Theodore Dreiser Quotes

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Language is always burdened by thought.

I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough.

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

Whatever I write in email, it doesn't mean anything. It is just words I write.

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

I only mean forty per cent of what I say.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

People like to say, 'What do you mean exactly?' I would answer, 'I mean, but not exactly.'

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves.

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord? HAMLET: Words, words, words.