3,439 Quotes About Words

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

I have no words — alas! — to tellThe loveliness of loving well!

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.