"I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone
who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I
spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language – the way it
can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all – all the Englishes I grew
up with." (271) Amy
Tan, The Opposite of Fate
"I have hated the words and I have loved them, And I hope I have made
them right." (528) Markus Zusak, The
Book Thief
"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is
what I have words for." Ludwig Wittgenstein
"The words fly out, over the roads and onto the big, idle farms, on the
hills, forests, and rivers of America, to mix into silence of glass, air, ice,
light, and winter cold." Donald Hall, Excerpt from "Waiting on the
Corners"
"The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a
grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my
life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response." Jhumpa Lahiri
"I love the sounds and shapes of words, the way
certain consonant blends can evoke related images.... I am fascinated with the
origins of words, when they came into being, how they were first used. Within
their histories are stories." Amy Tan
"I think everyone has in his or her self the urge to express…. Cooks do
it with food; there are people who do it with hair, with clothing, fabric. I
loved words, always, the sound of words, the feeling of words in my mouth and
so I did it that way." Lucille Clifton
"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for
the first time." Ernest Hemingway
"There came the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from
flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word 'moon'
came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth
the moon became a word." Eudora Welty
"Words abide, but new phrases enter the tongue and old phrases exit, reflecting the way the social landscape alters." (57) Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life
"I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy
dictionary in my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word
like eleemosynary or phantasmagoria -- some word that, on the tongue,
sounded great to me, and I would go out into the fields and I would shout those
words, because it was so important that they sounded so great to me. And then
eventually I began incorporating them into verses, into poems. But certainly my
thought in the beginning was that there was so much joy playing with language
that I couldn't consider living without it." Stanley Kunitz
"Protect your time.
Feed your inner life.
Avoid too much noise.
Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.
Be by yourself as often as you can.
Walk.
Take the phone off the hook.
Work regular hours."
Jane Kenyon
"Catmint—tubular,
lavender, an ointment
to
blur the scar, bloom the skin. My mouth has begun
the
hunt for words that heal."
From
"Elegy Composed in the New York Botanical Garden" by Eugenia Leigh
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” ~ Emily Dickinson
"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." Goethe
"A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special." Nelson Mandela
"I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door--a thousand opening doors!--past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power." (18) ~ Upstream by Mary Oliver
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” ~ Emily Dickinson
"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." Goethe
"A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special." Nelson Mandela
"I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door--a thousand opening doors!--past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power." (18) ~ Upstream by Mary Oliver
