3,439 Quotes About Words

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins.

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Ideas are expressed using good and bad words and they usually create similar ideas, but not always. However, if you prohibit too many words, you prohibit an equal amount of ideas.

I don’t write poetry. I reiterate conversations.

If God could transcribe my heart, it'd still read "I love you".

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.