3 Inspiring 147-Word Quotes

In a world that often moves too quickly, we can find profound wisdom in the simplicity of a single quote. Words have the power to uplift, inspire, and offer a fresh perspective. Sometimes, all it takes is a carefully crafted sentence or two to ignite a spark of motivation and encourage a change in mindset. In this post, we invite you to explore a unique collection of three masterfully crafted 147-word quotes. Each one is a miniature masterpiece, blending eloquence and insight to inspire positive action and reflection. Whether you're seeking a burst of creativity, a moment of solace, or a call to action, these quotes are designed to resonate deeply and provide inspiration in just the right measure. Dive in and discover how these beautifully articulated thoughts can become a part of your journey, offering guidance and encouragement whenever you need it.

1. “All words are pegs to hang ideas on.” - Henry Ward Beecher

2. “The menu is not the meal.” - Alan Watts

3. “On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.” - Marcel Proust

4. “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” - Henry David Thoreau

5. “In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart. ” - John Bunyan

6. “A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.” - Kurt Vonnegut

7. “The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

8. “All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.” - Ernest Hemingway

9. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” - Aldous Huxley

10. “The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.” - Malcolm X

11. “These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.” - Gilbert Highet

12. “Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.” - William Wordsworth

13. “Then I thought of reading—the nice and subtle happiness of reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication.” - Logan Pearsall Smith

14. “Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.” - Alberto Manguel

15. “She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” - Annie Dillard

16. “He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.She was the book thief without the words.Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.” - Markus Zusak

17. “But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.” - Rebecca Wells

18. “Don't, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.” - Samuel Johnson

19. “Where do the words gowhen we have said them?” - Margaret Atwood

20. “How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described.” - Anne Rice

21. “Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.” - Stephanie Connolly

22. “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 eloquenceAnd 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.” - William Shakespeare

23. “Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.("The Man Whom The Trees Loved")” - Algernon Blackwood

24. “The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.” - Ross McDonald

25. “To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.” - Augusto Roa Bastos

26. “Letters couldn't care less whether what is written with them is true or false.” - Augusto Roa Bastos

27. “One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

28. “The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.” - Henry David Thoreau

29. “…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….” - A.S. Byatt

30. “All things human begin with words.” - David Rains Wallace

31. “Equally, the surrealists consider words as witnesses of life acting in a direct way in human affairs. To use words properly it was necessary to treat them with respect, for they were the intermediaries between oneself and the rest of creation. To abuse them was immediately to set oneself adrift from true being. Words need to be coaxed to reveal a little of their true nature, so as to close the breach that exists between the writer and the universe. The world is not something alien against which man is in conflict. Rather man and cosmos exist in reciprocal motion. We are not cast adrift in an alien or meaningless environment. The universe is intimate with us and, as Breton insisted, it is a cryptogram to be deciphered.” - Michael Richardson

32. “She kept watching the words. ” - Markus Zusak

33. “I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.” - Tom Waits

34. “We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” - Franz Kafka

35. “Harper, treat your words with careFor they may cause joy or despairSing your songs of health and loveOf dragons flaming from above” - Anne McCaffrey

36. “For Hood's sake,' the foreigner muttered. 'What's wrong with words?' 'With words,' said Redmask, turning away, 'meanings change.' 'Well,' Anaster Toc said, following as Redmask made his way back to his army's camp,.. 'that is precisely the point. That's their value - their ability to adapt -' 'Grow corrupt, you mean. The Letheri are masters at corrupting words, their meanings. They call war peace, they call tyranny liberty. On which side of the shadow you stand decides a word's meaning. Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they how those others are deceived and made into fools because they choose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse.” - Steven Erikson

37. “There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.” - Victor Pelevin

38. “The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

39. “The thing he said aloud did not succeed.” - Tony Burgess

40. “We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.” - George Eliot

41. “A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.” - Jennifer Donnelly

42. “Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.” - Elizabeth von Arnim

43. “Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.” - Theodore Dreiser

44. “Somos o que pensamos, e dizemos aquilo que pensamos com palavras. Se as palavras são tão mal usadas, deturpadas, mal pronunciadas muitas vezes, que pensamento podem expressar? Isso é frustrante.” - José Saramago

