3,439 Quotes About Words

Hide me from this battle with words / and put out the furies of my elemental body.

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

Silence is a cage. These words are my keys.

Silence is a cage. These words are my wings.

But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It's like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation's there, but it's useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone's imagination.

To his shock, as Saarang turned the first page, the words slowly transformed into small cylinders, except for one-letter words, which preferred being spheres, and started rolling toward the vertical edges of the book.

An idiolect. That’s what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He’s been too blithe, he’d forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

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 you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.