A Quote by Lucy Maud Montgomery

People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Quote Topics

Because Big Big Idea Big Ideas Express Ideas Laugh Me People Them Use Words

Quote Author

Lucy Maud Montgomery
Canadian - Educator
November 30, 1874 - April 24, 1942

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

Ernest Hemingway

Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far to relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

Hunter S. Thompson

Today's comics use four-letter words as a shortcut to thinking. They're shooting for that big laugh and it becomes a panic thing, using four-letter words to shock people.

Red Skelton

I go through the text making sure I haven't used any big words. If I find any fancy adjectives have crept in, I replace them with small words like 'nice' and 'big'. I've liked these words ever since I was told not to use them in English class at school. After that, I check that the sentences are short so as people won't get confused and I shorten all the chapters so they won't get bored. I can't read anything complicated these days, my attention span is too short. Everyone else probably feels the same.

Martin Millar

You are what you think. So just think big, believe big, act big, work big, give big, forgive big, laugh big, love big and live big.

Andrew Carnegie

Sometimes when you remember yourself in a big, big fight, and you remember being very emotional, you use words, and you react in a way that you take back some hours later.

Thomas Tuchel

When someone isn’t smart enough to express their frustration, they use dirty words. Those are words that describe a lack of intelligence. Smart people don’t use those kind of dirty words, because they find it an insult to their intelligence.

Nouman Ali Khan

Big minds have big ideas. Small minds use big ideas to justify bad ideas.

Walter Darby Bannard

They think so small, they use small words. But not me, I'm smarter than that, I've worked it out. I'm stretching my mouth to let those big words come on out.

Peter Gabriel

I like to use big words so people will think I know what I'm talking about.

Jerry Coleman

I've learned to use big words. Because I'm an avid reader, I can prove myself as a smart and diligent person.

Marley Dias

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.

David Frum

If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall.

Steven Morrissey

Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden -- a secret language.