quotations about words
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally. The word "grammar," like its sister word "glamour," is actually derived from an old Scottish word that meant "sorcery." When we were made to diagram sentences in high school, we were unwittingly being instructed in syntax sorcery, in wizardry. We were all enrolled at Hogwarts. Who knew?
TOM ROBBINS
interview, Reality Sandwich
You take many words to say simple things.
LILLIAN HELLMAN
The Autumn Garden
The word was -- civilization!
THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain
There are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Principles of Success in Literature
Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk, speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble of all these syllables a single word before the purpose of speech is gone.
CONRAD AIKEN
"This Image or Another"
Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb! for I suppose he was dumb at the Creation, and must go round an entire circle in order to return to that blessed state.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
American Note-Books, April 1841
I make words up. It started when I had small children. I did it to make them laugh. I did it to keep them entertained. I did it because it was fun. And I did it to make them think and come up with words of their own!
DREXEL GILBERT
"The top 5 words you should never say at work", New York Daily News, March 5, 2017
A very great part of the mischiefs that vex the world arises from words.
EDMUND BURKE
letter to Richard Burke
You can stroke people with words.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Notebooks
You will hear words
old and spent and useless
like costumes left over
from yesterday's parties.
CESARE PAVESE
"The Cats Will Know"
A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
introduction, Three Soldiers
Weigh words, don't count 'em.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Raven's Shadow
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
Word and picture are correlatives which are continually in quest of each other, as is sufficiently evident in the case of metaphors and similes. So from all time what was said or sung inwardly to the ear had to be presented equally to the eye. And so in childish days we see word and picture in continual balance; in the book of the law and in the way of salvation, in the Bible and in the spelling-book. When something was spoken which could not be pictured, and something pictured which could not be spoken, all went well; but mistakes were often made, and a word was used instead of a picture; and thence arose those monsters of symbolical mysticism, which are doubly an evil.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
There was a magic in the words. I suppose their power lay in their utter futility.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
The proof of words are sometimes the effect of them on others; words are not proofs without effect.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The words fell as the axe of a skillful woodman falls at the root of a young tree and brings it down at a single blow.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief
So powerful is the charm of words, which for us reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us.
GENE WOLFE
The Shadow of the Torturer