Quotes About Words

“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

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.”
― Steve Martin

“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.”
― Mother Teresa

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“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

“He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.

She was the book thief without the words.

Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King

“Because even the smallest of words can be the ones to hurt you, or save you.”
― Natsuki Takaya

“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
― Rumi

“There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.”
― Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly

“He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“We live and breathe words.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”
― Ingrid Bergman

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”
― Cornelia Funke

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.”
― Karen Marie Moning

“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 mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

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

“I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant...I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Chocolate says "I'm sorry" so much better than words.”
― Rachel Vincent, My Soul to Save

“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
― W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume II. 1939-1948

“words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.”
― Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
― Carl Sagan