We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there...
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
We live and breathe words.
We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes...
We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of...
We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.
We're not outside the world... We are the world. We're its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don't say the words, what is their in our world?
What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.
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 ano...
What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
What is word knowledge but a shadow of wordless knowledge?
What we're doing, or, I should say, what doing, since no one has taught me any good words, is dropping recipes into people's brains to cause a neurochemical reaction to knock out the filters. Tie the...
When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.
When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking saf...
When it comes to words, rather than using our own voice, authentic and unpracticed, we steal someone else's to shield our fear.
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them. I...
When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially d...
When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.
When you think about it, everything has been said before, in one way or another. It's only our experience of it that makes it new.
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