Rainbow Rowell Quotes

I think we would all like to believe that every new event demands a new word. But we're environmentally conscious with our words. We recycle words we've got.

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.

He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner. He tries to compress as much thought as possible into a few words. On the contrary, the man who talks everlastingly and promiscuously, who seems to have an exhaustless magazine of sound, crowds so many words into his thoughts that he always obscures, and very frequently conceals them.

My father always said that too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious.

Vic pointed at him, two finger-guns of approval. “I like a man who knows the value of words, doesn’t spend ’em too cheap.” Ranulf nodded. “That is the manner in which I roll.

How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)

In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.

A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella.

The whole thrust of theatre is different, just because the writing is so much more respected in a play. Whereas in movies - and having been the writer, I can say from experience - the writer is lower down on the food chain.

Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary.

I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence - it's dead and who needs it?

Looking at virtual reality through computer screens, video game screens, and above all television screens is a denial of personality development. It's a denial of socialization, of expansion of vocabulary, of interaction with real human beings.

Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either.

I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary.

He was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either.

Talk is free but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.

Of all the disciplines involved in making anything - TV, film or anything I do - the writing is the most valuable commodity.

Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.

To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out

Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences. 828

By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.