#words

As the hours crept by, the afternoon sunlight bleached all the books on the shelves to pale, gilded versions of themselves and warmed the paper and ink inside the covers so that the smell of unread words hung in the air. ↗

— Maggie Stiefvater

#shiver #words

I could have been 23 next July I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost. ↗

— Hannah Senesh

#last-words #martyrs #poetry #life

If I had my life over again[, ] I'd have thought more about words. And thought about them earlier. ↗

— Enid Bagnold

#life

Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said...no, I'd be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar's a roar and no one is hard put to miss its meaning. ↗

— Philip Roth

#jungle #mastery #suspicions #words #life

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

#literature #reading #words #writing #funny

Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was…) and a future (there shall be…). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: “Defunctus adhuc loquitur” (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth. ↗

— Rob Riemen

#meaning #poetry #truth #words #experience

After awhile you realize that putting your actions where your mouth is makes you less likely to have to put your money where your mouth is. ↗

— Criss Jami

#actions-over-words #boasting #bragging #cheap #cheapness

I clung to each word that fell from his lips like a spider to a web. ↗

— Dannika Dark

#lips #romance #spider #sterling #twist

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. ↗

— Charles Péguy

#writing #writer

…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew…. ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#writing #design