#words

Within a week of the girl's sacrifice, the clouds above Ólympus had broken up and spread south. Soon, a steady rain fell upon the plains and mountainsides, producing just enough downfall to fill the wells and cisterns but not ruin the crops. The natives, who had been appalled at the sacrifice, were overjoyed. Embers of hatred and fear still smoldered in their eyes, but there was also, now, a flicker of respect. ↗

— Tom Stone

#words-that-burn-into-your-brain #respect

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much. ↗

— Mark Twain

#cats #dogs #grace #reticence #words

I knew I would stay in this town when I found the blue enamel pot floating in the lake. The pot led me to the house, the house led me to the book, the book to the lawyer, the lawyer to the whorehouse, the whorehouse to science, and from science I joined the world. ↗

— Leslie Daniels

#fiction #science

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows. ↗

— Denis Johnson

#english

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#words #language

The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas - a whole grammar made of light, for words too hard to speak. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#grammar

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job? ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#robert-browning #romantic-poetry #saul-bellow #time-magazine #whittaker-chambers

Rules. Even as the world of phone and computer sex (and dominance) were full of their own rules, so was the new world of doing-it-for real. And some of these new rules, (OK, most of them, Robin admitted) were just as silly as the ones she had learned and followed before. Safe words, for example. Magic words that when said by the bottom, stopped a scene so that some kind of inconvenient or dangerous activity could be halted. Robin had nothing against the concept......... Having a code to use so that you're free to pull against the bondage or whimper "no, no, no" seemed to be a great idea. But having all these possible ways to orchestrate what was happening seemed, well, contrary to the point........ I want to feel that I can't stop it. I want to be really mastered, taken over by someone who isn't goin to stop doing things because I'm not getting off on it. Someone who knows enough not to endanger me, unless that was what was intended......... ↗

— Laura Antoniou

#dominance #mastered #safe-words #bdsm

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words! ↗

— Samuel Adams

#meaning #meaning of #pervert #plain #strangely

Don't you know this, that words are doctors to a diseased temperment? ↗

— Aeschylus

#doctors #know #words #you