All Quotes By Tag: Words

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”

“There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears a Human soul.”

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

“A Word is DeadA word is deadWhen it is said,Some say.I say it justBegins to liveThat day.”

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

“I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race – that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant…I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.”

“What a curious power words have.”

“They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumbles away, computers could be destroyed. Only the spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn’t a thing.”

“Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good. He who knows has no wide learning; he who has wide learning does not know.”

“Actions are the true words of the heart.”