c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Three carefully stringed words are worth more than a book of gibberish. It's not the word count but the impact of those words that counts.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
In simple words, whatever you were born to do, you were equipped to do it. You are a whole equipment for success!
— Israelmore Ayivor, Michelangelo | Beethoven | Shakespeare: 15 Things Common to Great Achievers
You're like candy. People lick your knowledge to become wise, lick your words from your powerful mouth and say it even better than you. Lick each step you make and stay on a good track, and once you're dead, the lickers scavenge for another intellectual candy.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Every individual is an author in himself. It is only that he falls short of words to express
—  list of stories.
If your words touch the hearts, that’s good; if your words touch the minds, that’s better and if your words touch both the hearts and the minds, that is the best!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
A Dream Pirate attack is swift and ragged. Like awkward phantoms, the pirates often fly in lurches and jerks, and they usually destroy everything that gets in their way.
— William Joyce, The Sandman and the War of Dreams
Look into words for the tomb of spacewhere beauties & stones & eternities untangle.(...)In them is the flood which bothers the seaand the songs which need no music.Say these words that evolve into silence,whose language survives not being understood.Pronounce those which are unpalatable &untangle from all the world wants to hear.
— M.T.C. Cronin
I'd developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick - my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my face and less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of wordsand not one of them can save me.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.
— Ben Carson, Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story
words, you see," he said, looking at me again, "allow us to make permanent what is essentially transient.Turn a world filled with injustice and hurt into a place that is beautiful and lyrical.
— Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan
His words were full of hope and threat. Like the stars.
— James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate
I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.
— Ram Dass
Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us.
— Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Words need to be sown like seeds. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when in lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size.
— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
Words have magic. Spells and curses. Some of them, the best of them, once said change everything.
— Nora Roberts, Jewels of the Sun
Gossip: a weed watered by wayward words.
— Soul Dancer
Some words are sweet but unprotifable! Some are bitter but important. First weigh your words on the counter of integrity and speak not only because your words are sweet, but because they contain the truth!
— Israelmore Ayivor
It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
The words were good words, Ulysses felt, maybe even great words, but the list was very incomplete. He was just getting started. The words needed to be arranged, fussed with, put in the order of his heart.
— Kate DiCamillo, Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures
Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you’ll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns the wind makes in dry sand and you’ll see how syllables in a sentence should fall. Arthur Gordon
— Arthur Gordon, A Touch of Wonder
Remembrance is acknowledging that a life was lived ...My father finally wrote out his memories for a reason. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real.Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth. Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.
— Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
A librarian had found the baby sitting abandoned on the sheer edge of the world; the librarians kept her. That proved shrewd. Nepenthe had drooled on words, talked at them, and tried to eat them until she learned to take them into her eyes instead of her mouth.
— Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn
Stretch out your tongue and let the words drip on the world like savage shooting muses, never, never to be forgotten, if once fallen on earth, they stand in glittery defloration.
— Laura Gentile, Seraphic Addiction
Words left their mouths to hang frozen in midair.
— Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
You don't have to say I love you to say I love you.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
Words. Just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have! They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt. They even come to look and sound like what they mean. Angry looks angry on the page. Ugly sounds ugly when you say it.
— Arthur Gordon, A Touch of Wonder
The word in your mouth is anarchy.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
These hands elate my life, choke me, broil my bosom, spank me, give fire to my words, my words, mother, my heart beats in my words.
— Laura Gentile, Seraphic Addiction
Words have no power, unless you give it to them.
— Syed Ahmed Fahad
Words are never insufficient to describe any situation. It is the talent to use the words which is the insufficient one!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Be the one whose Lord is Jesus and who takes His words as a final authority without any thought of controversy. True believers follow Jehovah, not only for what He does, but specially for who He is.
— Israelmore Ayivor
Words won’t have meaning until you put your emotions into them.
— Pratik Akkawar
The more I did it―the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high.It was something. Don't say it wasn't.
— Megan Abbott, Dare Me
The Master doesn't try to be powerful;thus he is truly powerful.The ordinary man keeps reaching for power;thus he never has enough.The Master does nothing,yet he leaves nothing undone.The ordinary man is always ding things,yet many more are left to be done.[…]Therefore the Master concerns himselfWith the depths and not the surface,With the fruit and not the flower.[…]Teaching without words,Performing without actions:That is the Master’s way.[…]The Master arrives without leaving,Sees the light without looking,Achieves without doing a thing.[…]The Master is above the people,And no one feels oppressed.She goes ahead of the people,And no feels manipulated.The whole world is grateful to her.Because she completes with no one,No one can complete with her.