45. “She was battered and beaten up, and not smiling this time. Liesel could see it on her face. Blood leaked from her nose and licked at her lips. Her eyes had blackened. Cuts had opened up and a series of wounds were rising to the surface of her skin. All from the words. From Liesel's words.” - Markus Zusak

46. “Words are timeless. You should utter them or write them with a knowledge of their timelessness.” - Khalil Gibran

47. “Strong words resonate.” - Toba Beta

48. “He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.” - Robert Cormier

49. “Sometimes you're drowning yourself in your own words.” - Steve Maraboli

50. “Ideas were found by the freethinker, expressed by poet with the new words,formulated by scholar into knowledge.” - Toba Beta

51. “In soul of every newborn baby, words are waiting to be written.” - Toba Beta

52. “Bait GoatThere is adistance wheremagnets pull,we feel, havingheld them back. Likewisethere is adistance wherewords attract.Set one outlike a bait goat and wait and seven otherswill approach.But watch out:roving packs canpull your wordaway. You find your stake yanked and some rough bunchto thank.” - Kay Ryan

53. “I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.” - Siri Hustvedt

54. “Many people can and have written books, but many have nothing to say.” - Amy Rogers

55. “I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the luminosity of the words and the violent verbal subjugation by a complacent God. The hatred is a difficult hatred for how can you allow yourself to hate words that are part of the melody of life in this part of the world? Words that taught us early on what reverence is?” - Pascal Mercier

56. “Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

57. “Words are only words” - Jude Morgan

58. “Talk like an ambassador (Eph 4:29-30). 1)Consider the person ("only what is helpful for building others up")2) Consider the problem ("according to their needs")3) Consider the process ("that it may benefit those who listen")” - Timothy S. Lane

59. “Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?” - Cornelia Funke

60. “A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.” - Gaston Bachelard

61. “I think a man's "wordplay" can be so fucking sexy!!! I love a good mind fuck!!” - Junnita Jackson

62. “All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.” - Khalil Gibran

63. “What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.” - Elizabeth von Arnim

64. “She liked the word ineffable because it meant a feeling so big or vast that it could not be expressed in words.And yet, because it could not be expressed in words, people had invented a word to express it, and that made Liesl feel hopeful, somehow.” - Lauren Oliver

65. “His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.” - Roberto Bolaño

66. “So I kept reading, just to stay alive. In fact, I'd read two or three books at the same time, so I wouldn't finish one without being in the middle of another -- anything to stop me from falling into the big, gaping void. You see, books fill the empty spaces. If I'm waiting for a bus, or am eating alone, I can always rely on a book to keep me company. Sometimes I think I like them even more than people. People will let you down in life. They'll disappoint you and hurt you and betray you. But not books. They're better than life.” - Marc Acito

67. “Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.” - Boris Pasternak

68. “I did not know then that words and music are more deadly than any spear.” - India Edghill

69. “After awhile you realize that putting your actions where your mouth is makes you less likely to have to put your money where your mouth is.” - Criss Jami

70. “This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.” - Michael Ondaatje

71. “He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ...” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

72. “I want to see the thirstinside the syllablesI want to touch the firein the sound:I want to feel the darknessof the cry. I wantwords as roughas virgin rocks.” - Verb.” - Pablo Neruda

73. “A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.” - Siri Hustvedt

74. “Words are wind.” - George R.R. Martin

75. “The true poem rests between the words.” - Vanna Bonta

76. “A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.” - C. Day Lewis

77. “Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.” - David Quammen

78. “I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.” - John Burroughs

79. “Words are power. The more words you know and can recognize, use, define, understand, the more power you will have as a human being... The more language you know, the more likely it is that no one can get over on you."selection from book: Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community” - Quraysh Ali Lansana & Georgia A. Popoff

80. “I search his eyes for the slightest sign of anything, fear, remorse, anger. But there's only the same look of amusement that ended our last conversation. It's as if he's speaking the words again. "Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other."He's right. We did.The point of my arrow shifts upward. I release the string. And President Coin collapses over the side of the balcony and plunges to the ground. Dead.” - Suzanne Collins

81. “You ask me why I don't speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill'Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it's how it mends it” - Criss Jami

82. “Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. ... Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.” - Helen Keller

83. “I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?” - Lynne Sharon Schwartz

84. “It feels like spoken words, this bridge. I want it but fear it. God, I want so desperately to reach the other side - just like I want the words. I want my words to build bridges strong enough to walk on. I want them to tower over the world so I can stand up on them and walk to the other side.” - Markus Zusak

85. “Words were another sword for the man who wielded them well.” - Brent Weeks

86. “I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!” - C. JoyBell C.

