"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'"
— John Greenleaf Whittier (Maud Muller - Pamphlet)

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."
— Rudyard Kipling

"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me."
— C.S. Lewis

"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

"I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."
— Arthur Rimbaud (Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works)

"A word is dead when it's been said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day."
— Emily Dickinson

"All words are pegs to hang ideas on."
— Henry Ward Beecher

"[Words] cling to the very core of our memories and lie there in silence until a new desire reawakens them and recharges them with loving energy. That is one of the qualities of love that moves me most, their capacity for transmitting love. Like water, words are a wonderful conductor of energy. And the most powerful, transforming energy is the energy of love."
— Laura Esquivel (Swift as Desire)

"He was a writer and words were his weapons."
— Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends)

"PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there's a word to lift your hat to...to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry."
— Emily Dickinson

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think."
— George Gordon Byron

"In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart. "
— John Bunyan

"Sometimes there aren't words. The silence between us is flung wide as an ocean. But I manage to reach across it, to wrap my arms around him."
— Jodi Picoult (Keeping Faith)

"I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words."
— Craig Claiborne

"We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them."
— Abigail Adams

"But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words."
— Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South)

"They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart what light can for a field."
— John of the Cross (The Poems of St. John of the Cross)

"Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap?"
— Jack Spicer

"Language does have the power to change reality. Therefore, treat your words as the mighty instruments they are - to heal, to bring into being, to remove, as if by magic, the terrible violations of childhood, to nurture, to cherish, to bless, to forgive - to create from the whole cloth of your soul, true love.
"
— Daphne Rose Kingma

"How to put this feeling, this certainty, into something as limited as words?"
— Eileen Wilks (On the Prowl (Includes: Alpha & Omega Prequel; World of the Lupi, #3.5; Dorina Basarab Prequel; Monère, #3))

"I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean."
— George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss)

"Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding."
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

"sometimes every word i write is 'love' but the letters are rearranged, the sounds are different. all the words are red."
— Zoe Trope (Please Don't Kill the Freshman: A Memoir)

"My father always said that too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech."
— Patricia Briggs (Raven's Shadow)

"Slogans are mere wordsuck..."
— Gabriel Thy

"Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
"
— Jack Spicer

"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."
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"I am a poet in deeds--not often in words."
— Ian Fleming (Goldfinger)

"Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause somethinge in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?But at this moment, the mystery seemed greater than usual, for these were words he hadn't even known yesterday morning."
— Pascal Mercier (Night Train to Lisbon)

""A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.""
— William Wordsworth

"He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust."
— Emily Dickinson

"Her words were like tinfoil; they shone and they covered things up."
— Helen Cross (My Summer of Love)

"If I had my life over again[, ] I'd have thought more about words. And thought about them earlier."
— Enid Bagnold (The Loved and Envied)

"Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken."
— Orson Rega Card

"Besides, I always feel safer when I've got words against my heart."
— Zoe Trope (Please Don't Kill the Freshman: A Memoir)

"All words are written in the same ink,
'flower' and 'power,' say, are much the same,
and though I might write 'blood, blood, blood'
all over the page, the paper would not be stained
now would I bleed."
— Philippe Jaccottet

"We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)