— Lao Tzu
...there are some things for which there are no answers, no matter how beautiful the words may be.
— Patricia MacLachlan, Baby
What is word knowledge but a shadow of wordless knowledge?
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Sometimes poetry--words--give us a small, lovely look at ourselves. And sometimes that is enough.
— Patricia MacLachlan, Baby
Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.
— Madeleine L'Engle
The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effective way of reaching the heart; one must constantly pay attention with one’s mind. The spoken word tends to go to our heads, not our hearts.
— Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith
Maybe that was how I found comfort just then, even with him being so far away. By remembering the flavor of his words.
— Clare Vanderpool, Moon Over Manifest
Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. ‘Love’ is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.
— David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System
It’s just words. How can words be dangerous?”“You have a lot to learn about the world, baby girl. Nothing is more dangerous than words.”“That’s stupid. What about a gun? A gun can kill you dead.”“Only your body,” Billy said. “It can’t kill your soul. Words can kill your soul.
— Catherine Ryan Hyde, Don't Let Me Go
Poetry is one of my guilty pleasures and I want to thank you poets for providing me with beautiful words that I can devour and selfishly indulge in any time I want. ♥-Nina Jean Slack
— Nina Jean Slack
It is our duty and our joy to communicate our hearts to each other. Words assist us in this task.
— Kate DiCamillo
Positive words left unsaid are like sachets of currency notes burnt in vain. Positive deeds left undone are like deep wells filled with soil to the brim. Do the undone, say the unsaid and turn the unturned.
— Israelmore Ayivor
Every word that i utter had already been said in the spirit realm.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
That our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people desire from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them, is a fact which is perpetually demonstrated in daily life.
— Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Part 2
If you let your man-made actions to be more frequent than your man-said words you will travail with praise in man-win visions. Do more, say less, win big.
— Israelmore Ayivor
There are things known—things experienced, felt, and understood—that words hold no power to convey. Attempting to do so only dilutes their substance and does them injustice.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
I love the words, because they love me too.
— M.F. Moonzajer
No writer can be the ‘Master of the Words’ without loving them! Loving is the way for Mastering! No Love, no Master!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
It is very difficult to understand man. It is also very difficult to understand what a man does. If he is able to give an explanation, it may be easier. Even then everything can not be understood. Words have their limitation and comprehension, its limits. So if we are able to understand 25% of what is being said, even that should be deemed, as good communication skills are very good. Beyond this one should not even aspire for.
— Acharya Mahapragya
I find that is the best way to write during emotional scenes...put yourself and your emotions in every single word.-Nina Jean Slack
— Nina Jean Slack
His voice, what he said, remains, and it is here, all of those voices are here, in what I am telling you. If in the beginning there was the word, then perhaps, with humility at the smallness of our powers, in words a small part of us can return.
— Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything
I will write in words of fire.I will write them on your skin.I will write about desire.Write beginnings, write of sin.You’re the book I love the best,your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You’re my letter to desire: And you’ll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You’re my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends.
— Neil Gaiman
I like the word clandestine. It feels medieval. Sometimes I think of words as being alive. If clandestine were alive, it would be a pale little girl with hair the color of fall leaves and a dress as white as the moon.
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
Today I acknowledge that I am not in position to judge what mistakes anyone is making or what lessons anyone needs to learn. I don’t know how far someone has come or when that person will have a breakthrough, I simply don’t know what other people should be doing. But when I think I do know, I clearly am not doing what I should be doing, which is taking responsibility for my own life.
— Hugh Prather
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate people of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
— Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
Our love must not be a thing of words and fine talk. It must be a thing of action and sincerity.
— Brian McGreevy, Hemlock Grove
Words,words filled the night like the fragrance of invisible flowers.
— Cornelia Funke
Words have power, you understand? It is in the nature of our universe. Our library itself distorts time and space on quite a grand scale. Well, when the Post Office started accumulating letters, it was storing words. In fact, what was being created was what we call a 'gevaisa', a tomb of living words.
— Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams.And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep.
— Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea
Conclusion 1:Boredom= Flared tempers= hard words
— Bisco Hatori, Ouran High School Host Club, Vol. 2
I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly and language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language... I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”? “It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.
— Elie Wiesel, Night
I know so many words. It's perplexing to come across so many I don't.
— Emily Murdoch, If You Find Me
Many who have learnedfrom Hesiod the countless namesof gods and monstersnever understandthat night and day are one
— Heraclitus, Fragments
To be read. To be heard. To be seen. I want to be read, I want to be heard. I don't need to be seen. To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones. Words have a weight to them. How you choose to present them and to whom is a matter of style and choice.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
Once your words fly out of your mouth, you sometimes can't control whether they fly straight or crooked, Grandma Augustine says. "They can get bent in the strangest ways." Grandma Augustine says that the only way to straighten out bad words is to keep making good ones until you say what you need to say to who you need to say it to.
— Lori Aurelia Williams, When Kambia Elaine Flew in from Neptune
The pressure disappeared with the first word he put on paper. He thought--while his hand moved rapidly--what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have not discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.
— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
I wish I could read what she's written there. Instead, I pretend the letters are stars. The words, constellations.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
My cheeks are red hot,my lip still trembles,because I sent my heartto speak; every word of itdelusional and awkward,an exuberance, an abrupt sound.That's how I spoke, oh, it stillshows on my hot cheeksI'm now carrying home.I look down at the snowand walk past many houses,past many hedges, many trees,the snow adorns hedge, tree and house.I walk on, staring downat the snow, on my cheeksnothing but red-hot memoryreminding me of my wild talk.
— Robert Walser, Oppressive Light: Selected Poems by Robert Walser
A teacher of mine once said there are no true synonyms.
— Roy Peter Clark, The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English
To hunt words is to do no trespass.
— Ivor Brown
People can go on telling themselves things like “Think before you speak!” or “You don’t believe that yourself” or “Forget it!” But they can also say, “Oh, what lovely flowers!” or “Are you a phone freak or something?” or “Suit yourself,” or “This record makes me feel so happy!’ Wonderful! Words are delightful little gifts we exchange like the Easter eggs we paint and hide for others to find and enjoy. I’d forgotten that, but you reminded me of it.
— Thomas Brussig
You're like a dictionary. You know the word is in there, but you need to know how to spell what you want first
— Aaron Withers
You mean less to me than the dog s__t I scraped off the bottom of my shoe!
— Emma Paul
Na, it's not about what I say; It's about what I can't express in words.
— Saurabh Sharma
Words are just words. The evidence is in how you act, how you react.
— Maya Banks, Fever
The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.
— Thomas Carlyle
Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can understand you.
— J.C. Ryle
It wasn't supposed to. It was just supposed to stop you from hurting yourself.” “It helps—” “No it doesn't. It just pushes it away temporarily. Just like the booze.” “But I need—” “You need to let yourself feel. Feel it, own it. Then move on.” “You make it sound so easy.” Bitterness drips from each syllable. “It’s not. It’s the fucking hardest thing a person can do.” I smooth a damp strand out of her face and away from my mouth. “It’s the hardest fucking thing. It’s why we drink and do drugs and fight. It’s why I play music and build engines.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
The word lethologica describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.
— Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon
Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do.
— Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Words have power. The power to soothe. The power to skewer someone through the heart. The power to render someone speechless.
— Ellen Hopkins, Collateral
To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.
— Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice
...at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes.
— Ben Jonson, The Works of Ben Jonson: With critical and explanatory notes and a memoir by William Gifford. Volume 2
There is a weird power in a spoken word.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
The words ran away with me.
— Edna O'Brien, Country Girl
The body is poisoned through the mouth, even so is the heart through the ear ... And even if we do mean no harm, the Evil One means a great deal, and he will use those idle words as a sharp weapon against some neighbor's heart.
— Francis de Sales
The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn't quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they'd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up. All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion. Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid... Soon, exhausted, she was done. No, she had said weakly, I don't want to go home. I'll be all right now.
— Alice Walker, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
Music pulls words from the heart and inspires brilliance.
— Court Young
If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.
— J.B. Phillips
Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said...no, I'd be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar's a roar and no one is hard put to miss its meaning.
— Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession
With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I'd been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen.
— Denis Johnson, The Name of the World
I believe in the magic and in the authority of words
— René Char
We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.
