Alfred Marshall Quotes

I guess I'm attracted to more archaic words because they can be imbued with more meaning, because their definition is elusive.

The way I write, words can means lots of different things.

Words take on many different meanings.

It is important that we realize that words have meanings far beyond the dictionary definition.

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

I'm perplexed, though, by your application of the term 'negative' to my figural imagery.

It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of a living thought and may vary in color and context according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.

I'm well-read as far as literary fiction, but I wanted to make better decisions about my writing, to use words or phrases more confidently by learning how your words can be interpreted, the shades of meaning, the different connotations.

I looked up 'standard' in the dictionary. There are eleven different definitions.

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.

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

No word is absolutely wrong or dirty or insulting. It all depends upon context and intention.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

For me, words are just words, nothing else.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.