“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.” — Roland Barthes

“Think of a word as a pendulum instead of a fixed entity. A word can sweep by your ear and by its very sound suggest hidden meanings, preconscious associations. Listen to these words: blood, tranquil, democracy. You know what they mean literally but you have associations with those words that are cultural, as well as your own personal associations.” — Rita Mae Brown

“As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest, or new because experience is new. . . . But, as a black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.” — June Jordan

“I’ll try to be nicer if you’ll try to be smarter.”

“Get a taste of religion, lick a witch.”

“The power of words is immense. A well-chosen word has often sufficed to stop a flying army, to change defeat into victory and to save an empire.” — Emile de Girardin

“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.” — Anais Nin (1903-1977)

“I saw the book — didn’t read it at all — didn’t think it worth reading — fingered it a little. Mother thought as I did.” — George Whitman, brother of Walt, on “Leaves of Grass”

just remember, when you’re doing your art, you need no one’s approval but your own. thank you. — wm

“Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.” — Willa Cather

“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 1999, spoken by the character Albus Dumbledore

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

— J.K. Rowling, “King’s Cross,” Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2007, spoken by the character Albus Dumbledore

“Words are loaded pistols.” — Jean-Paul Sartre