— Chuck Palahniuk
I know how you are with your words, and, Will- I love all of them. Every word you say. The silly ones, the mad ones, the beautiful ones, and the ones that are only for me. I love them, and I love you." - Tessa Gray
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
TELL THE WORLD WHAT YOU INTEND TO DO, BUT FIRST SHOW IT.This is the equivalent of saying "deeds, and not words, are what count most.
— Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller - Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
I don’t know: perhaps it’s a dream, all a dream. (That would surprise me.) I’ll wake, in the silence, and never sleep again. (It will be I?) Or dream (dream again), dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of murmurs (I don’t know, that’s all words), never wake (all words, there’s nothing else).You must go on, that’s all I know.They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I?You must go on.I can’t go on.You must go on.I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.You must go on.I can’t go on.I’ll go on.
— Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
Who knew paper and ink could be so vicious
— Kathryn Stockett, The Help
We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.
— Zadie Smith, The Autograph Man
Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters
— Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
Why do you have to be so damn cryptic?
— Amanda Hocking, Switched
Words Like FreedomThere are words like FreedomSweet and wonderful to say.On my heartstrings freedom singsAll day everyday.There are words like LibertyThat almost make me cry.If you had known what I knowYou would know why.
— Langston Hughes, The Panther and the Lash
I had a cousin once who lived in your dictionary, inside the binding, and there was a tiny hole which he used for a door, and it led out between trichotomy and trick. Now what do you think of that? It was only a few minutes walk to trigger, then over the page to trinity, trinket and trional, and there my cousin used to fall asleep.
— Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind
Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.
— Don Roff
The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns connected one to the other create a verb, and verbs had created everything, had skittered across the face of the void like pebbles across a frozen pond. She had not created a verb herself, but the cherry-wood cabinet in the hall contained book after book, jar after jar, vessel upon vessel, all brown as branches, and she had faith.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.
— Robert Pirosh
More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.
— David Grossman, Her Body Knows
However, at fourteen years old, she didn’t understand that all those terrible troubles the heroines in her books went through in real life
— Kristen Ashley, Three Wishes
It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.
— Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal
And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it's your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk's candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive--a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bournes and orchards to the solitary hills.Peace.
— Don DeLillo
As if he conveyed by actions what he could never say in words. Would never say in words.
— Maya Banks, Rush
He read it over twenty times and though the darkness that sang on held steady about him, the unhurried words fell bright through his mind, going down golden through deep water, and when one passed another came, ceaselessly, shining.
— Elizabeth Spencer, This Crooked Way
If I say a word that is angry, he explained, then I should never be surprised by the harm. And if I say something good, then it is like watching my own garden grow, and that is the greatest pleasure ever.
— Marina Budhos, Ask Me No Questions
People are jostling at the gates of heaven or Department stores Words are bumping into each other("Poem")
— Raymond Radiguet, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology
Such a voice this man has. The way he sounds isn't a sound at all. It's a river into which words are thrown.
— Laura Bynum, Veracity
To say someone is a vision is to pay them a great compliment. If you say that they look a sight it is a grave insult.
— Teresa Monachino, Words Fail Me
He falls quiet again and tries to understand how he can be saying these things, how it can be that his dark words are coming out into the light and yet he is still alive. At once he storms the doorway that has suddenly opened for him in the endless corridor in which he has been bumping around for years; words spill out, cut off, confused, ashamed, squeezing out.
— David Grossman, Her Body Knows
She was only saying what I already knew in my heart, but hearing the words spoken made it seem all the more true, all the more terrifying.Words gave concepts power. Once they were released, there was no choice but to understand them, no matter how painful they might be.
— Mike A. Lancaster, 1.4
Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
Maybe I was praying for him then, in my own way. Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it. I believe some people-- lots of people-- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?
— Dorothy Day
Hungry for beautiful words, the fox comes rooting around in the hedge, almost too close to the fire. He reads my mind with one glance and is gone. All my poetry is now trotting around the bushes inside him, maybe some day to be partly eaten or left to rot. He understands being alive for as long as he can be, and does not worry about why, or what might happen afterwards.
— Jay Woodman
I don’t believe in signs. I believe in words, and action, and doing. And what you’re doing is sitting and waiting and that is one hundred percent unacceptable.
