Stephen King

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear."

Stephen King (Different Seasons)

Kirsten Dewar

Words. Roll them on your tongue. Swirl them around your mouth. Breathe them in. Taste them: the rich vibrant golds and greens, the colours of jealousy and fealty; the yellows, friendship distilled, bottled sunshine; the seething, vengeful reds; passionate plum; the shy and retiring grays. Pause. Close your eyes. Study the pictures on the inside of your lids. Look at them closely. Do they whisper, and nudge and call out to be spoken? Consider their sound. Tease out each each syllable. Do the nerves grate? Can you feel the muscles in your back tense? Check your hands. Are they cold and clammy? Hot and sudoriferous? Are your palms open wide, or fisted balls? Would these words tease, tempt, tantalise, sending a frisson of what could only be sheer delight down the receiver’s spine? Or are they sharp, jagged, meant to hurt and harm? Are they royal orchid, or common garden variety? Were they nurtured in love, or deceit? Can they, should they live an existence independent of their speaker? Remember: words once spoken, cannot be recalled. Finally, having considered all these things, exhale: breath them into life. Speak. Give them voice.

(c) 2008 all rights reserved.

Diane Setterfield

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic... "

Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

Aldous Huxley

"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."

Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

Virginia Woolf

"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."

Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

Alberto Manguel

"At one magical instant in my early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to me, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. I became a reader."

Alberto Manguel

Ian Rankin

"His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life. "

Ian Rankin (Knots and Crosses)

Gordon B. Hinckley

"You will have significant experiences. I hope that you will write them down and keep record of them, that you will read them from time to time and refresh your memory of those meaningful and significant things. Some may be funny. Some may be significant only to you. Some of them may be sacred and quietly beautiful. Some may build one upon another until they represent a lifetime of special experiences."

Gordon B. Hinckley

Stephen King

'Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.'

Stephen King

Mark Twain

'The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug ..'

Mark Twain

John Greenleaf Whittier

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'"

John Greenleaf Whittier (Maud Muller - Pamphlet)

Diane Setterfield

"I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled."

Diane Setterfield

Gordon B. Hinckley

"I love libraries. I love books. There is something sacred, I think, about a great library because it represents the preservation of the wisdom, the learning, the pondering, of men and women of all the ages accumulated together under one roof to which we can have access as our needs require."

Gordon B. Hinckley

A.S. Byatt

"Things are not what they seem."

A.S. Byatt

Cornellia Funke

"Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before."

Cornellia Funke

A.S. Byatt

"Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by."

A.S. Byatt

Anthony Doerr

"Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death..... and here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

Anthony Doerr

Mahatma Gandhi

"Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart."

Mahatma Gandhi

Jeffrey Eugenides

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "

Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "

Jeffrey Eugenides