c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Teaching others, he corrected himself.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
We need knew knights, but without swords.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
How does one say something new and not retell?
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
He thought others were small
—  that was his greatness.
After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Now that we are all so smart, we don’t easily find resolutions.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Holy books are an insult to a God with good intentions.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
He did not profess to anybody how to reach others without professing.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn’t live off fame, but rather deeds.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Life is only a flicker of melted ice.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Darkness does not age
—  nothing is always nothing
Get close to grass and you’ll see a star.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Eternity is a glorious word, but eternity is ice.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Universe is the Sun watching its own self.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Sunbathe from within.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Absolute equals nothingness.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Stars are only the rain of the Absolute.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Sun is a hearthstone, a merry-go-round of extinguished hearthstones.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Real geniuses would like that what we think of ourselves is true.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Procreation annihilates eternity.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
The universe is God's son.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Unborn eternity does not die
—  existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.
Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
Absolute is a game with only one player where Absolute forgets itself so it would have a reason to fulfill the motion while returning.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)
— Kellie Elmore
In the language of the day it is customary to describe a certain sort of book as “escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even have the disastrous effect on the reader of taking him happily for a few hours out of his own real life in N.W.8. Why this should be a matter for regret I do not know; nor why realism in a novel is so much admired when realism in a picture is condemned as mere photography; nor, I might add, why drink and fornication should seem to bring the realist closer to real life than, say, golf and gardening.
— A.A. Milne
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it." -- William Styron (born June 11 1925)
— William Styron
Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.
— Ray Bradbury
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
— Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero
God really must have had a sense of humor, because if I had to name my biggest turn-on, it was literature. And he had just recommended a book that I didn’t know, that wasn’t taught in school. If I were single, there would be no better pick-up line.
— Kody Keplinger
Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It's a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in a place where you would not have expected to find it.
— Gustave Flaubert
Pay attention, and use your imagination.
— R.M. Engelhardt (TALON), Versus : Poems By R.M. Engelhardt 2009
Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.
— Tim Gillespie
The passion to teach, to share deeplyexperienced “lessons from life,” is embedded in all literature.
— Vera B. Williams
In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.
— R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)
For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living.
— Edith Grossman
Gazing from the moon, we see one earth, without borders, Mother Earth, her embrace encircling one people, humankind.
— Frederick Glaysher
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
— Rudyard Kipling
For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
I like good strong words that mean something…
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Sweet words are like honey, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.
— Anne Bradstreet
I believe in the magic and authority of words.
— René Char
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
— Richard Wright, Black Boy
Because even the smallest of words can be the ones to hurt you, or save you.
— Natsuki Takaya
I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Give sorrow words
—  the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.
— Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Sometimes not speaking says more than all the words in the world.
— Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
— William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
— Ernest Hemingway
He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
— William Faulkner
Lying is done with words, and also with silence.
— Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying
Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.
— C.S. Lewis
Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,Falling, like dew, upon a thought producesThat which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.
— George Gordon Byron
Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.
— Mark Slouka, God's Fool
You can only fit so many words in a postcard, only so many in a phone call, only so many into space before you forget that words are sometimes used for things other than filling emptiness.
— Sarah Kay
Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.
— Pythagoras
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
— Orson Scott Card
In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
— Roland Barthes
But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Words are loneliness.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.
— Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .
— Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan / A Woman of No Importance / An Ideal Husband / The Importance of Being Earnest / Salomé
I am not imposed upon by fine words
—  I can see what actions mean.
Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.
— Patricia A. McKillip, In the Forests of Serre
Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know more.
— Confucius
Words are wind.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.
— Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends'.
— Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. 
— Herman Melville
She kept watching the words. 
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN.
— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.
— Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel
A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.
— Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science
Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.
— Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.
— Aldous Huxley, The Genius And The Goddess
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things
—  the word about being.
Did your mom ever tell you, ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything’? She was right–and talking nicely also applies when you’re talking to yourself, even inside your head. (339)
— Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit
I have learned that I should be careful with the words I choose to say when I am angry because later, those words always leave a huge wound of regrets in my heart besides hurting the loved ones. Those wounds can't be healed!
