A Quote by Dennis Potter

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

Dennis Potter

Quote Topics

Been Know Mouths Never Trouble Whose Words

Quote Author

Dennis Potter
British - Dramatist
May 17, 1935 - June 7, 1994

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

Dennis Potter

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

Penelope Lively

Words were one of the most powerful forces known— or unknown— to man. The Most High had created this world with His words. And humans, who had been fashioned in His image, could direct the entire course of their lives with their words, their mouths as the rudder on a ship, as the bridle on a horse. They produced with their words. They destroyed with their words.

Gena Showalter

We are full of words whose true meaning we haven't been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don't know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery.

Alessandro Baricco

O lust, thou infernal fire, whose fuel is gluttony; whose flame is pride, whose sparkles are wanton words; whose smoke is infamy; whose ashes are uncleanness; whose end is hell.

Francis Quarles

Golf has been the sport of the social elite, with lawyers and doctors. But I have never been embarrassed by the looks I've been given by others. I have sometimes been looked at with condescension and it still happens now, but I know how to deal with it - I know whose opinions count.

Tommy Fleetwood

The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Look, words are like the air: they belong to everybody. Words are not the problem; it's the tone, the context, where those words are aimed, and in whose company they are uttered. Of course murderers and victims use the same words, but I never read the words utopia, or beauty, or tenderness in police descriptions. Do you know that the Argentinean dictatorship burnt The Little Prince ? And I think they were right to do so, not because I do not love The Little Prince , but because the book is so full of tenderness that it would harm any dictatorship.

Juan Gelman

Better never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you; for you only make your trouble double trouble when you do.

Robert D Keppel

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.

Athol Fugard

You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.

Alison McGhee

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

Daniel Gilbert

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.

Norton Juster

I don't know what goes on in prison. I've never been in trouble with the police in my life.

Harry Redknapp

I'll drive down the street, and I'll practice improv. I will sit there at a red light and see two guys talking to each other, and I will just start playing both characters. I can't hear them, but I can see their mouths moving, so I'll just put words in their mouths.