Top 1200 English Words Quotes & Sayings - Page 17

Poetry is very crafted. You can't have too many words. It needs compression. It has to be spare, just the right number of words.

I don't speak cockney and I don't pretend to come from that part of the world. For the longest time the English, like the Beatles and so on sounded American. "She loves you yeah yeah yeah!" All of the sudden you sound American. It doesn't work that way with Americans who try to sing English. It's not convincing. If I say "Footy" and "tele" and "Brissy" and "Sydney" and "Simmo" it's not convincing.

I think the French agonise more about being French, I don't think English think about being English that much. I think the Scottish think about being Scottish and the Welsh think about being Welsh, but the English don't really care. But the French think about it all the time, it's an absolute preoccupation.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

America is not a nation of separation. All our citizens are Americans. The common denominator is our language. Our language is English. The glue that binds generation after generation is both our Constitution and our English language.

It's an unnecessary burden to try to think of words and also worry at the same time whether they're the right words.

You and I have spoken all these words, but for the way we have to go,words are no preparation. I have one small drop of knowing in my soul. Let it dissolve in your ocean

Living sites are only as good as today's update. If the words are dull, nobody will read them, and nobody will come back. If the words are wrong, people will be misled, disappointed, infuriated. If the words aren't there, people will shake their heads and lament your untimely demise.

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.

Words began fights and words ended them.

One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits.

The English landscape at its finest - such as I saw this morning - possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term 'greatness.'

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

Words are just words. They only bother you if you let them.

Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?

I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be.

Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and broken promises.

Not a man to mince words. People, yes. But not words.

My favourite film-maker west of the English Channel is not English - but to me doesn't seem American either - David Lynch - a curious American-European film-maker. He has - against odds - achieved what we want to achieve here. He takes great risks with a strong personal voice and adequate funds and space to exercise it. I thought Blue Velvet was a masterpiece.

You and I must realize that the English language is filled with words that, in addition to their literal meanings, convey distinct emotional intensity. For example, if you develop a habit of saying you 'hate' things - you 'hate' your hair; you 'hate' your job; you 'hate' having to do something - do you think this raises the intensity of your negative emotional states more than if you use a phrase like 'I prefer something else'?

No matter where we live, we have to use words. Once you've been looking into words, their stories, it's easy to fall in love with them.

I feel Scottish when with English people, and when I'm with Scottish people, I realise I'm English.

Some time ago, the United States was an English colony. If an Englishman were asked if the United States would be independent, he would have said no, that it would always be an English colony.

Do not use poisonous words against anyone, for words wound more fatally than even arrows.

I have an English identity and a French identity. When I'm in France, I'm more outgoing. And the French part of me cooks, whereas the English part of me writes.

The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time.

I've got to learn French because I've been going there for years and still, the only words I know are the swear words.

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.

I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!

We'd said we'd keep in touch. But touch is not something you can keep; as soon as it's gone, it's gone. We should have said we'd keep in words, because they are all we can string between us--words on a telephone line, words appearing on a screen.

I'd studied English literature and American history, but the English literature, which I thought was going to be helpful to me in an immediate way, was the opposite. So I had to un-think a lot of things and move out of my own head, and I learned a lot. It was like graduate school, but an un-graduate school or an un-school.

Since I stopped writing, I read more than ever. Other people's words, not my own - my words are gone.

Words are only as good as the response to those words.

Words are everything. Words give wings even to those who have been stamped upon, broken beyond all hope of repair.

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

I put a lot of stock in the written word, and the power of it. That's what I love about acting and reading scripts. Words are really powerful. I don't believe that axiom at all - words can absolutely hurt you. Words can wound. They can do a lot of damage. I think they can do way more damage than sticks and stones. I'll take sticks and stones.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

Words like meditation, karma, samskaras, they're just words. You can get into the jargon, you can speak it, but that doesn't mean you'll be any freer.

For me, words are just words, nothing else.

For many, 'rehearsing' means going over the words in your head. That's not good enough say the words aloud.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that the moment it's put into words it becomes exaggerated. Because the moment it's put into words there's an abuse, an excess in the expression of the idea that makes it false.

You can always buy something in English, you can't always sell something in English.

People in Russia learned English off the Beatles. People in Japan learned English off the Stone Roses. Noel Gallagher says music can't change the world, but the Roses made him want to start a group, so it changed his world.

Hank Cochran was a man of very few words, but certainly the words that he chose were the right ones to use.

It's funny because I've made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

The first question is always, 'We loved him on 'Dancing with the Stars,' we loved him in the Olympics, but can he speak English?' Yes I speak English. Yes, I can.

Words are the most powerful thing in the universe... Words are containers. They contain faith, or fear, and they produce after their kind.

Your words and my words are the same, but not our meaning.

I heard words and words full of holes aching.

In English, there is one word for sister. In Chinese, there are two separate words, for elder and younger sister. This is actually a translation problem because if you see the word sister, you don't know how to translate it to Chinese because you don't know if it's an elder sister or younger.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

Most songwriting like poetry takes a careful selection of words. Sometimes you're just channeling something and a selection of words come out that you wouldn't normally say, but you come up with an assortment of words that are really special. It just makes sense even if it's normally how you wouldn't express yourself.

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.

There are few words in Russian for the Western concept of 'law,' but there are legions of words for connections, helping people from one's neck of the woods.

For me, words are just words, nothing else

There's something so wonderful about writing in rhyme where it isn't just the meaning of the words, it's the music to the words and the shape and the sound.

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can't understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren't always the most reliable thing.

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

More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.

When we mistake words for reality, we are subject to the tyranny of words.