"Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you."
— Neil Gaiman

"A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child."
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Palindrome as well. My sister's name is Hannah. Father liked word games. He was fourteen times World Scrabble Champion. When he died, we buried him at Queenzieburn to make use of the triple word score."
— Jasper Fforde (The Big Over Easy)

"The word I think of is precarious. I am struck by how precarious it all is. How the things that hold us are only as strong as the faith we have in them."
— David Levithan (The Realm of Possibility)

"The anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words, the death sentence, of sheer triteness!"
— Evelyn Waugh

"Lead me, follow me or get out of my way"
— General Patton

"Salvation is more than a word, It is His Word. His word became flesh so we have the opportunity to live."
— Tabitha Robin

"They say 90% of the promotion of a book comes through word of mouth. But you've somehow got to get your book into the hands of those mouths first!"
— Claudia Osmond

"I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven."
— A.W. Tozer

"The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction."
— Brion Gysin

"Harper to your word be true
Holder, crafter you also hew
To honesty, integrity, and respect
All others without regard to intellect"
— Anne McCaffrey (Dragon Harper)

"It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word"
— William Gass

"I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony"
— Gustave Flaubert (November)

"Scots from hogtowns or cowtowns work from cockcrow to moondown -- to chop down woodlots, to plow down cornrows."
— Christian Bök (Eunoia)

"I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does."
— Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet)

"The language of sword is less powerful than the language of word, but most of
the people understand the language of sword with greater power than the
language of word."
— Kedar Joshi

""She rubbed her eyes, and after a long study of his face, she spoke
"Is it really you?"
Is it from your cheek, she thought, that I took the seed?
The man nodded.
His heart wobbled and he held tighter to the branches.
"It is."
"
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Wen das Wort nicht schlägt, den schlägt auch der Stock nicht."
— Socrates

"The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us."
— Wendell Berry

"Forget language. Afer all, it bores me. The senses. And this much is true: any communication must transcend the immediacy of solidarity, must be mediated by ideological and economic connections. And there the senses reappear. No use giving in to words."
— V Y Mudimbe

"Never look down on anyone unless you're looking down to extend a helping hand, or word."
— Barbara Hart