Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

A good writer is impatient on behalf of the reader. They ruthlessly eliminate unnecessary information and needless words. They are respectful of the reader’s time by only including what matters.

Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools

Old words are reborn with new faces.

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.

Words alone can effect great good as well as evil. A few apt words have swept candidates into office, ended as well as started wars, paved the way for peace and carried with them both...

If spirit is the seed, dance is the water of its evolution.

After awhile you realize that putting your actions where your mouth is makes you less likely to have to put your money where your mouth is.

When you realize the awesome power of words, you can change lives.

And empty words are evil.

Sometimes poetry–words–give us a small, lovely look at ourselves. And sometimes that is enough.

One suffers in silence so long as one has the strength and when that strength fails one speaks without measuring one’s words much.

To keep the air fresh among words is the secret of verbal cleanliness.

Words, with their multiple meanings and nuances are like trees and oral communication like a forest. Trees are good for hiding, forest for losing the path. When one is trying to contemplate the horizon of...

Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.

By the way I also would say “I got a book.” But your teacher and I are not “English teachers” in the same sense. She has to put across an idea of what the English...

Sometimes words aren’t needed.

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven’t forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to...

words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the...

Words don’t always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. People make empty promises, go...

See, the thing about that word, Sharkey, the F-word, is that sometimes I make that word do too much work. I mean, I say that word as if it clearly articulates what I’m really feeling....

What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?…I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that...

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...

Books are readable drugs.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

I told them in the same words Coach Rob used: no half-stepping. This is a tournament that if you lose, you go home. And that’s something that we really don’t want to happen right now....

He would like to be capable of writing as he thinks, quickly, without effort, the word as agile and dynamic as athletes in a race, jumping over hurdles, one after the other, go, go, go,...

A man never feels more important than when he receives a telegram containing more than ten words.

I wish I could read what she’s written there. Instead, I pretend the letters are stars. The words, constellations.

There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper…

Shakespeare teaches you how to act. You come out of this process as a better actor. It’s just the nature of the words he writes.

Literature is my Utopia

We’re living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we’re left with this cluttered world of language.

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.

The body is poisoned through the mouth, even so is the heart through the ear … And even if we do mean no harm, the Evil One means a great deal, and he will use...

All the ideas in the universe can be described by words. Therefore, if you simply take all the words and rearrange them randomly enough times, you’re bound to hit upon at least a few great...

You string some letters together, and you make a word. You string some words together, and you make a sentence, then a paragraph, then a chapter. Words have power.

You come across words all the time that are everyday sexism. I was described as ‘competently bossy’ and ‘bossily competent’ by a male journalist, and I thought, ‘Gosh, ‘bossy’ is never used of a man.’

I’ll bet I could find some hurtful words in a pile of sticks and stones. Something like an insincere and deceptive “I love you.

The word begone is a Russian doll. A small, single word, which contains so many others; and when all the smaller words inside line up, they look like a bridge: Be Beg Ego Go On...

Remember to say what you mean, but don’t say it meanly.

With math, I remember all of the words—and none of the numbers. I’m also like that with love.

The sound of the words as they’re said is always different from the sound they make when they’re heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when...

There are no words to express this. Everybody says there’s nothing they can do. This is outrageous.

You are a leader until you are dictated by your own words.

Words make known. But we live in the unknown.

I used to write my books at night when I was a freelancer with no children. I used to really work in huge spurts – I could turn around a revision in two weeks, I...

Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.