All Quotes By Tag: Words

“At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. … That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.”

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”

“We are word-shaped beings who live word-shaped lives within word-shaped communities.”

“Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also as components that can change… Now, though, we live in a world where text is fluid, where is responds to our instructions. Writing something down records it, but does not make it true or permanent. So why should we put up with a system we don’t like simply because it’s been written somewhere?”

“For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I’d started writing down, but I couldn’t. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn’t speak it, to anyone.”

“As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words.”

“M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises…”

“If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.”

“Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.”

“I try to be a positive light in this cold dark world… if only with a few words from deep within my heart, I try”

“Words and magic are two powerful forces that can change the world.”

“OBSOLETE, adj. No longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer, but if it is a good word and has no exact modern equivalent equally good, it is good enough for the good writer. Indeed, a writer’s attitude toward “obsolete” words is as true a measure of his literary ability as anything except the character of his work. A dictionary of obsolete and obsolescent words would not only be singularly rich in strong and sweet parts of speech; it would add large possessions to the vocabulary of every competent writer who might not happen to be a competent reader.”

“What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was ‘perhaps.”

“I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.”

“In your sublimity I find meaningIn your love I find a universeIn you I find an unknown radianceYour thoughts my anchorYour being my desireYour life my inspirationYour words my existence”