WORDS QUOTES IX

quotations about words

Words carry weight and have impact. Our generation's vocabulary is a significant part of our culture, and everyone contributes. Words have history and baggage that are too often ignored. Meanings of words change, often incredibly slowly, so using a word now can mean that you are implicitly using all of its past meanings. Using that word can take you back to its origin and render you a contributor to the degradation it was meant to cause.

GRACE JOHNSON

"Words and their weight", The Brown Daily Herald, January 27, 2016


When the first emperor wanted to unify the country, one of the major policies was to create one system of written signs. By force, brutal force, he eliminated all the other scripts. One script became the official script. All the others were banned. And those who used other scripts were punished severely. And then the meanings of all the characters, over the centuries, had to be kept uniform as a part of the political apparatus. So from the very beginning the written word was a powerful political tool.

HA JIN

The Paris Review, winter 2009

Tags: Ha Jin


Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

JAMES JOYCE

"The Dead", Dubliners

Tags: James Joyce


For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

JOSÉ SARAMAGO

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ


Twas a special gift of God that speech was given to mankind; for through the Word, and not by force, wisdom governs.

MARTIN LUTHER

"Of God's Word", Table Talk

Tags: Martin Luther


The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER

lecture at Columbia University, March 4, 1908

Tags: Nicholas Murray Butler


Make friends with words. You can't give words a pat on the back, nor can you shake hands with words. But like an old friend, words can fill you with a nostalgia that's indescribably sweet.

SHUJI TERAYAMA

attributed, "VOX POPULI: Words are like friends that bring comfort and meaning to life", Vox Populi, January 27, 2016


Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence -- by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present -- but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word "quarters" the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out

Tags: Slavoj Zizek


There are times when people aren't able to acknowledge or interpret an action but words are definite.

ANGIE JURGENS

"The power of words, through the eyes of a writer", Journal Star, January 30, 2016


In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

DAN SIMMONS

Hyperion


Even when we know things, sometimes it takes words to make them concrete.

GLEN COOK

Ceremony

Tags: Glen Cook


When we think, our thoughts are in the form of words, so authorities must never be permitted to outlaw or edit our thinking by redefining or outlawing our words.

JONATHAN HOFFMAN

"Words are thoughts; protect them", Arizona Daily Star, March 11, 2017


Truly speech has wonderful strength and power, that through a mere word, proceeding out of the mouth of a poor human creature, the devil, that so proud and powerful spirit, should be driven away, shamed and confounded.

MARTIN LUTHER

"Of God's Word", Table Talk

Tags: Martin Luther


I write because words are beautiful when used correctly to describe thoughts and feelings. I write because when a topic or thought is important, the words just pour right onto the page as if that is where they were supposed to be.

SAM WAKITSCH

"I write because to me, words are beautiful", Chicago Now, January 25, 2016


Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

"Words Fail Me", BBC Radio, April 29, 1937

Tags: Virginia Woolf


You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.

DON DELILLO

Underworld

Tags: Don DeLillo


Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.

GLEN DUNCAN

I, Lucifer

Tags: Glen Duncan


When you come to rely on the written word, it's time to light the fire with it.

K. J. PARKER

Evil for Evil

Tags: K. J. Parker


The word; the forth-speaking of a thought, an idea, a truth, is the beginning of every new creation, or pulse of creation. It is the inauguration of every new order of things; it begins every new messianic reign, every coming of a better time. The darkness never comprehends it; but always, to as many as receive it, it gives power.

SAMUEL LONGFELLOW

Essays and Sermons


A laxity pervades the popular use of words.

CHARLES LAMB

"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb

Tags: Charles Lamb