quotations about words
Don't gobblefunk around with words.
ROALD DAHL
The BFG
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The Olive Tree
Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.
JOHNNY CARSON
The Tonight Show
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
TOM ROBBINS
interview, Reality Sandwich
Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk, speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble of all these syllables a single word before the purpose of speech is gone.
CONRAD AIKEN
"This Image or Another"
The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are the supreme belief.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
Wondrous depth of Thy words! whose surface, behold! is before us, inviting to little ones; yet are they a wondrous depth. O my God, a wondrous depth! It is awful to look therein; an awfulness of honor, and a trembling of love.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
There are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Principles of Success in Literature
How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, though the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by signs. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Place a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." A beck of the hand is better than, "Come here." No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Philosophy of Style
Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
There are words which are worth as much as the best actions, for they contain the germ of them all.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.
MARY OLIVER
"Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver", O Magazine, March 2011
Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Equinox
Wicked words are the prelude to wicked deeds.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Pamela
Into the cities my people had gathered. They had become dizzy with words. Words had choked them. They could not breathe.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Cornfields", Mid-American Chants
Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
You will hear words
old and spent and useless
like costumes left over
from yesterday's parties.
CESARE PAVESE
"The Cats Will Know"
Words never can express the whole that we feel: they give but an outline.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Our generation throws a lot of slang around only to demand that other words be chosen with a pinpoint precision. Words today are both malleable as silly putty and hard as bricks.
ISABEL DRUKKER
"Sticks and stones", Campus Times, April 2, 2017
The written word has this advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to take effect.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe