Quotes about wording
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David Malouf (1934) Australian writer

“The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.”

Richard Dawkins book The Magic of Reality

Duke University, 01/03/2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYcOoqxuroI&t=54m51s <br class="br">The Magic Of Reality (2012) <br class="br">Source: The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True <br class="br">Context: Don’t ever be lazy enough, defeatist enough, cowardly enough to say “I don't understand it so it must be a miracle - it must be supernatural - God did it”. Say instead, that it’s a puzzle, it’s strange, it’s a challenge that we should rise to. Whether we rise to the challenge by questioning the truth of the observation, or by expanding our science in new and exciting directions - the proper and brave response to any such challenge is to tackle it head-on. And until we've found a proper answer to the mystery, it's perfectly ok simply to say “this is something we don't yet understand - but we're working on it”. It's the only honest thing to do. Miracles, magic and myths, they can be fun. Everybody likes a good story. Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth. The real truth has a magic of its own. The truth is more magical, in the best and most exciting sense of the word, than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic - the magic of reality.

Truth, Reality, Sense, Science

“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Imagination, Knowledge, Dead

“She gave 'The Dream Carrier' to Max as if words alone could nourish him.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Dreams

“Hopeless implies that at one time there was hope. And that's another word I don't understand. Hope only exists for people who have choices. [Zarek]”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

People, Hope, Understanding, Time

“But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Source: The Second Sex

Women, Men

“There was something peculiarly gratifying about shouting in a blind rage until your words ran out. Of course, the aftermath was less pleasant. Once you'd told everyone you hated them and not to come after you, where exactly did you go?”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Hate, Rage

“Empty words almost echo within themselves”

Cecelia Ahern book Thanks for the Memories

Source: Thanks for the Memories

“Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

Silence, Powerful

“I know how you are with your words, and, Will- I love all of them. Every word you say. The silly ones, the mad ones, the beautiful ones, and the ones that are only for me. I love them, and I love you." - Tessa Gray”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Love, Beauty, Madness

“Appreciation can make a day - even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.”

Margaret Cousins (1878–1954) Suffragist and feminist

Life, Change

“It's not the words but the music that counts.”

Benjamin Spock (1903–1998) American pediatrician and author of Baby and Child Care

Music

“For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Source: The Golden Notebook

Women

“Power, wealth and immortality--they don't bring happiness. You will never know what the word means.”

Christopher Pike (1954) American author Kevin Christopher McFadden

Source: Black Blood

Happiness, Wealth

“With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Women, Men, Age, Way

“When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

“Fate is just another word for people's choices coming to a head. Destiny, coincidence, whatever you name it. It inevitably lies in our hands.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: How to Kill a Rock Star

Fate, People

“The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Source: Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950
Context: When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.

“You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Feeling, Silence

“He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Never separate the life you lead from the words you speak.”

Paul Wellstone (1944–2002) American politician

Life

“A river of words flowed between us.”

Ernest Cline book Ready Player One

Source: Ready Player One

“Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

12 July 1827.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Variant: Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Context: I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.

“Science is only a Latin word for knowledge”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

Knowledge, Science

“When death takes your mother, it steals that word forever.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

Death

“Say the word. Say the word and I won't go.

Say the word, Qhuinn. Do it and I'll spend the night with you.

Better yet, why don't you just kiss me”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Mine

Kiss, Night

“if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Life, Music

“She didn't quite know what the relationship was between lunatics and the moon, but it must be a strong one, if they used a word like that to describe the insane.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

Strong

“You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.”

Maya Angelou And Still I Rise

"Still I Rise"
Source: And Still I Rise (1978)

Hate

“Time passes slowly. Nobody says a word, everyone lost in quiet reading. One person sits at a desk jotting down notes, but the rest are sitting there silently, not moving, totally absorbed. Just like me.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Time, Reading, Personality

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

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

Boy, Question, Business

“You Keep Using the Word Help. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means”

Rick Riordan book The Hammer of Thor

Source: The Hammer of Thor

Thinking, Help

“Mind your own Brazilian!" The words fly out of my mouth before I can stop them. Oops.

OK. The trick when you've said something embarrassing by mistake is to pretend nothing happened.”

Sophie Kinsella book I've Got Your Number

Source: I've Got Your Number

Flying

“To me, merely and pretty were words that had nothing to do with each other. Pretty went with miraculously, and merely belonged in another paragraph entirely.”

Gail Carson Levine Fairest

Source: Fairest

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World

Reading

“Every word you have ever uttered, is engraved upon my heart.”

