“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?”
“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”
“It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.”
“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.”
“The next time you try to seduce anyone, don t do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.”
“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”
“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”
“Chocolate says I m sorry so much better than words.”
“But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think.”
“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.”
“Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.”
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
“In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.”
“One thing I m sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”