Her words Quotes

“I can see her struggling to find the right word. Death seems so harsh. Passing so oblique. Some things are beyond words, I suppose, and she never finishes the statement. It seems right, that her words should fall into oblivion; after all, she—like me, like everyone—has no words for what follows, for the unknowable, only her hopes and prayers and an unwavering faith in something more.”

“Is it not so presumptuous to write a word? To write a word is to give the word a space all of its own. You build a home for it and hope it can find itself at home among all the other words. Nestled in a new place.”

“Soon, there was nothing but scraps of words littered between her legs and all around her. Ther words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this. Without words, the Fuhrer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better.”

“She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.”

“I remember, for instance, the first time I went to the great palace of Versailles outside Paris and how, as I wandered around among all those gardens and fountains and statues, I had a sense that the place was alive with ghosts which I was just barely able to see, that somewhere just beneath the surface of all that was going on around me at that moment, the past was going on around me too with such reality and such poignance that I had to have somebody else to tell about it if only to reassure myself that I wasn’t losing my mind. I wanted and sorely needed to name to another human being the sights that I was seeing and the thoughts and feelings they were giving rise to. I thought that in a way I could not even surely know what I was seeing physically until I could speak of it to someone else, could not come to terms with what I was feeling as either real or unreal until I could put it into words and speak those words and hear other words in response to mine. But there was nobody to speak to, as it happened, and I can still remember the frustration of it: the sense I had of something trying to be born in me that could not be born without the midwifery of expressing it; the sense, it might not be too much to say, of my self trying to be born, of a threshold I had to cross in order to move on into the next room of who I had it in me just then to become. “in the beginning was the Word,” John writes, and perhaps part of what that means is that until there is a word, there can be no beginning. Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, in an essay called The Speaking and Writing of Words.”

“Let me summarise our delicate position in this universe: Our every word can be our last word; our every look can be our last look! Our every moment can be our last moment! Are we happy about this fragile situation? No! Are we going to deceive ourselves with some childish stories, in other words with religion? No! Then what are we going to do? We will change this desperate situation, we will strike this chaotic universe with human mind, with high intelligence, in short with science! Humanity’s ultimate objective is to reshape this dangerous universe so that no threat will ever remain for our existence!”

“I had a teacher who stressed for me the importance of diction in terms of... I want to be very careful about how I say this... in terms of supporting one's voice when one is singing. In other words, if you hold on to your words, your voice will pull through for you when you're singing. So be true to your vowels.”

“I thought I was attractive when I shot 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding.' Studio executives and movie reviewers let me know I had a confidence in my looks that was not shared by them. In other words, they labeled me with words like overweight, unattractive, unappealing.”

“He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed.”