A smart man only tells half of what he thinks.

Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.

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

The“b” word and the “n” word are like poison, whether you take poison from a vial or pour it into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison.

I left the room because, and only because, we had said all we could say. The unsaid words pushed roughly against the thoughts that we had no crafts to verbalize, and crowded the room to uneasiness.