Language Words Quotes

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language. ~ Daniel Dennett

She understood that for her to excel at Oxford she had to improve her English. Her brain was in need of words to express itself fully, the way a sapling was in need of raindrops to grow to its potential. She purchased stacks of coloured Post-it notes. On them she wrote the words she chanced upon, fell in love with and intended to use at the earliest opportunity -- just as every foreigner did, one way or another:
- Autotomy: The casting off of a body part by an animal in danger
- Cleft Stick (from Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings): To be in a difficult situation
- Rantipole (from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow): Wild, reckless, sometimes quarrelsome person.
In her first Political Philosophy essay, she wrote 'In Turkey, where daily politics is rantipole, each time the system is in a cleft stick, democracy is the first thing to be severed and sacrificed in an act of autotomy. ~ Elif Shafak

The word begone is a Russian doll. A small, single word, which contains so many others; and when all the smaller words inside line up, they look like a bridge: Be Beg Ego Go On One. ~ Craig Stone

What a gulf between impression and expression! That's our ironic fate - to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse - touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash. ~ Aldous Huxley

Laughing,Savannah jumped from her precarious perch on the boulder into the safety of Gregori's arms.
He caught her,crushing her against his chest, sheer elation, exhilaration, rushing through his veins. To feel again was beyond his comprehension, to feel like this, to have such joy in him, was totally unbelievable. He whispered to her in the ancient language, words of love and commitment that he could not find a way to express in any other language. She was more than she could ever know to him; she was his life,the very air he breathed. You worry about the most ridiculous things, he said gruffly, burying his face for just a moment against her neck,inhaling her scent.
"Do I?" she asked aloud,her eyes dancing at him. "You're the one always concerned I'm going to do something wild."
"You do wild things," he answered complacently. "I never know what you are going to do next. It is a good thing I reside in your mind, ma petite, or I would have to be locked up in the nearest asylum."
Her lips brushed his chin, feathered along his jaw, then nibbled enticingly at the edge of his mouth. "I think you should be locked up.You're postively lethal to women."
"Not to women,only to you. ~ Christine Feehan

Words are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in "foreign commerce" on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves - this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together. ~ Gaston Bachelard

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. ~ Henry Adams

There sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first it made me weep; strange tongues, horrible language, words of pain, tones of anger, voices loud and hoarse, and with these the sound of hands, made a tumult which is whirling through that air forever dark, and sand eddies in a whirlwind. ~ Dante Alighieri

Words themselves are all the ghosts we need. ~ Donald Harington

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. ~ Italo Calvino

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music. ~ James Joyce

Each word's evocative value or virtue, its individual power of touching springs in the mind and of initiating visions, becomes a treasure to revel in. Besides this hold on affection a word may well have about it the glamorous prestige of high adventures in great company. Think of that the plain word "dust" calls to mind. "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was." "Dust hath closed Helen's eye." "All follow this and come to dust." "The way to dusty death." So, to the lover of words, each word may be not a precious stone only, but one that has shone on Solomon's temple or in Cleopatra's hair. ~ C.E. Montague

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this. ~ Markus Zusak

I love language, words, and all the lovely, exciting, and heart wrenching things you can do with them. Pick the right ones, put them in the right order, and you've created a moment in time where the reader forgets about the late car payment, the dirty dishes, the impending workweek. You have created a state of bliss. Or negligence, depending on your perspective. ~ Darynda Jones

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors. ~ Stephen Fry

The Word

Wonder or dream from distant land
I carried to my country's strand

And waited till the twilit norn
Had found the name within her bourn -

Then I could grasp it close and strong
It blooms and shines now the front along...

Once I returned from happy sail,
I had a prize so rich and frail,

She sought for long and tidings told:
"No like of this these depths enfold."

And straight it vanished from my hand,
The treasure never graced my land...

So I renounced and sadly see:
Where word breaks off no thing may be. ~ Stefan George

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure
The bastion of sensation. Do not waver
Into language. Do not waver in it. ~ Seamus Heaney

He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed. ~ Mal Peet

[...] it seems you don't understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you'll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them [...] ~ Jose Saramago

After I nodded, she continued. We can no longer express with words our emotional states, our revelations, our transformations. Words fail. We are in the very beginning stages of what might take years or even decades of transition. The human race is developing a Universal Language. The practices that will assist humanity - and assist you - in reaching this higher communication will include all the things I'll share with you: vocal exploration, meditation, and energetic practices such as chi gong and yoga. Through these techniques, you are going to completely overhaul your nervous system and your energetic makeup to allow the emergence of this language within you. ~ Dielle Ciesco

Hello" and "good-bye" were a pair of bookends, propping up a vast library of blank volumes, void almanacs, novels full of sentiment I couldn't apprehend ~ Lauren Collins

The most advanced minds as well as the least advanced are obliged to use the same words. If we adopt new words, it will be even more difficult - if not impossible - to make ourselves understood. The new man must therefore express himself in conventional language. ~ Piet Mondrian

The word is always a word for others. Words need to be heard. When we give words to what we are living, these words need to be received and responded to. A speaker needs a listener. A writer needs a reader.