87. “Disappear, she says. I love that word.” - Will Christopher Baer

88. “Your words have the power of life and death. Choose them wisely.” - Orrin Woodward

89. “...I gave you painted air - tears I couldn't weep - truths I couldn't speak - all the words that caught in my throat...” - John Geddes

90. “Don't let yourself be amazed by the imagination of a writer and his words, writers are almost all the time in a love-hate relationship with words.” - Nema Al-Araby

91. “How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions” - Miguel Syjuco

92. “People talk a lot but they rarely say anything.” - Sandra Chami Kassis

93. “...when you're hard and unyielding your words score me with lines - I hate lines - I want curves - curves are happy like a snowman ...” - John Geddes

94. “...you can use words if you wish, but I'm warning you - I've learned how to read your heart ...” - John Geddes

95. “words...To lure the tribal shoals to epigram / And order.” - Seamus Heaney

96. “... but I love language. It is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and language has power. Whether in a song lyric, a poem, a speech, or a simple conversation, we’ve all experienced words that resonate with us. They may make us recall a powerful moment, inspire us, move us, or perhaps, comfort us…. But at the same time, we don’t think in words. We think in pictures. If I say the word ‘dog’ to you, you aren’t picturing the letters, d-o-g, you’re picturing a dog from your memory...” - Lily Velden

97. “The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth.  But all of that is nothing if those words fail to touch the heart and make one feel.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

98. “...the words make our silences easier--they're the current that runs under them.” - Sue Miller

99. “I liked old time music but what i meant by that was the period from the 1930s through the 60s, nothing before and little after. Performers like fats waller, Sinatra, billie holiday, louis armstrong, rosemary clooney, ella, sammy Davis Jr, dean martin... If the lyrics weren't stupid. Words were important.” - Jeffery Deaver

100. “What’s more amazing is how we habitually take the power ofour voice for granted. When we bring our awareness to our voiceand learn to express it in new ways—with impeccability—werediscover our true message. Your voice is the key to unlockingthe power and magnificence of your message. This work isn’tabout singing on key, finding the right words, leaving out ‘ums’and ‘uhs’ and articulating clearly. This is about allowing andaccepting your Magical Self. Let’s talk about how words createyou.” - Dielle Ciesco

101. “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.” - Amy Tan

102. “Each word's evocative value or virtue, its individual power of touching springs in the mind and of initiating visions, becomes a treasure to revel in. Besides this hold on affection a word may well have about it the glamorous prestige of high adventures in great company. Think of that the plain word "dust" calls to mind. "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was." "Dust hath closed Helen's eye." "All follow this and come to dust." "The way to dusty death." So, to the lover of words, each word may be not a precious stone only, but one that has shone on Solomon's temple or in Cleopatra's hair.” - Charles Edward Montague

103. “Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.” - Mina Loy

104. “Words were sometimes like ammo. They could strike you with fear worse than an arrow. And worse was sometimes knowing ahead a time what the words were.” - Cyndi Goodgame

105. “Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.” - Maya Angelou

106. “There are only 3 things that can make your dreams come true: your thoughts, your words, and your actions.” - MIke Dooley

107. “Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

108. “You can only fit so many words in a postcard, only so many in a phone call, only so many into space before you forget that words are sometimes used for things other than filling emptiness.” - Sarah Kay

109. “The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?” - James Salter

110. “I don’t believe in signs. I believe in words, and action, and doing. And what you’re doing is sitting and waiting and that is one hundred percent unacceptable.” - Lauren Blakely

111. “Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.” - Dejan Stojanovic

112. “How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive.” - Dejan Stojanovic

113. “If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.” - Dejan Stojanovic

114. “My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world.” - Dejan Stojanovic

115. “The baby understands that its mother loves it. [...] Words have their origin in baby talk, so words have their origin in love.” - Yasunari Kawabata

116. “A word only writes Its night and ridesIts dream.” - Dejan Stojanovic

117. “I would rather my heart be without words than my words be without heart.” - LaMar Boschman

118. “‎Without a knowledge of where words come from, things disappear, history is lost.” - Patrick Lane