— Lauren Blakely, Caught Up in Us
It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as to my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cotton ball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified. A few quick cuts and cunt becomes can't, cock turns into back, clit transforms to a very unlikely cat, the l and i turned into a teetering capital A. The last words I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body. Up on my shoulder, panty calling down to cherry on the inside of my right ankle. On the underside of a big toe, sew uttering muffled threats to baby, just under my left breast. I can quiet them down by thinking of vanish, always hushed and regal, lording over the other words from the safety of the nape of my neck. Also: At the center of my back, which was too difficult to reach, is a circle of perfect skin the size of a fist. Over the years I've made my own private jokes. You can really read me. Do you want me to spell it out for you? I've certainly given myself a life sentence. Funny, right? I can't stand to look myself without being completely covered. Someday I may visit a surgeon, see what can be done to smooth me, but now I couldn't bear the reaction. Instead I drink so I don't think too much about what I've done to my body and so I don't do any more. Yet most of the time that I'm awake, I want to cut. Not small words either. Equivocate. Inarticulate. Duplicitous. At my hospital back in Illinois they would not approve of this craving.For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is that the cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured. But I was out of places to write, slicing myself between my toes - bad, cry - like a junkie looking for one last vein. Vanish did it for me. I'd saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in.
— Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
The“b” word and the “n” word are like poison, whether you take poison from a vial or pour it into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison.
— Maya Angelou
Words to intrigue, inspire, examine, question, praise; Words to help us appreciate our world, our selves, our games; Words to dance our true soul fires gracefully free.
— Jay Woodman
slow it isa slow businessto grow a few wordsto say love
— Anselm Hollo, Maya: Works, 1959 1969
Words are music to the ears, alone or together, with or without melody.
— A.A. Patawaran, Write Here Write Now: Standing at Attention Before My Imaginary Style Dictator
Even as I think them, the words lose their context, dissolve into grains of absurdity in the vast ocean of day-to-day hunger.
— Isaac Marion, Boarded Window
...is worship too strong a word? yes, I worship you - to worship is to give worth to something – isn’t that what love is all about?...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
And there was no way to unsay words you'd blurted out, no matter how sorry you were.
— Terri Farley, Firefly
Thomas loved words, particularly if he didn’t understand them.
— Guus Kuijer, The Book of Everything
It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
— Italo Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millennium
People from context cultures tend to view personal bonds and informal agreements as far more binding than any formal contract. People from content cultures don't believe the deal is finalized until everyone has signed on the dotted line. And therein lies the potential for conflict.
— Carol Kinsey Goman, The Nonverbal Advantage: Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work
Does it matter that people and thingsHave words,Have names?If not,Why read any book?A litany of useless lettersDetached from bone, muscle.Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,PersonReal?
— Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition
...art is weaker than life - in the end I have a bag of letters to scrabble into order - rune tiles to cast my fate...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
As a result of these news stories, millions of people must have become aware of "niggardly," who otherwise would never have heard it, let alone thought to use it. If this is right, and the word has a new currency, it is probably not the currency I would wish for. The word's new lease of life is probably among manufacturers and retailers of sophomoric humor. I bet that even as I write, some adolescent boys, in the stairwell of some high school somewhere in America, are accusing each other of being niggardly, and sniggering at their own outrageous wit. I bet … Wait a minute. Sniggering? Oh, my God …
— John Derbyshire
Cordelia loved his explanations. She loved knowing words that belonged to things she'd never seen, even to things you couldn't see at all. She remembered those words carefully. "Magic," George had said, "is something unnatural, something that doesn't really exist. If I snap my fingers and Othello suddenly turns white, that's magic. If I fetch a bucket of paint and paint him white, it isn't." He laughed, and for a moment it looked as if he felt like snapping his fingers or fetching that bucket. Then he went on, "Everything that looks like magic is really a trick. There's no such thing as magic." Cordelia grazed with relish. "Magic" was her favorite word - for something that didn't exist at all.
— Leonie Swann, Three Bags Full
...how are you sacred to me? your lines are golden threads - your patter, my patten - I explore the liturgy of your words...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...being with you was so easy and natural - there was no strain - I never had to guard my words...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...all this time I've been worshiping you - when other men wanted to kiss you, I've been offering the praise of my lips...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
You may not have money, you may not have medicine, you may not have miracles, but you do have words, and they can produce life, or death depending on how you use them.