When the flesh – the lived human experience – becomes word, community
can develop. When we say, 'Let me tell you what we saw. Come and listen
to what we did. Sit down and let me explain to you what happened to us.
Wait until you hear whom we met,' we call people together and make our
lives into lives for others. The word brings us together and calls us
into community. When the flesh becomes word, our bodies become part of
a body of people. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

... but I love language. It is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and language has power. Whether in a song lyric, a poem, a speech, or a simple conversation, we've all experienced words that resonate with us. They may make us recall a powerful moment, inspire us, move us, or perhaps, comfort us…. But at the same time, we don't think in words. We think in pictures. If I say the word 'dog' to you, you aren't picturing the letters, d-o-g, you're picturing a dog from your memory... ~ Lily Velden

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place. ~ Steven Millhauser

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statue. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor - whereby the process of improverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that "it isn't in the dictionary" - although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at t ~ Ambrose Bierce

The room was filled with smoke, dry worn-out smoke retaining in it like a web the insectile cadavers of dry husks of words which had been spoken and should be gone, the breaths exhaled not to be breathed again. But the words went on, and in those brief interruptions between cigarettes the exhalations were rebreathed. ~ William Gaddis

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

You see, I'm a juggler with words myself. ~ Anonymous

Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear. ~ Toni Morrison

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations ... There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind. ~ Teresa Jordan

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light. ~ Elizabeth Kostova

As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me, The old world of houses, rooms, trees and streets shimmers, wavers and tears away, revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world – how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being. It's as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there's no "house," no "object," no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among the galaxies. ~ Steven Millhauser

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

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 this before. ~ M.L. Rio

Words don't always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. People make empty promises, go back on their word, say things they don't believe. But connection, with ourselves and others, is the only way we can live. ~ Alena Graedon

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness - I am nothing. ~ Virginia Woolf

There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words. ~ Owen Barfield

The Actor, noticing a closed bookshop, dismounted from the horse which he tied to a street lamp. He woke up the bookseller and bought a Spanish grammar and dictionary. He set out again across town marveling at the way that the words of the foreign language were freshly gathered fruits and not old and dry. They touched the senses marvelously, new like young beggars who accost you, not yet words but the every things they designate, happily running naked before being clothed again in abstraction. ~ Georges Limbour

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them. ~ Samuel Butler

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled. ~ Horace

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. ~ Toni Cade Bambara

Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes. ~ Ben Jonson

Language is insight itself. ~ Confucius

You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well. ~ Elie Wiesel

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure. ~ Pat Conroy

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say. ~ Sarah Dessen

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

The facts that make the world real
these depend on the unreal in order to be recognised by it. ~ Ingeborg Bachmann

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words. ~ Richard Mitchell

I had to settle for two of the most inadequate words in the English language, words to pale to express what I needed to say. Thank you. ~ Lilith Saintcrow

I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more. ~ Antony Sher

Words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. ~ Ingrid Bengis

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas. ~ Confucius

The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effective way of reaching the heart; one must constantly pay attention with one's mind. The spoken word tends to go to our heads, not our hearts. ~ Marcus J. Borg

A man reacheth not to excellence with one language. ~ Roger Ascham

In such troubled times, we must remember the value writers have - the value of inventing new language to keep pace with the rapidly transforming world around us. ~ Jonathan Stalling

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. ~ Roland Barthes

Filthy language is used by people who don't have the maturity or intelligence to express themselves with better words. ~ Nouman Ali Khan

There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle. ~ Samuel Beckett

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words
rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition
children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down. ~ John Edgar Wideman

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words. ~ George Eliot

This is how Tack and Raven work: It's their private language of push and return, argument and concession. With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. ~ Lauren Oliver

You can tell a person's past, present and future by listening to the words they use. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

Words are like coin - it pays to hoard."
"Until you die on a bed of gold," Paran said. ~ Steven Erikson

Every evening words, not stars, light the sky. No rest in life like life itself. ~ Umberto Saba