119. “Words are music to the ears, alone or together, with or without melody.” - A.A. Patawaran

120. “A tongue is about the size of a bullet, but much more fierce and powerful.” - Anthony Liccione

121. “Cordelia loved his explanations. She loved knowing words that belonged to things she'd never seen, even to things you couldn't see at all. She remembered those words carefully. "Magic," George had said, "is something unnatural, something that doesn't really exist. If I snap my fingers and Othello suddenly turns white, that's magic. If I fetch a bucket of paint and paint him white, it isn't." He laughed, and for a moment it looked as if he felt like snapping his fingers or fetching that bucket. Then he went on, "Everything that looks like magic is really a trick. There's no such thing as magic." Cordelia grazed with relish. "Magic" was her favorite word - for something that didn't exist at all.” - Leonie Swann

122. “What words cannot convey ... the mind can read.” - Stephen Richards

123. “They said a lot of things to each other that night, but nothing that involved words.” - Michael Grant Fear

124. “If you have to use the words, “deep down” all that means is you're fooling yourself. You're seeing what you want to see and not what's really there.” - Nyrae Dawn

125. “...you know I wanted a Madonna, not a whore - I made you sacred offering you my words...” - John Geddes

126. “...all this time I've been worshiping you - when other men wanted to kiss you, I've been offering the praise of my lips...” - John Geddes

127. “...being with you was so easy and natural - there was no strain - I never had to guard my words...” - John Geddes

128. “He'd call me false and faithless and I've always had a weakness for those two words; next to cruel, they're the nicest words for a woman to hear, and not so hard to earn.” - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

129. “There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.” - John Updike

130. “My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.” - Margaret Edson

131. “It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.” - Italo Calvino

132. “The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

133. “Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.” - Eugene Ionesco

134. “He read it over twenty times and though the darkness that sang on held steady about him, the unhurried words fell bright through his mind, going down golden through deep water, and when one passed another came, ceaselessly, shining.” - Elizabeth Spencer

135. “Under every friendship there is a difficult sentence that must be said, in order that the friendship can be survived.” - zadie smith

136. “Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.” - Don Roff

137. “To say someone is a vision is to pay them a great compliment. If you say that they look a sight it is a grave insult.” - Teresa Monachino

138. “The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns connected one to the other create a verb, and verbs had created everything, had skittered across the face of the void like pebbles across a frozen pond. She had not created a verb herself, but the cherry-wood cabinet in the hall contained book after book, jar after jar, vessel upon vessel, all brown as branches, and she had faith.” - Catherynne M. Valente

139. “I don’t know: perhaps it’s a dream, all a dream. (That would surprise me.) I’ll wake, in the silence, and never sleep again. (It will be I?) Or dream (dream again), dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of murmurs (I don’t know, that’s all words), never wake (all words, there’s nothing else).You must go on, that’s all I know.They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I?You must go on.I can’t go on.You must go on.I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.You must go on.I can’t go on.I’ll go on.” - Samuel Beckett

140. “He falls quiet again and tries to understand how he can be saying these things, how it can be that his dark words are coming out into the light and yet he is still alive. At once he storms the doorway that has suddenly opened for him in the endless corridor in which he has been bumping around for years; words spill out, cut off, confused, ashamed, squeezing out.” - David Grossman

141. “More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him.” - David Grossman

142. “With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I'd been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen.” - Denis Johnson

143. “If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.” - J.B. Phillips

144. “Sento ancora la follia scorrermi dentro, ma ancora non ho scritto le parole che avrei voluto, la tigre mi è rimasta sulla schiena. Morirò con addosso quella figlia di puttana, ma almeno le ho dato battaglia. E se fra voi c'è qualcuno che si sente abbastanza matto da voler diventare scrittore, gli consiglio va' avanti, sputa in un occhio al sole, schiaccia quei tasti, è la migliore pazzia che possa esserci, i secoli chiedono aiuto, la specie aspira spasmodicamente alla luce, e all'azzardo e alle risate. Regalateglieli. Ci sono abbastanza parole per noi tutti.” - Charles Bukowski

145. “There is a weird power in a spoken word.” - Joseph Conrad

146. “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.” - Carl Sagan

147. “Okay, let's put this another way―if what you're about to say wouldn't look good permanently engraved on your tombstone, bite your tongue.” - Richelle E. Goodrich