quotations about words
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
Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
speech on receiving the London Times Literary Award, November 2, 1949
The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
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
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Notes on an Elizabethan Play", The Common Reader
God's linguistic being is the word. All human language is only reflection of the word in name. Name is no closer to the word than knowledge to creation. The infinity of all human language always remains limited and analytical in nature in comparison to the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present
I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
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
The same words
come from each mouth
differently.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Fifteen Pebbles"
Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Space
A laxity pervades the popular use of words.
CHARLES LAMB
"Table-Talk and Fragments of Criticism", The Life and Works of Charles Lamb
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
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
Contrary to what some people have tried to imply, the meaning of a word can be, to a great extent, a subjective experience. After all, words are really just ideas. Those ideas are layered in experiences unique to each individual's perspective. That means that we may not be using our terms in the same exact manner as we might think others are. If that isn't bad enough, those unique ideas might, or might not be rooted in fact. These things should force us to reflect on the thought that perhaps even the few words we do use are not as well defined or universal as some would have us believe.
DAVID BUCIENSKI
"How much do words really matter?", Southgate News Herald, March 9, 2017
A word makes thy fortune sometimes.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Words come reluctantly to me, they clatter in my mouth and tumble out heavily like stones.
J. M. COETZEE
In the Heart of the Country
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
Talking, talking, spinning a spell, pale skin of words that closes me in like a coffin.
JOHN GARDNER
Grendel