A well-read person I know once said that messages, words have a life of their own. I cannot agree less. Words from a book breathe, come alive in the reader’s mind. If not, you are reading it wrong! Or, you are reading the wrong book. The power possessed by permutations and combinations of these 26 alphabets is so immense and when used right can make you cry, laugh and all the things in between. However, there is always another side to things, as is here; without belief, words mean nothing. Meaningless words have no more power than clouds being helplessly carried away by winds. Words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.
Here are some quotes I collected for my love of words and otherwise. :)
Here are some quotes I collected for my love of words and otherwise. :)
Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Gentle words, quiet words, are after all the most powerful words. They are more convincing, more compelling, more prevailing.
-W. Gladden
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
- Mark Twain
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
-John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“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
“Silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation.”
― Rumi
“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
“My task, which I am trying to achieve, is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”
- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”
- L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”
- Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
“There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, which could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.”
- Philip K. Dick, VALIS
“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
“Because even the smallest of words, can be the ones to hurt you, or save you.”
-Natsuki Takaya
“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?”
- Cornelia Funke
“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
- Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat
And never let them tell you
that silence, isn't beautiful.
For silence is what happens
when words fall asleep
and you must carry the belief
that one day they will
wake up inside of you.”
- Christopher Poindexter
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will make me go in a corner and cry by myself for hours.
-Eric Idle
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
-Lord Byron
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.
-Ralph Ellison
The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them.
-Anatole France