— Rick Cochran
...you know I wanted a Madonna, not a whore - I made you sacred offering you my words...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Why certainly, words possess power.  They do!  But releasing their magic requires combining and arranging those words in the right order.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
An author is like a jeweller, with words as their gemstones and imagination the precious metals.
— Steve K. Smy
Look, words are like the air: they belong to everybody. Words are not the problem; it's the tone, the context, where those words are aimed, and in whose company they are uttered. Of course murderers and victims use the same words, but I never read the words utopia, or beauty, or tenderness in police descriptions. Do you know that the Argentinean dictatorship burnt The Little Prince ? And I think they were right to do so, not because I do not love The Little Prince , but because the book is so full of tenderness that it would harm any dictatorship.
— Juan Gelman
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.
— Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
— Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
...words are so strong and I am so timid - my soul ignores warnings and I end up covered with your paint ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.
— John Gardner, Grendel
The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
...I gave you painted air - tears I couldn't weep - truths I couldn't speak - all the words that caught in my throat...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
If toes had eyes,then I could seehow my feet know where to go,but toes are blind.And how is it that my tonguespeaks words it cannot hear?Because for all its eloquence,the tongue itself is deaf,and flaps in soundlessness.
— Jane Roberts, Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment, Volume One: A Seth Book
I don’t know what message to send to Bran. Help him Tyrion.”“What help could I give him? I am no maester, to ease his pain. I have no spell to give him back his legs.”“You gave me help when I needed it” Jon Snow said.“I gave you nothing,” Tyrion said. “Words.”“Then give your words to Bran too.
— George R.R. Martin
It wasn't what you said", he told her."It was how I felt when you said it".
— Anne Tyler, The Amateur Marriage
Talk is cheap when your words are of no value
— Habeeb Akande
A thought to ponder: If I couldn't use words to speak, what would my life be saying?
— Evinda Lepins
To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is harder still. Communication between you and me relies on assumptions, associations, commonalities and a kind of agreed shorthand, which no-one could precisely define but which everyone would admit exists. That is one reason why it is an effort to have a proper conversation in a foreign language. Even if I am quite fluent, even if I understand the dictionary definitions of words and phrases, I cannot rely on a shorthand with the other party, whose habit of mind is subtly different from my own. Nevertheless, all of us know of times when we have not been able to communicate in words a deep emotion and yet we know we have been understood. This can happen in the most foreign of foreign parts and it can happen in our own homes. It would seem that for most of us, most of the time, communication depends on more than words.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
...you can be angry and silent, but it's no use - there's no distance in the spirit - besides, my words touch you more softly than my hands...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...when you're hard and unyielding your words score me with lines - I hate lines - I want curves - curves are happy like a snowman ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Words can't save you, but they can give you courage.
— Marty Rubin
Words. I had always loved them. I collected them, like I had collected pretty stones as a child.
— Kate Forsyth
And that's why people no longer care which words they use as long as they use lots of them.
— Norton Juster
...I need you to be a listener - you need me to hang word on. We're friends because neither has discovered a limit where the other ends...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need.
— Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary
...you can use words if you wish, but I'm warning you - I've learned how to read your heart ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Talk is cheap when your words have no value.
— Habeeb Akande
... only a seer or a lover would know that I'm making a jewelry of words for you -drawn from your essence -to flash and burn with your fire -so you can bedazzle with your own light ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...good words - that triumphalism of positivity- but life will claw and eat you - chew you over and over - if you carry such a small knife ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...why is my cat a Muse? the cat has the rare grace of never saying a word too much― Mark Twain ...that's why ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Words were sometimes like ammo. They could strike you with fear worse than an arrow. And worse was sometimes knowing ahead a time what the words were.
— Cyndi Goodgame
What’s more amazing is how we habitually take the power ofour voice for granted. When we bring our awareness to our voiceand learn to express it in new ways—with impeccability—werediscover our true message. Your voice is the key to unlockingthe power and magnificence of your message. This work isn’tabout singing on key, finding the right words, leaving out ‘ums’and ‘uhs’ and articulating clearly. This is about allowing andaccepting your Magical Self. Let’s talk about how words createyou.
— Dielle Ciesco, The Unknown Mother: A Magical Walk with the Goddess of Sound
Have you ever noticed how pretty and beautiful words can be? How easy it is to say the things you think someone wants to hear. How you can affect a person’s entire day with just a few measly sentences?
— J. Sterling, The Perfect Game