Norton Juster Quotes

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

Words," he said, "is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

Words are mighty, words are living:Serpents with their venomous stings,Or bright angels, crowding round us,With heaven's light upon their wings:Every word has its own spirit,True or false, that never dies;Every word man's lips have utteredEchoes in God's skies.

We live and breathe words.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

No matter where we live, we have to use words. Once you've been looking into words, their stories, it's easy to fall in love with them.

We think of speaking as something we do naturally, without any effort. But like playing music, it requires attention and knowledge and practice.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Language. By this we build pyramids, fight battles, ordain and administer laws, shape and teach religion, and knit man to man, cultivate each other, and ourselves.

Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.

"Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?

We must plow through the whole of language.

The tongue of man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there of every kind.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!

So what's the point of using words nobody else knows or can say comfortably? I just don't understand that.

Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.

What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.