“The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.”

“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

“The Gospel of John tells us that the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of glorious grace and truth, was also the Word through whom all things- all phenomena in nature, all capacities for fruitful interaction, all the kinds of beauty- were made. To honor that Word as he deserves to be honored,evangelicals must know both Christ and what he has made.”

“...at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...”

“Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.”

“Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.”