimes a word can shatter to pieces. Or love can be a thing that endures, a rich, deep current flowing unending through the years.”

“We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.”

“Words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express that regret.”

“Truth is in things, and not in words.”

“Do you know my dog's name?
[…]
"It is from an ancient word, kerberos. It means 'spotted.'"

I blinked. "You're a genuine Greek god. You're the Lord of the Underworld. And… you named your dog *Spot*?”

“[A] novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.”

“So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate.”