All Quotes By Tag: Words

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!”

“i writebecauseit is the only wayi can reach you.”

“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.”

“My head is full of fireand grief and my tongueruns wild, piercedwith shards of glass.”

“A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,–and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.”

“Surely it is an odd way to spend your life – sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.”

“You see how I tryTo reach with wordsWhat matters mostAnd how I fail.”

“He ate and drank the precious words,His spirit grew robust;He knew no more that he was poor,Nor that his frame was dust.He danced along the dingy days,And this bequest of wingsWas but a book. What libertyA loosened spirit brings!”

“The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride… Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.”

“When the actions becomes frequent than the words, success becomes heavier than the dreams. Do more, say less.”

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

“In Memoriam A.H.H. Section 5I sometimes hold it half a sinTo put in words the grief I feel;For words, like Nature, half revealAnd half conceal the Soul within.But, for the unquiet heart and brain,A use in measured language lies;The sad mechanic exercise,Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,Like coarsest clothes against the cold:But that large grief which these enfoldIs given in outline and no more.”

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”

“How would your life be different if…You pretended those around you were deaf to your words? Let today be the day…You let your actions speak and communicate your feelings and intentions.”