Susie Dent Quotes

I'm a massive fan of the dictionary.

A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words.

When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.

I do love perusing the dictionary to find how many words I don't use - words that have specific, sharp, focused meaning. I also love the sound of certain words. I love the sound of the word pom-pom.

There are about 30 words around you all the time, like 'thread' or 'exit.'

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

I'm quite obsessed with words.

I was fascinated by the shape of words even before I knew what they meant.

I keep a big, fat dictionary with me while writing.

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.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

I'm a vocabulary nerd.

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

Words are all we have.

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.

I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time, I thought the greatest word was 'jejune' and I would throw it into every piece because something about it appealed to me.

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.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft.

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?

Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.

Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.