— Nino Varsimashvili
They can be like the sun, words.They can do for the heart what light can for a field.
— San Juan de la Cruz, The Poems of St John of the Cross
[Words] cling to the very core of our memories and lie there in silence until a new desire reawakens them and recharges them with loving energy. That is one of the qualities of love that moves me most, their capacity for transmitting love. Like water, words are a wonderful conductor of energy. And the most powerful, transforming energy is the energy of love.
— Laura Esquivel, Swift as Desire
A picture can tell a thousand words,but a few words can change it’s story.
— Sebastyne Young
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
Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.
— Robert  Herrick
Words are like arrows, Arianne. Once loosed, you cannot call them back.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness.
— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
— Abigail Adams
Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
I want to see the thirstinside the syllablesI want to touch the firein the sound:I want to feel the darknessof the cry. I wantwords as roughas virgin rocks.” - Verb.
— Pablo Neruda
Men of few words are the best men."(3.2.41)
— William Shakespeare, Henry V
I was thinking lots of things, but most of them needed to stay thoughts, not words.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world
— Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society
The most colorful thing in the world is black and white, it contains all colors and at the same time excludes all.
— Vikrmn, 10 Alone
My father always said that too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.
— Patricia Briggs, Raven's Shadow
I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.
— Tom Waits
How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described.
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?
— Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted
English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
— Denis Johnson
That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
She had always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
— A.S. Byatt
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
Language does have the power to change reality. Therefore, treat your words as the mighty instruments they are - to heal, to bring into being, to remove, as if by magic, the terrible violations of childhood, to nurture, to cherish, to bless, to forgive - to create from the whole cloth of your soul, true love.
— Daphne Rose Kingma
I am master of my spoken words and slave to those which remain unspoken.
— Ankita Singhal
Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.
— José Saramago, Death with Interruptions
Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.
— David Almond, My Name Is Mina
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets —no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
— Philip Roth
Take care of your words and the words will take care of you.
— Amit Ray
When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.
— Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.
— Marguerite Duras, Summer Rain
Her words were like tinfoil
—  they shone and they covered things up.
It has been noted that actions speak louder than words. Truth is, I have found that during many situations in life, words are just noise... and actions are the ONLY things that speak.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Words aren't made — they grow,' said Anne.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences. 
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
— Samuel Beckett
All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.
— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
How to put this feeling, this certainty, into something as limited as words?
— Eileen Wilks, On the Prowl
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
The beauty of this idea is that my decision to keep Peeta alive at the expense of my own life is itself an act of defiance. A refusal to play the Hunger Games by the Capitol's rules. My private agenda dovetails completely with my public one. And if I really could save Peeta... in terms of a revolution, this would be ideal. Because I will be more valuable dead. They can turn me into some kind of martyr for the cause and paint my face on banners, and it will do more to rally people than anything I could do if I was living. But Peeta would be more valuable alive, and tragic, because he will be able to turn his pain into words that will transform people.
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.
— Gabriel García Márquez
But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.
— Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.
— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
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
That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific--chair, eye, stone--but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Just remember, when someone has an accent, it means that he knows one more language than you do.
— Sidney Sheldon, Windmills of the Gods
Do not depend on good motivator!Find your words of self-motivation!
— Toba Beta
A person who doesn’t understand both sides of an issue can’t relate to the side he is trying to sway, so his words will bounce off of them without leaving any impression.
— Daniel Willey
You string some letters together, and you make a word. You string some words together, and you make a sentence, then a paragraph, then a chapter. Words have power.
— Chloe Neill, Firespell
Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is 'elephant'.
— Charlie Chaplin
It doesn't matter if you and everyone else in the room are thinking it. You don't say the words. Words are weapons. They blast big bloody holes in the world. And words are bricks. Say something out loud and it starts turning solid. Say it loud enough and it becomes a wall you can't get through.
— Richard Kadrey, Kill the Dead
Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound,Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.
— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
It's strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
I am no poet. I do not love words for the sake of words. I love words for what they can accomplish. Similarly, I am no arithmetician. Numbers that speak only of numbers are of little interest to me.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret".Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
— Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Dictionaries stop where the heart starts.
