#Words

"I hope that I will be the last victim in China's long record of treating words as crimes."

"But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him."

"Rap music's been around for too long now to be inspirational. The words are, but the music isn't."

"All words are pegs to hang ideas on."

"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all."

"I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."

"Words are truly the image of the soul."

"Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory."

"I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language."

"To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry."

"These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart."

"Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity."

"So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone."

"Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude."

"The word long is short, and so is the word short, but why is the word love as long as long? Shouldn’t it be longer?"

"In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart."

"The books - the generous friends who met me without suspicion - the merciful masters who never used me ill!"

"Beneath my eyes opens -- a book; I see to the bottom; the heart -- I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart."

"How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul."

"Who needs a large vocabulary when you can just make up any word at any time? It makes life a whole lot more emeaglibop."