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Words Quotes

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Words Quotes

“One of the most common platitudes we heard was that “words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language—the comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn’t want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn’t want to know what we did; we didn’t want to know it either.”

WordsIllnessPlatitudesClichesCommunication ProblemWords Failed
Book:The Book of My Lives
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“Words should not be used merely because they are 'old' or obsolete. The words chosen, however remote they may be from colloquial speech or ephemeral suggestions, must be words that remain in literary use, especially in the use of verse, among educated people. (To such Beowulf was addressed, into whatever hands it may since have fallen.) They must need no gloss. The fact that a word was still used by Chaucer, or by Shakespeare, or even later, gives it no claim, if it has in our time perished from literary use.”

WritingWordsVocabularyLinguisticsTranslationArchaic EnglishWord Usage
Book:The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays
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“You alone in Europe are not ancient oh Christianity The most modern European is you Pope Pius X And you whom the windows observe shame keeps you From entering a church and confessing this morning You read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloud That's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapers There are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteries Portraits of great men and a thousand different headlines ("Zone")”

PoetryLanguageChurchEuropeWordsNewspapersAdvertisingProseConfessionCityModernityHeadlinesMysteriesMystery NovelsTextEuropeanBillboardCatalogsPope Pius X
Book:Zone
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“Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. That's what happened to me. Once upon a time, I was a boy named Hugo Cabret, and I desperately believed that a broken automaton would save my life. Now that my cocoon has fallen away and I have emerged as a magician named Professor Alcofrisbas, I can look back and see that I was right. The automaton my father discovered did save me. But now I have built a new automaton. I spent countless hours designing it. I made every gear myself, carefully cut every brass disk, and fashioned every bt of machinery with my own hands. When you wind it up, it can do something I'm sure no other automaton in the world can do. It can tel you the incredible story of Georges Melies, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician. The complicated machinery inside my automaton can produce one-hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can wrote, letter, by letter, an entire book, twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words. These words. THE END”

ChildrenTimeWorkGrowing UpWordsMachineryPicturesClocksAutomatonHugo Cabret
Book:The Invention of Hugo Cabret
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“Why are some words bad? The idea that they could be bothered me as a kid. Words are strings of sounds. How could sounds be bad? But of course: words aren’t just strings of sound. They are strings of sound to which we attach meaning. And yet it’s not the meaning of words that makes them bad either. Just consider this list: poop, crap, manure, dung, feces, stool. It’s all the same s**t. And yet, it’s only “s**t” we shouldn’t say. Why is that? F**k if I know.”

LanguageWordsMeaningShitSemanticsPhilosphyPoo
Book:Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids
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“This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognise it by means of another interpretation....They forget however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world.”

ConsciousnessWordsMaterialismMetaphysicalHegelConceptualPlatonic Forms
Book:German Ideology
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“Just as learning to produce phonologically contoured speech and learning to hear it as such are interrelated aspects of a single task, so, too, learning to creatively project words into new contexts and to grasp the projections of those same words by others into new contexts are two aspects of a single task. What can be hard to see here is that these two pairs of interrelated capacities - to hear and produce potentially significant phonemes, on the one hand, and to detect and to project a pattern of use, on the other - are themselves no less intertwined.”

UseSpeechWordsHearPatternPhonology
Book:The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics
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“It is too sad . I must speak to him - The do you really ? - Sure . How can you expect things to get better , if we do not speak? - Earlier , you talked to Mr. Omochi . Do you feel that things have thus been arranged? - What is certain is that if we do not talk , there is no chance to solve the problem. - What seems more certain is that if we talk, there is serious risk of aggravating the situation.”

WordsSpeakingPalabrasComunicacionEncuentros
Author:Amelie Nothombe
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“In these days of living in a dry land that wants fire, we need to find words, or burn. 'I dreamt of rain last night.' Mai stood near my skin, on the bank of the American River, her flesh wet with simplicity. The scent of star thistle mixed with river mud. ' I met people in my dreams who had never known the inside of a lotus flower. Ever.' In the center of each word another word unfolded. Our ankles cold from the river. Her hands trembled. Bewildered fingers. Be careful around those who claim to know the history of fire and yet remain unafraid of rain.”

HistoryFireDreamsFlowerRainWordsCaliforniaRiverWordSacramento
Book:between appear and disappear
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“I have realised recently that words are just words, a series of letters arranged in a certain order, most likely in the language we were assigned at birth. People are careless with their words nowadays. They throw them away in a text or tweet, they write them, pretend to read them, twist them, misquote them, lie with, without, and about them. They steal them, then they give them away. Worst of all, they forget them. Words are only of value if we remember how to feel what they mean. We won't forget, will we? I like to think that what we have is more than just words.”

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Book:Rock Paper Scissors
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“Societal beliefs have taught us never to rely on our emotions as they're erratic, unpredictable and not logical. The heart doesn't operate in the realm of logic or reason; the mind does. Precisely why human emotions are a built-in navigation system. When was the last time you regretted something? It wasn't what you thought in that moment that sticks with you, it's how you felt.”

SpeakWordsLaw Of AttractionManifestThinkWriteWords Have PowerPower WordsFeelings Fuel Behind WordsTop Ten Power Words
Book:The Energy of Words: Harness the Vibration of Language & Transform Your Life
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“They rolled over her − the words − with an unexpectedness, as though something of great importance had been said, but she could not catch their meaning. She consulted the tree, with her ear jammed to its trunk. Then a funny thing happened. A switch clicked inside her and all the fear and terror that had stoked her hopelessness disappeared. The incipient cancerous tumor that had threatened to derail her young life lay severed, and squirmed in a death-throe like the bodiless tail of a lizard.”

WordsTrees QuotesTrees Inspiration Life And DeathWords Of Power
Book:They Whisper in my Blood
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“Worte sind die blassen Schatten vergessener Namen. Und wie Namen Macht innewohnt, wohnt auch Worten Macht inne. Mit Worten kann man im Geist der Menschen Feuer entfachen. Mit Worten kann man selbst dem hartherzigsten Menschen Tränen entlocken. Es gibt sieben Worte, die einen Menschen dazu bringen, dich zu lieben. Und es gibt zehn Worte, mit denen man den Willen selbst des stärksten Mannes brechen kann. Aber ein Wort ist weiter nichts als die bildliche Darstellung eines Feuers. Ein Name ist das Feuer selbst.”

WisdomWordsMeaningWordPatrick RothfussWorteDer Name Des WindesWort
Book:The Name of the Wind
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