words

At certain moments, words are nothing; it is thetone in which they are uttered.

I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear."Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock.Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.

If you have to use the words, __eep down_ all that means is you're fooling yourself. You're seeing what you want to see and not what's really there.

A tongue is about the size of a bullet, but much more fierce and powerful.

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

What do you think was the first sound to become a word, a meaning?...I imagined two people without words, unable to speak to each other. I imagined the need: The color of the sky that meant 'storm.' The smell of fire taht meant 'Flee.' The sound of a tiger about to pounce. Who would worry about these things?And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. For a long time, that was the only word the baby needed. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it.Jean-Paul Sartre, Words

The words explain us all, each having a meaning in a meantime: every time for a lifetime.

Our words were a shaky ladder; all I could do was climb, uncertain if I was about to surmount a glorious peak or fall and smash myself on the rocks below.

People talk a lot but they rarely say anything.

Words form the sinew and muscle that hold societies upright, he argued. Consider the Koran, the Bible, the American Constitution, but also letters from fathers to sons, last wills, blessings, curses. Thousands upon thousands of words infused with the full spectrum of emotions fill in the nooks and corners of human life.

But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.

You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.

I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.

I saw pearls in her mouth and the velvet cushion of her tongue and I heard the magic words come out of her.

Words are precious things meant to create, to imagine, to dream with.

...perhaps in actions I'm less of a man - but, oh the words - such lovely words...

I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.