872 quotes found
“Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.”
“You see, Im a juggler with words myself.”
“To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but its just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message h...”
“Mr. Treadstone believed that there was always an apposite word. The English language, after all, was the richest in the world. If you couldnt find the apposite word, if you found your language slip...”
“Words are incomplete and yet we need them. They are the cups that give our memories shape, and keep them from trickling away.”
“An individual who delights at all in the beauty of language does well to avoid becoming an attorney or a legislator.”
“It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big ...”
“The room was filled with smoke, dry worn-out smoke retaining in it like a web the insectile cadavers of dry husks of words which had been spoken and should be gone, the breaths exhaled not to be br...”
“A word drops into the mistlike a child's ball into high grasswhere it remains seductivelyflashing and glinting untilthe gold bursts are revealed to besimply field buttercups.Word/mist, word/mist: t...”
“As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated...”
“Without words meaning anything, we stop meaning anything. It's getting to the point where nobody means what they say or says what they really mean.”
“They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.”
“I read everything in that dusty little library. I read the prologues and the epilogues until I could tell you how many times Stephen King thanked his wife, Tabitha. I could tell you how the Columbi...”
“Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down.”
“The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the work of the silkworm. In being made into silk, the material achieves its value. But in the light...”
“There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.”
“Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language...”
“Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language...”
“We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to gr...”
“Words dont always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. Pe...”