When will you ask for your post back?" he whispered in her ear. "I miss the smell of
industrial-strength solvents."
She laughed softly. "Soon. And when will you have papers read at the mathematical society
again? I rather like having my husband called a genius for reasons that are not clear to me."
My husband. The words rolled off her tongue, easy and beautiful. He kissed her fervently.
"Soon. My brilliance quite overflowed on the way home. I have four notebooks to show for
it."
"Good. We don't want people to think I love you for your looks alone."
"In that case we should also put you in some rather revealing gowns once in a while, so that
people don't think I married you for your accomplishments alone. ~ Sherry Thomas

I shook my head, just as I had back then. "Let the one you've just had take effect," I said. "You'll feel better then." "There's no better for me." He put his fingers on my wrist, his grip surprisingly tight. "Please. Have mercy." But the pill was already beginning its work, or maybe it was the effort of making the request, of taking my arm, of saying such words. His eyelids began to droop. "You're a clever girl, always were," he whispered. "You know what to do." His eyes closed on the first compliment he ever gave me. ~ Orna Ross

For words divide and rend But silence is most noble till the end. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Do we not see the influence we have when we say we believe in one thing, but our children see us living something else? Do we not realize how little we encourage our children to actually decide what they believe, declare what they believe, and then live by it? Whether it's religion, politics, sports, or societal norms. It is not our place to tell our kids what to think. It is our place to teach our kids to think correctly. If we do this, we need have no fear of what they will decide for themselves and how strongly they'll stand behind it. A man will follow his own convictions to his death, but he'll only follow another man's convictions until he steps in manure. ~ Dan Pearce

They're in southern France. Oldest paintings ever found there. We're talking like thirty thousand years old. Scenes typical of the Paleolithic - horses, cattle, mammoths, that kind of thing. No pictures of humans but one depiction of a vagina, for what that's worth. The really interesting thing is what happened when they carbon-dated the place. They found pictures in the same room painted six thousand years apart. They looked identical."

"Okay. So?"

"So think about that. For six thousand years there was no progress and no evidence of any impulse to change anything. People were fine with the way things were. In other words, this is not a people experiencing spiritual desolation. You and I need new diversions nightly. These people didn't change a thing for sixty centuries. This is not a people tired of their snack routine."

The drumming outside escalates for a moment and then fades "back into a kind of ominous tolling.

"Melancholy," Periwinkle says, "had to be invented. Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom. And when those things were birthed, so were people like me, to attend to them. So no, it's not patriotism. It's evolution. ~ Nathan Hill

He didn't think it possible to sign sewage-sucking-excuse-of-a-baseborn-bilge-rat but somehow Gurn managed. ~ Grace Draven

If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors? ~ James Lee Burke

so the knowledge of their presence remained, for the time being, strictly within the bounds of people's private thoughts, lying dormant in a corner of their minds like a secret language spoken only at home. ~ Orhan Pamuk

Actually the city editor was one of the gentlest, most soft-spoken men I have ever encountered, and he did me a service I have always been grateful for. I got stuck one day on a story and finally, with the desperation of youth, I took my problem to him, although it seemed cheeky to bother him. How was I to express a certain thing? … I asked him how I could get around my difficulty.

He thought for a minute. Then he said, 'Just say the words'. ~ E.B. White

I had been walking through the Chakara Forest. Fat moths the size of palms wreathed my hair like pearls and moonstones. And then, as I had done since before language burgeoned in the velvet clefts of the mind--I danced.
Not a slow dance, but sharp, punctual movements. My dance organized the shadows of trees, canceled the cloying plumes of wind-fallen fruit, aligned the moonbeams themselves. My back arced gracefully as I moved, neck extended like an oryx, fingers conjuring sharp kathas of rhythm, when a sound crunched not far from me.
I spun around. "Who's there?"
From beneath the heart-shaped leaves of a peepal tree, something rustled. And a voice, so lush it made ambrosia acrid, answered me.
"Only the lowly painter who tries each night, in vain, to capture evening herself."
"What do you want? Show yourself."
The stranger stepped out of the peepal tree. He was broad-shouldered, his features as severely beautiful as a strike of lightning. He wore a crown of blackbuck horns that arced in graceful whorls of onyx, catching the light. But it was his gaze that robbed the clamoring rhythm in my chest.
His stare slipped beneath my skin. And when he saw my eyes widen, he smiled. And in that moment, his smile banished my loneliness and limned the hollows of my anima with starlight, pure and bright. He moved toward me, grasping my hand, and his touch hummed in my bones like an aria. A song to my dance. The beginning of a promise. ~ Roshani Chokshi

We are one in spirit. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Tessa..." There were no words to say what he needed to say, that his love for her stretched beyond time, beyond death. ~ Cassandra Clare

I never knew words could be so sharp, until the wrong ones cut me ~ Foz Meadows

Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it. ~ Lisel Mueller

People need things like that to go on living - mental landscapes that have meaning for them, even if they can't explain them in words. Part of why we live is to come up with explanations with these things. That's what I think. ~ Haruki Murakami

