quotations about words
My method is to find a word with a gesture.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
An Evolution in Aphorisms
Words can only hurt you if you try to read them. Don't play their game!
BEN STILLER
Zoolander
The words we speak have such power, and we have the power to choose them wisely.
BARBARA WALSH
"Choosing our words wisely for encouragement", Deming Headlight, January 28, 2016
By words the mind is winged.
ARISTOPHANES
The Birds
Words once sequenced into phrases were never done with but recycled themselves in perpetuity.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Jargon of Authenticity
Words are never "only words"; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden -- a secret language.
ROBERT ALTMAN
Esquire, March 2004
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"To Speech"
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Words have not the color of the rose
Nor the beauty of the morn!
EDWIN CURRAN
"The Depths of Love"
A word in earnest is as good as a speech.
CHARLES DICKENS
Bleak House
In silence you can't hide anything ... as you can in words.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
The Ghost Sonata
In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;
Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Criticism
Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound,
Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Criticism
Flaubert's famous search for the "mot juste" was not a search for words that glow alone, but for words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.
STANLEY FISH
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
It feels like spoken words, this bridge. I want it but fear it. God, I want so desperately to reach the other side -- just like I want the words. I want my words to build bridges strong enough to walk on. I want them to tower over the world so I can stand up on them and walk to the other side.
MARKUS ZUSAK
Getting the Girl
In the increasingly convincing darkness
The words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat.
JOHN ASHBERY
Houseboat Poems
The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
Word -- that invisible dagger.
EMIL CIORAN
History & Utopia