Lewis Thomas Quotes

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

All people in the world - who are not hermits or mutes - speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, "How are you" or "I'm not feeling well" all over the world. These common words - these common elements that we have between us - the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh.

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop.

I have this little thing that people call Keegan-ese, where I don't speak English words at all. I just say stuff like, "You gotta toish the doish and you gotta maloish the hoish."

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

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

...words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.

I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

When someone asks you, A penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?

Language is our way of communicating what we want and who we are.

You can't eat language but it eases thirst.

Leave words to them whom words, not doings, move.

These glorious things-words-are man's right alone...Without words we should know no more of each other's hearts and thoughts than the dog knows of his fellow dog....for, if you will consider, you always think to yourself in words, though you do not speak them aloud; and without them all our thoughts would be mere blind longings, feelings which we could not understand ourselves.

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.

I gotta use words to talk to you.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing.

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

Goosnargh," said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know what it should be.

If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.

God gave humans language so they could conceal their thoughts from one another.

Conversation is the legs on which thought walks; and writing, the wings by which it flies.

I drink coffee with my right hand, and I smoke with my left. But I talk with both hands.