Diane Ackerman Quotes

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.

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Words are what created our world. Words are what keep it going.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

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

I'm so language-based and I'm so about communicating, and my art has always been very audience-based, and very about being functional and communicating something, and about feeling like I have to be heard.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

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

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?

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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!

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

What a pity it is that there are so many words! Whenever one wants to say anything, three or four ways of saying it run into one's head together and one can't tell which to choose. It is as troublesome and puzzling as choosing a ribbon ... or a husband.

You're all mad for words. Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books. Give me things!

Words were her plague and words were her redemption.

She tore a page from the book and ripped it in half. Then a chapter. Soon, there was nothing but scraps of words littered between her legs and all around her. The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this. Without words, the Führer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better. What good were the words? She said it audibly now, to the orange-lit room. "What good are the words?

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

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

In this box are all the words I know… Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is use them well and in the right places.

According to my wife, my use of vocabulary is wide and varied.

I love words.

The vocabulary I use has to reflect the people I'm trying to communicate with.

If you can talk, you can write.