Elizabeth Hoyt (1970) American writer

Source: Wicked Intentions

Heart

“Home is the nicest word there is.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) American children's writer, diarist, and journalist

Home

“I meant what I said to you. I wasn't playing some kind of summer game. Everything I said was true, from the first day. EVERY GODDAMN WORD.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Source: This Lullaby

Game, Summer

“Obstreperous, ‘huh,” said Tad. “I see you’ve been using that Big Word of the Day calendar I got you last Christmas.”

“That is irrefragable,” I told him solemnly.”

Patricia Briggs book Frost Burned

Source: Frost Burned

Christmas

“Mama says that satisfaction isn't what I should search for. Respect is. Respect?
I detest that word. Probably because in this world you have to respect the wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

Melina Marchetta book Looking for Alibrandi

Source: Looking for Alibrandi

People, World, Search

“Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Love, World

“Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

1848
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)

Evil

“…. he said it was interesting. He used the word 'textured'. He said 'smooth' is boring but 'textured' was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever had tried to hurt me.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Hurt

“The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

Silence, Past, Future

“I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Music, Way, Feeling

“I have given my word that only death will take me from you.”

Philippa Gregory (1954) English novelist

Death

“Maybe crazy is just the word we use for feelings that will not be contained.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: Every Last One

Feeling

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

Henry, Act II, scene V
Source: The Real Thing (1982)

Children, World, Thinking, Dead

“What a curious power words have.”

Tadeusz Borowski book This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Source: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

“Where do the words go
when we have said them?”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: Procedures For Underground

“Every discussion which is made from an egoistic standpoint is corrupted from the start and cannot yield an absolutely sure conclusion. The ego puts its own interest first and twists every argument, word, even fact to suit that interest.”

Paul Brunton (1898–1981) British philosopher

Source: The Notebooks of Paul Brunton

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Back To Work, For Team

“Katniss?" Peeta says. I meet his eyes, knowing my face must be some shade of green. He mouths the words. "How about that kiss?”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Kiss

“Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“Something always happens. You still have to promise stuff anyway. If you have to work to make the promises true… it's like a spell. You have to say the words every time you want the results.”

Diane Duane book High Wizardry

Source: High Wizardry

Time

“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Marriage, Happiness, Relationship

“When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Men, Children, Learning

“I love the relationship that anyone has with music… because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out…. It's the best part of us probably…”

Nick Hornby book Songbook

Source: Songbook

Love, Music, Parting

“Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

“Say it, reader. Say the word "quest" out loud. It is an extraordinary word, isn't it? So small and yet so full of wonder, so full of hope. so trthen despererux died i n heaven and in peace”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

Source: The Tale of Despereaux (2004)

Peace, Hope

“Words are like coin—it pays to hoard."
"Until you die on a bed of gold," Paran said.”

Steven Erikson book Gardens of the Moon

Source: Gardens of the Moon

“If I can learn to understand this language without words, I can learn to understand the world.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

World, Understanding, Learning

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Plague of Doves

“Mark my words, nothing smells worse than burned scorpion.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.”

Max Brooks book World War Z

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Lie, Hope

“Wo ai ni, Tessa,” he whispered. “Wo bu xiang shi qu ni.” She knew, without knowing how she knew, what the words meant. I love you. And I don’t want to lose you.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Prince

Love

“Strange? I don't think that word comes anywhere near it. My troops are on an overnight camp three hundred kilometres away from here. I had to sleep at the Santangelo penitentiary for pre-pubescent girls.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

Girl, Thinking, Sleep

“There is a moment—Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word—something that makes it worth while.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Kiss

“And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!”

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

Love, Children

“We don't have to do this. Just say the word and I can have a jet here in an hour. We can go anywhere”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

“I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Truth, Way

“One picture is worth a thousand words”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“I don't think any word can explain a man's life.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Source: Citizen Kane

Life, Thinking

“She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.”

Dean Koontz book Lightning

Source: Lightning

Beauty

“Good Lord, woman. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that men have a specified word count set aside each day and if I don’t stop talking, my tongue will explode? (Syn)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Fire

Men

“Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

Way, Universe

“Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 192)

Truth

“All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: Freedom; Justice; Honour; Duty; Mercy; Hope.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

United Europe Meeting, Albert Hall, London (May 14, 1947). Cited in Churchill by Himself, ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs (2008), p. 26 ISBN 1586486381
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Justice, Hope, Freedom

“When I first heard the word existential, I didn't know what it meant. But then I found out that no one knows what it means, so now I use it all the time.”

Francine Pascal Fearless

Source: Fearless

Time