Quotes About Words

“Full sexual consciousness and a natural
regulation of sexual life mean the end of
mystical feelings of any kind. In other words,
natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of
mystical religion. The church, by making
the fight over sexuality the center of its
dogmas and of its influence over the masses,
confirms this concept.”

— Wilhelm Reich

“Firefighter is one of the few jobs kind enough to warn me away by containing two words I'm not interested in, unlike the deceptive bookkeeper.”

— Joel Stein

“In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.”

— Robert Hughes

“Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can break hearts.”

— Tim Minchin

“She doesn't acknowledge Tucker, and there's no thank you for the cigarettes. She says a person shows their gratitude by action, not by words. So I guess that means she thanks me by smoking every cigarette in every pack.”

— Peter Hedges

“I can't do this with you, Vincent." Lexi stepped back, putting some distance between them.
"We belong together." There was no doubt, no question in his voice, as he said the words, only
utter certainty.”

— Victoria Michaels

“Love can both ruin and save one. It is our deepest emotions that lay root to our most beautiful words.”

— Jennifer Megan Varnadore

“Words that comes out of your mouth describes you character and personalty”

— Beta Metani'Marashi

“I find that often simple words say all that needs to be said in less time, using less energy, with all the details wanted- fully in tact. Love it.”

— Sereda Aleta Dailey

“As individuals, great writers from Villon to Diderot to Voltaire to
Rousseau to Byron or Shelley have often shown themselves to be
irresponsible, selfish, mean or sometimes even cowardly people. Their lives were drab or self destructive or reckless.
We read them for their Words, not for their deeds.”

— Max Vegaritter

“Sometimes words are like water and lips as strong as wine.”

— Dave Guerrero

“Actions lie louder than words.”

— Carolyn Wells

“She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.”

— Robert Graves

“If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.”

— Orson Scott Card

“The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development; they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don't have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver who wasn't sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. That's what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.”

— Gabor Maté

“I assumed he knew that your coach was abusing you. I realized in the limo that he didn't."
For a moment, there is only silence. When Damien speaks, his words are ice cold. "He knew.”

— J. Kenner

“That they will find each other during the play, once more, in the words of Shakespeare.”

— Gayle Forman

“A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

“Words that are full of hurt sometimes need to be left in the air where they have been spoken.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

“Sometimes people claim they don't need a crutch like Jesus, but he's not a crutch, he's a teacher. If you want to be a writer, you read the classics. If you want to make great music you listen to music that's been made by great musicians who have gone before. If you're studying to be a painter, it's a good idea to study the great masters. If Picasso came into your room while you were learning to draw and said 'Hi, I have a couple of hours would you like some hints?' would you say no? So it is with spiritual masters: Jesus, Buddha or any other enlightened being. They're geniuses in the way they used their minds and hearts just as Beethoven was a genius with music, or Shakespeare a genius with words. Why not learn from them, follow their lead, study what they were doing right.”

— Marianne Williamson

“You and me, Tina. It's gonna happen ... Mark my words, baby.”

— Belle Aurora

“The injury of words.
Yes, the brutality of words.”

— Markus Zusak

“He strolled out onto the wide, semidark veranda, where couples were scattered at tables, filling the lantern-hung night with vague words and hazy laughter.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.
The two are rarely compatible.”

— Neil Gaiman

“No need to mince words. And you don't need to force yourself to like me. No one likes me now. It's only to be expected. I don't even like myself much. I used to have a few really good friends. You were one of them. But at a certain stage in life I lost them. Like how Shiro at a certain point lost that special spark. ...  But you can't go back. Can't return an item you've already opened. You just have to make do.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I'd never admitted before how much I wanted to hear those words. How much I wanted to be treasured, cared for, loved. Not just loved for the person I tried to be, but the person I was.”

— Annabel Joseph

“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”

— Vaclav Havel

“I nod, trying not to look too hard at the food on his dish. The flakiness of the sugared crust, which reminds me of crystals on an edge of snow. The red-stained berries smeared across the plate, ripe and surely ful of taste. The words I've said cling to my mind like the pastry does to the heavy silver fork.”

— Ally Condie

“Big Rube was on my first album and some of my mixtapes. His words are so powerful. I want to speak every word he says into existence. I wanna be a part of that! I wanna be a part of greatness. His wordplay is great to me.”

— Nayvadius Cash

“I was a very bad journalist. Awful. I would just invent everything. If I did an interview, I had a preconception of what that person should say and I would put my words in his mouth.”

— Isabel Allende

“When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them. Everyone else will finish with the singular plowing through, and Ada still has discoveries ahead and behind.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“She'd always known he loved her, it had been the one certainty above all others that had never changed, but she had never said the words aloud and she had never meant them quite this way before. She had said it to him, and she hardly knew what she had meant. They were terrifying words, words to encompass a world.”

— Sarah Rees Brennan

“She smiled then, an adorable, sweet smile that took his breath away. He forgot all about trying to maintain an air of civility. His inner caveman came barreling out, grunting and pounding his chest and muttering unintelligible words.”

— Maya Banks

“Somebody comin'," he said softly. "Five or six, maybe." His words were spoken over an empty fire, for each of us vanished ghostlike into the surrounding darkness. I, fortunately, had the presence of mind to retain my coffee. With the Ferguson rifle in my right hand, I drank coffee from the cup in my left.”

— Louis L’Amour

“But me contradicting a news story is not going to make my words fact. It will just create a new news story.”

— Megan Fox

“The images in a picture book are the driving forces that tell the story. The words tell only what the pictures can't.”

— Dan Yaccarino

“I will tell you how to make money: Work very hard. I will tell you how to win love: Wear nice clothing and smile all the time. Learn the words to all the latest songs.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, and there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.”

— David McIntosh

“I think that those few words were my greatest mistake.”

— Anita Brookner

“In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.”

— Donald E. Westlake

“Such words as 'God' and 'Death' and 'Suffering' and 'Eternity' are best forgotten. We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be.”

— Etty Hillesum

“For the young Gaels of Ireland
Are the lads that drive me mad,
For half their words need footnotes
And half their rhymes are bad.”

— Arthur Guiterman

“Your words become the mirror in which others see themselves.”

— Sharon Jaynes

“Couple of artists got words for me, that's never fun. They say it's on when they see me, that day don't ever come.”

— Drake

“I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface.”

— Susan Griffin

“And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.”

— Terence McKenna

“Let it not be death but completeness. Let love melt into memory and pain into songs. Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest. Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night. Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence. I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“There's a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver.”

— Charles Dickens

“The Democrats are going to change the name of the Hoover Dam. That is the silliest thing I ever heard of in politics ... Lord if they feel that way about it, I don't see why they don't just reverse the two words.”

— Will Rogers

“I had composed songs, I sang, and played the vina. Practising this music I arrived at a stage where I touched the music of the spheres. Then every soul became a musical note, and all life became music. Inspired by it I spoke to the people, and those who were attracted by my words listened to them instead of listening to my songs.”

— Hazrat Inayat Khan