Pride is tough. You go to high school, and its 'pride,' 'courage;' it's all these types of words that we use to motivate us. I don't think there's anywhere in the Scriptures through the saints' lives where pride was ever a positive characteristic of anybody. ~ Troy Polamalu

Language is a living thing. It must survive in men's minds and on their tongues if it survives at all. ~ Charlton Laird

There are many bad things in this world of ours, but the use of the word 'monetize' has to rank high among them. Also, 'incentivize.' Actually, all the '-ize' words, like 'contextualize' and 'utilize' and 'prioritize.' And - this is almost too horrible to type - 'juniorize.' ~ Susan Orlean

Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see-thoughtfully. ~ Dan Beachy-Quick

Tell me why, Been. Why would you trick us in the first place?"
Ben stopped pacing. Looked directly at me. "Don't you know?'
I shook my head,confused.
"To impress you, Victoria Brennan." His voice cracked. "I wanted you to think that I was special."
The words rocked me.
Oh, Ben.
"He'd started this madness ... for me?
'You were spending all that time with Jason," Ben said softly, staring at his shoes. "skipping around town with your new perfect guy. Cotillion this. fund-raiser that. I hated it. Hated him. When I finally told Rome, he said that I needed to amaze you. Said I needed to figure out a way to make you see me. ~ Kathy Reichs

What President Bush has done speaks more than words about his feeling of compassion and commitment to people. ~ Thad Cochran

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument. ~ George Steiner

One of the reasons they [the Japanese] have bad eyesight is probably these microscopic characters [furigana] which have many lines and strokes to them.& We wonder why they went mad and bombed Pearl Harbor when they knew they couldn't win. That [the Japanese language] would be a reason. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

We looked at each other in the half-light, searching for words that didn't exist. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

...while there may have been gods, they weren't particularly well defined. If, for instance, something unusually lucky happened, one might declare that a god--pick one--was feeling generous that day. And if a particularly bad thing happened, a god (usually a different one) was upset about something or other. Gods, in other words, were what most of us would now call chance or luck. And in that sense they served their purpose, by making a random existence seem less random. ~ Gene Doucette

Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words. ~ Margaret Mitchell

let the words speak for itself. it will be like a gigantic speaker for the one who is reading it and pierces straight to the heart. ~ Sydney Bajenting

Most of the words you know and love and use every day are not words you learned by looking them up in a dictionary and reading a definition. ~ Erin McKean

When the twins asked what cuff-links were for - "To link cuffs together," Ammu told them - they were thrilled by this morsel of logic in what had so far seemed an illogical language. Cuff+link = cuff-link. This, to them, rivaled the precision of logic and mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate (if exaggerated) satisfaction, and a real affection for the English language. ~ Arundhati Roy

Not all men are the same, you know. With someone such as Gavriel, I would suggest appearing aloof, not chasing too much. He might see that as suffocating rather than charming.
Her words are sharp, but her voice is sweet, like honey on the edge of a blade, and meant to be cutting. I comfort myself with the knowledge that if Duval ever feels smothered by me, it will be because I am holding a pillow over his face and commending his soul to Mortain. ~ R.L. LaFevers

The only way to know how prayer works is to have complete knowledge and control of the past, present, and future. In other words, you can figure out how prayer works if you are God. ~ Paul E. Miller

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly. ~ Kate Atkinson

If it will reassure you that I'm not a coward, I suppose I could rearrange his face." Quietly he added, "The music has ended," and for the first time Elizabeth realized they were no longer waltzing but were only swaying lightly together. With no other excuse to stand in his arms, Elizabeth tried to ignore her disappointment and step back, but just then the musicians began another melody, and their bodies began to move together in perfect time to the music.
"Since I've already deprived you of your escort for the outing to the village tomorrow," he said after a minute, "would you consider an alternative?"
Her heart soared, because she thought he was going to offer to escort her himself. Again he read her thoughts, but his words were dampening.
"I cannot escort you there," he said flatly.
Her smile faded. "Why not?"
"Don't be a henwit. Being seen in my company is hardly the sort of thing to enhance a debutante's reputation."
Her mind whirled, trying to tally some sort of balance sheet that would disprove his claim. After all, he was a favorite of the Duke of Hammund's…but while the duke was considered a great matrimonial prize, his reputation as a libertine and rake made mamas fear him as much as they coveted him as a son-in-law. On the other hand, Charise Dumont was considered perfectly respectable by the ton, and so this country gathering was above reproach. Except it wasn't, according to Lord Howard. "Is that why you refused to dance with me when ~ Judith McNaught