"They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses."
- Daniel Handler, Adverbs (via larmoyante)
(via buynewsoul)
"where do the words go
when we have said them?"
- Margaret Atwood, The Small Cabin (via beryl-azure)
(via word-digest)
"Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed.
Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in you mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene.
It tells you.
You don’t tell it."
- Joan Didion (via amandaonwriting)
(via thesearepeopleyouknow)
"We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out."
- Winston Churchill (via quotes-shape-us)
(via whygodmadegirls)
Wislawa Szymborska, “The Three Oddest Words”
(via thegraveyardpoets)
"I love you more than words. And I am a big fan of words."
- Joe Dunthorne, Submarine (via dealll)
(via coffeemaps)
"I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me you’d better go."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Beautiful and Damned (via anditslove)
(via buynewsoul)
"She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth… People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in."
- Lorrie Moore, Like Life (via selfinspiration)
(via dulcetdecember)
"I try to think of things to say but nothing comes and if something did come I probably couldn’t say it. This is my great obstacle, the biggest of all the boulders littering my path. In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, it all collapses."
- Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies (via selfinspiration)
(via dulcetdecember)
