872 quotes found
“Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies.”
“A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would su...”
“He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned b...”
“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum in...”
“I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly and language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary t...”
“A teacher of mine once said there are no true synonyms.”
“There is a weird power in a spoken word.”
“Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters”
“More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in he...”
“No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a l...”
“Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. Man dwells poetically on this earth, Hlderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, fo...”
“In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers havethe value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us.”
“... but I love language. It is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and language has power. Whether in a song lyric, a poem, a speech, or a simple conversation, weve all experienced words that reso...”
“I wish I didnt need words to speak to her. They sometimes hold very different meanings for us both.”
“What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant 'storm....”
“There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.”
“Each word's evocative value or virtue, its individual power of touching springs in the mind and of initiating visions, becomes a treasure to revel in. Besides this hold on affection a word may well...”
“I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.”
“To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, ...”
“Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for ones friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which lea...”
