Virginia Woolf Quotes

A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.

This world is nothing except it tend to another.

We belong to each other.

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

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

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

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.

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

For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence.

Grammar is the analysis of language.

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

I'm telling you, I could teach at a university, [George] Carlin, a whole semester. The construction and deconstruction of the words, the language, the order.

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

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

To be is to be related.

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

It's simple. Nothing exists except in relation to something else.

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.

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

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.

Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

There was no "me" in Alchemy. Well, phonetically there was, but that wasn't the point.