“A drop of ink may make a million think.”
“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”
“Der Missbrauch der Sprache lässt Böses in die Seele”
“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
“When will you learn that there isn t a word for everything?”
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”
“The menu is not the meal.”
“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I ve never been able to believe it. I don t believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”
“There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you re lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.”
“Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.”
“Music; joy of the heart.”
“Words... They re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they re no good any more... I don t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you re dead.”
“To see evil and call it good, mocks God. Worse, it makes goodness meaningless. A word without meaning is an abomination, for when the word passes beyond understanding the very thing the word stands for passes out of the world and cannot be recalled.”
“There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can t be said.”