Words Quotes

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”
― Cornelia Funke

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat

“Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.”
― Karen Marie Moning

“Sometimes not speaking says more than all the words in the world.”
― Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”
― René Descartes

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.”
― Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly

“I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.”
― Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
― Shakespeare William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”
― Ingrid Bergman

“I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant...I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

“A Word is Dead

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“The menu is not the meal.”
― Alan Watts

“The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“What a curious power words have.”
― Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
― Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
― Proust-M

“Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart. ”
― John Bunyan

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”
― Alexander Trocchi