Words Quotes

“Words are everything. Words give wings even to those who have been stamped upon, broken beyond all hope of repair.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Mime Order

“Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people's books, one's own books - it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction. And often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular, you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one of all the others you must read. Those are great moments - and the books we come across like that are often the most memorable.”
― Aidan Chambers

“I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”
― Theodore Dreiser

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”
― E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy

“Words are like arrows, Arianne. Once loosed, you cannot call them back.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

“You see how I try
To reach with words
What matters most
And how I fail.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“A picture can tell a thousand words,
but a few words can change it’s story.”
― Sebastyne Young

“I love that word. Forever. I love that forever doesn't exist, but we have a word for it anyway, and use it all the time. It's beautiful and doomed.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Words are the clothes thoughts wear.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”
― Ross McDonald

“Let us use words carefully, because words can betray and kill.( "A gap of silence")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“While we are expecting everybody to tell downright the truth, many are muddying the water, drowning questions in a river of words and trying to make us forget what actually the real issue is about. If paltering and deflecting matters might become a new way of telling the truth, interaction might be doomed to culminate in a cluster shell of suspicion and mutual trust to become frantically undermined. ( “Blame storming” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When words fail music speaks. ”
― Irena Huang

“Just remember, when someone has an accent, it means that he knows one more language than you do.”
― Sidney Sheldon, Windmills of the Gods

“The worst part of being okay is that okay is far from happy.”
― Anna Todd

“If we learn to listen to the others and try to capture the soul of their language, and can scent the fragrance of the words we hear, we can be transported to a nirvana of deep understanding, without being overwhelmed by the reality of the clock. ("Watching the flight of time")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When the leaden haze of our lives starts cracking and tearing, and the forlornness and torpor in our minds are smoldering into ashes, we can softly hear the sounds of a new dawn and learn to pick up the magic of the words that make us understood among our neighbors.( "Life was a misunderstanding")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.”
― Andrea Levy, Small Island

“I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“If your actions don't live up to your words, you have nothing to say.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“There's no such thing as complete when it comes to stories. Stories are infinite. They are as infinite as worlds.”
― Kelly Barnhill, Iron Hearted Violet

“I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design."

"You say this as if you envied him."

"There are worse prisons than words.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude

“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.”
― Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch

“I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“When you're having an asthma attack, you don't have any breath. When you don't have any breath, it's hard to speak. You're limited by the amount of air you can spend from your lungs. That's not much, something between three to six words. It gives the word a meaning. You're searching through the piles of words in your head, picking the most important ones. And they have a cost. It's not like the healthy people that take out every word that has accumulated in their head like garbage. When someone, while having an asthma attack, says "I love you" or "I really love you", there's a difference. A word difference. And a word is a lot, because that word could have been "sit", "Ventolin" or even "ambulance".”
― Etgar Keret, צנורות