To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence–...

Words are powerless when confronted by catastrophe; they’re pitiable, wretched, and easily distorted

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy...

Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It’s all you’ve got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.

Maybe I was praying for him then, in my own way. Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it. I believe some...

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters...

I am far from a perfect dad. And I always will be. But I’m a damn good dad, and my son will always feel bigger than anything life can throw at him. Why? Because I...

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...

Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.

I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

Positive words come from positive thoughts. It implies, when you open your mouth to talk for people to listen, you have opened your mind for them to read. Think positively; talk positively!

Drop a pebble in the water: just a splash, and it is gone;But there’s half-a-hundred ripples circling on and on and on, Spreading, spreading from the center, flowing on out to the sea. And there...

Life is so beautiful and so short that anything that makes me feel less than too much is nothing at all.

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?

Embrace all emotions: sadness, happiness, sorrow, hate, love, prejudice, fear; they are weapons against our greatest enemy: indifference.

PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to… to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that’s the genius behind poetry.

Words only make sense when someone who says them does.

But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.

Two similar words might lead to two similar ideas. They might also lead to the basement, which I recently converted into a dungeon/torture chamber.

Certain words roll off the tongue like frozen balls of saliva. Words like sure, positive, and definite—you know, words that are certain.

We are all in Christ’s energy. We are all in the divine plan. We are all on the sacred journey, if you want to put it into some very spiritual words. And I like to...

Words aren’t made — they grow,’ said Anne.

My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.

Most of my recognition comes from us winning that championship. The words may not come out – ‘Super Bowl III’ – because a lot of the folks at the grocery store, gas station or mall...

More sailors have drowned in words than in the sea.

There is more to writing than playing with words.

He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself […].

However, at fourteen years old, she didn’t understand that all those terrible troubles the heroines in her books went through in real life hurt.That the words were just words on a page, but in real...

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words.I don’t believe in “sadness”, “joy”, or “regret”.Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my...

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as...

I know now that the poem in my head, the one that pushed me to the page, begged me – or dared me to be born is almost never the poem that comes out. I...

And on the days I couldn’t breathe, I learned to paint air.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of...

It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words.

I will write in words of fire.I will write them on your skin.I will write about desire.Write beginnings, write of sin.You’re the book I love the best,your skin only holds my truth, you will be...

You will never have confidence in your prayers if you fail to be prudent with your words.

When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

I don’t listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.

some of the first words a child learns are brand names, because they don’t have to sound them out. It becomes part of your environmental vocabulary [Whitney Curry Wimbish & Sarah Gerard, “The Binary Companion,”...

The only way to change the world is to quit thinking it’s a job for Superman. Real power lies in your own hands.

I crossed oceans for you,Turned over every rock,Climbed the highest mountains,Holding on to the words you said,Reliving your touch inside my head,The taste of you on the tip of my tongue,Only to be left with...

A million words were going through my head and honestly I didn’t say one of them. I wanted to let it sit, simmer, you know I wanted to soak it all in – the moment...

Freedom is…the right to write the wrong words.

If she had some level of theism, we might have a shared theological root from which I could shape holy words.

People used to ask me questions on my blog about how to break into the acting industry. You often have to start out in parts where you have very few words, but you still have...

Sometimes I fear those noisy words boiling in an unsettling cauldron.

Whatever characterization one may choose to place on Satan, “imbecile message maker” doesn’t fit. This was no third-ranking demon out there in the wilderness throwing lines at Christ. This was the manic master who understood...

He was going to punish me now. He couldn’t beat me up with his old man fists, but he could hurt me with his old man words.