— David Foenkinos, Delicacy
When you feel like throwing rocks, make sure they're ones no one can throw back.
— Rebecca McKinsey
The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
And he would listen, making only a few comments, always sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he had solved everything for me.
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
How unladylike of you to mention such a thing.
— Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock
Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.
— Confucius
Translation is the art of failure.
— Umberto Eco
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.
— William Faulkner
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
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
— Seamus Heaney
Words', he said, 'is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.
— Roald Dahl, The BFG
Say something worth the words.
— Tracy Chevalier
Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.
— John Dewey, How We Think
nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
sometimes every word i write is 'love' but the letters are rearranged, the sounds are different. all the words are red.
— Zoe Trope, Please Don't Kill the Freshman
Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
— Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2
Elodin pointed down the street. "What color is that boy's shirt?""Blue.""What do you mean by blue? Describe it."I struggled for a moment, failed. "So blue is a name?""It is a word. Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man's will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself."My head was swimming by this point. "I still don't understand."He laid a hand on my shoulder. "Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating." He lifted his hands high above his head as if stretching for the sky. "But there are other ways to understanding!" he shouted, laughing like a child. He threw both arms to the cloudless arch of sky above us, still laughing. "Look!" he shouted tilting his head back. "Blue! Blue! Blue!
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
I got words in me, Jess, fighting to find a way out. Sometimes there's so many words and they get so crowded in my skull I think my head is gonna explode. I want to write them down. I've tried, but most of the time my thoughts and my feelings are bigger than what I can get on paper.
— Carolee Dean, Take Me There
Better than a thousand sayings Made up of useless wordsIs one word of meaning Which calms you to hear it.
— Anonymous, The Dhammapada
She had to find her own story, and she could make it whatever shape she thought best.
— Tad Williams, River of Blue Fire
We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. 
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
Words have consequences.
— Albert Marrin
Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.
— Jim Rohn
Because sometimes silence speaks much louder than words possibly could.
— Elizabeth Eulberg, Better off Friends
I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.
— Carol Ann Duffy
We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.
— José Saramago, The Double
How could an alphabet—letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves—be impo
— Linda Sue Park, When My Name Was Keoko
A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.
— Ari Marmell, Thief's Covenant
Besides, I always feel safer when I've got words against my heart.
— Zoe Trope, Please Don't Kill the Freshman
I will tell these stories...because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.
— Dave Eggers, What Is the What
Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.
— José Saramago
who did I think we were.who did I thinkI could make you.this is the oldest mistake,to confuse wantingwith magic. silence is the undoingof every spell, and we are expertsin the unsaid. even now, I forgetto put us in past tense. as ifthe air in this city were the same.as if love is anything like its speaking.
— Marty McConnell Emily Kagan Trenchard
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
Memories fade but words hang around forever.
— Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse
The term "political correctness" has always appalled me, reminding me of Orwell's "Thought Police" and fascist regimes.
— Helmut Newton
All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.
— Nora Raleigh Baskin, Anything But Typical
-It's extremely cool how the words can stay the same but their meaning can change.-Because the reader changes.-EXACTLY
— Doug Dorst, S.
One should therefore not rely on mere words, but everywhere search for the intention behind them. (121)
— Edward Conze, Buddhist Scriptures
Harper, treat your words with careFor they may cause joy or despairSing your songs of health and loveOf dragons flaming from above
— Anne McCaffrey, Dragon Harper
All words are written in the same ink,'flower' and 'power,' say, are much the same,and though I might write 'blood, blood, blood'all over the page, the paper would not be stainednow would I bleed.
— Philippe Jaccottet
Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?But at this moment, the mystery seemed greater than usual, for these were words he hadn't even known yesterday morning.
— Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
I thought I would be understood without words.
— Vincent van Gogh
How true it is that 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, Sister Carrie
He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.
— Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese
The paper burns, but the words fly free.
— Akiba Ben Joseph
Words are memes that can be pronounced.
— Daniel C. Dennett
...choosing words is harder than I thought.
