Words about words.

“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.”

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

“Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.”

“Words are but the signs of ideas.”

“The word is now a virus.”

“Language is also a place of struggle.”

“We think in language. We think in words. Language is the landscape of thought.”

“Language is fossil poetry.”

“Words, words, words.”

“You taught me language, and my profit on ’t is I know how to curse.”

“Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.”

“Words in their primary or immediate signification stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them.”

“Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires.”

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

“Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.”

“A Word that breathes distinctly has not the power to die.”

“The pen is the tongue of the mind.”

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”

“Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.”

“A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”

“We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss.”

“It is like when someone points his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, that person should see the moon.”

“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.”

“Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.”

“Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”

“A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.”

“Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations—naturally.”

“Words are events, they do things, change things.”

“You don’t ever really have the language to describe something in a way that makes complete sense.”

“Somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.”

“Writers breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own.”

“I wrote words to fit with the rhythms.”

“The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.”

“All writing, for me, is a relationship.”

“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know.”

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

“A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”

“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

“What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

“Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.”

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.”

“True wit is Nature to advantage dressed; what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

“The sound must seem an echo to the sense.”

“The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.”

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.”

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.”

“Murder your darlings.”

“Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.”

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.”

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”

“I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

“If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”

“They go to poetry for a transformational moment, to speak when there are no words to speak.”

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”

“Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor.”

“Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read.”

“One’s work is a way of keeping a diary.”

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

“The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.”

“Your silence will not protect you.”

“Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.”

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

“If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.”

“Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.”

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant—”

“Words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the Soul within.”

“Speech is silvern, Silence is golden.”

“It does not require many words to speak the truth.”

“Though the tongue’s commentary is luminous, yet love without tongue is still more luminous.”

“I tell my story not because it is unique, but because it is the story of many girls.”

“Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.”

“Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

“An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.”

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”