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Words Quotes

“The sun is but a mere handful of minutes from rising on yet another Christmas morning. And I sit here in the early morning light wrestling with a handful of inordinately stubborn words that refuse to submit to any kind of syntax that might express the richness of my thoughts on this morning. But then I realized that the God of Christmas is infinitely too big for words, and His gift surpasses any syntax man could hope to form to explain it. Therefore, my prayer for you is that the God of Christmas will come to you in a manner beyond words and change your life beyond imagination.”

“The grounding principle of the Small Science was "like calls to like," but then it got complicated. Odinakovost was the "thisness" of a thing that made it the same as everything else. Etovost was the "thatness" of a thing that made it different from everything else. Odinakovost connected Grisha to the world, but it was etovost that gave them an affinity for something like air, or blood, or in my case, light. Around then, my head started swimming. One thing did stand out to me: the word the philosophers used to describe people born without Grisha gifts, otkazat'sya, "the abandoned." It was another word for orphan.”

“Marginalia Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like who wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird singing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”

“I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold: But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more. In Memoriam A.H.H. Section 5”

“For me, food wasn't a competition about who could make the best dish. It's greatest power was to make taste and turn it into a long lasting memory. As a girl, I had learned from my father that good food could be a vessel, a way to show love, even when you might not have the words to say so. I could feel it in my soul that this was exactly what I was meant to do now. But the question remained, if I built it, would they come.”

“I am not a finished poem, and I am not the song you’ve turned me into. I am a detached human being, making my way in a world that is constantly trying to push me aside, and you who send me letters and emails and beautiful gifts wouldn’t even recognise me if you saw me walking down the street where I live tomorrow for I am not a poem. I am tired and worn out and the eyes you would see would not be painted or inspired but empty and weary from drinking too much at all times and I am not the life of your party who sings and has glorious words to speak for I don’t speak much at all and my voice is raspy and unsteady from unhealthy living and not much sleep and I only use it when I sing and I always sing too much or not at all and never when people are around because they expect poems and symphonies and I am not a poem but an elegy at my best but unedited and uncut and not a lot of people want to work with me because there’s only so much you can do with an audio take, with the plug-ins and EQs and I was born distorted, disordered, and I’m pretty fine with that, but others are not.”

“Words Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones. For the miraculous we do our best, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave not a sting but a kiss. They can be as good as fingers. They can be as trusty as the rock you stick your bottom on. But they can be both daisies and bruises. Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face. Yet often they fail me. I have so much I want to say, so many stories, images, proverbs, etc. But the words aren't good enough, the wrong ones kiss me. Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren. But I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.”

“The quickest way a person can defame your character is by taking something you said out of context. But Fear Not. Everyone that was ever Anyone always had their words taken out of context. If you can't handle having your words twisted up, then leadership is not for you. Leadership is reserved for the ‪#‎BRAVE‬.”

“In one sense the whole process of development consists of the formation of habits; for knowledge itself, and the powers of thought, as well as the higher elements in the will, all depend upon the establishment of fixed ways of reacting to given stimuli. Consequently, the general laws of habituation underlie the whole of education. But the term habit is more commonly restricted to those established reactions that act with little or no participation of consciousness, or, in other words, mechanically or automatically. Such habits as these begin to form very early, and constitute a kind of supporting framework for the higher elements of character.”

“Good communication has just a little to do with eloquence. It's character that makes it more successful. Harsh words nicely articulated are sharp enough to kill your brand!”

“As an unperfect actor on the stage, Who with his fear is put besides his part, Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage, Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart; So I, for fear of trust, forget to say The perfect ceremony of love's rite, And in mine own love's strength seem to decay, O'ercharg'd with burden of mine own love's might. O, let my books be then the eloquence And dumb presagers of my speaking breast; Who plead for love, and look for recompense, More than that tongue that more hath more express'd. O, learn to read what silent love hath writ: To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.”

“I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.”