— Cynthia Lord, Rules
And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere.
— Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage
The thing he said aloud did not succeed.
— Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything
Words are like spices. Too many is worse than too few.
— Joan Aiken, The Last Slice of Rainbow and Other Stories
I wish I could remember the moment when I was a kid and I discovered that the letters linked into words, and that the words linked to real things. What a revelation that must have been. We don't have the words for it, since we hadn't yet learned the words. It must have been astonishing, to be given the key to the kingdom and see it turn in our hands so easily.
— David Levithan, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
Strong words resonate.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)
— Ron Rash, Serena
Are you watching the boats?" Cornelia guessed. She craned her neck to see if there was any excitement on the river.Heavens no, I'm spying on people," Virginia responded unrepentantly.-Cornelia E and Virginia Somerset
— Lesley M.M. Blume, Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters
I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also—more so—for beauty.
— Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky
There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.
— Victor Pelevin, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Dictionopolis is the place where all the words in the world come from. They're grown right here in our orchards.""I didn't know that words grew on trees," said Milo timidly."Where did you think they grew?" shouted the earl irritably. A small crowd began to gather to see the little boy who didn't know that letters grew on trees."I didn't know they grew at all," admitted Milo even more timidly. Several people shook their heads sadly."Well, money doesn't grow on trees, does it?" demanded the count."I've heard not," said Milo."Then something must. Why not words?" exclaimed the undersecretary triumphantly. The crowd cheered his display of logic and continued about its business.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words' sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you speill them out the right way.p92
— Frances O'Roark Dowell, Shooting the Moon
Sometimes you take all my words away from me.
— Amie Kaufman, These Broken Stars
A picture tells a thousand words. But you get a thousand pictures from someone's voice.
— Paul Fleischman, Seek
Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.("The Man Whom The Trees Loved")
— Algernon Blackwood, Tales Of The Uncanny And Supernatural
The word is a prism through which the two beams shot from heart and head are refracted into the colours of the Universe.
— Paul Grimsley
Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.
— Derek Landy, Death Bringer
I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
A single word can brighten the faceof one who knows the value of words.Ripened in silence, a single wordacquires a great energy for work.War is cut short by a word,and a word heals the wounds,and there’s a word that changespoison into butterand honey.Let a word mature inside yourself.Withhold the unripened thought.Come and understand the kind of wordthat reduces money and riches to dust.Know when to speak a wordand when not to speak at all.A single word turns the universe of hellinto eight paradises.Follow the Way. Don’t be fooledby what you already know. Be watchful.Reflect before you speak.A foolish mouth can brand your soul.Yunus, say one last thingabout the power of words –Only the word “I”divides me from God.
— Yunus Emre
Land and water are not really separate things, but they are separate words, and we perceive through words.
— David Rains Wallace, The Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays
Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.
— Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol 2
I was on the point of breaking off the conversation, for nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Here is the time for the sayable, here  is its home.Speak and attest. More than everthe things we can live with are falling away,and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image.Will beneath crusts which readily crackwhenever the act inside swells and  seeks new borders.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
If you observe the pace of my breaths, you won't need to listen to my words.
— Nema Al-Araby
I have no special desire to go crawl around in caves, but I really like the word [spelunking] and want to use it in conversation. I do a lot of things just to use words I like.
— Evan Mandery, First Contact-Or, It's Later Than You Think
Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellowmen bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.
— Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say
There are things which couldn't be expressed by the words,when you've mastered certain lesson for more than 30 years.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
What are words if you really don't mean them when you say them?
— Chris Medina
Words are useless. Use your eyes to say a million things.
— Gabriella Jording
He only had the imperfect medium of words.
— Sara Gruen, Ape House
Talk like an ambassador (Eph 4:29-30). 1)Consider the person ("only what is helpful for building others up")2) Consider the problem ("according to their needs")3) Consider the process ("that it may benefit those who listen")
— Timothy S. Lane
No man is exempt from saying silly things
—  the mischief is to say them deliberately.
[W]e talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occassions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
I love bright words, words up and singing early;Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing;Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees;I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees, Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.
— Elinor Wylie