Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

Words that make questions may not be questions at all.

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context.

I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear. "Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock. Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.

I suppose there is something appealing about a word that everyone uses with absolute confidence but on whose exact meaning no two people can agree. The word that I'm thinking of right now is genre, one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other

You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

I is reading it hundreds of times,' the BFG said. 'And I is still reading it and teaching new words to myself and how to write them. It is the most scrumdiddlyumptious story.' Sophie took the book out of his hand. 'Nicholas Nickleby,' she read aloud. 'By Dahl's Chickens,' the BFG said.

At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.

Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

Hey," he said. "It's someday." He said the last word in Greek.

It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.

Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.

I once used the word OBSOLETE in a headline, only to discover that 43 per cent of housewives had no idea what it meant. In another headline, I used the word INEFFABLE, only to discover that I didn't know what it meant myself.

The point,' Ms. Conyers continued, "is that no word had one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life.

So many problems are solved simply by knowing enough verbs.

Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.