"Books...are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development." Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 1928

"Every man has one thing he can do better than anyone else - and usually it's reading his own handwriting." G. Norman Collie

"I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking." Woodrow T. Wilson

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill." Barbara Tuchman

"Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." George Bernard Shaw

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it." Oscar Wilde

"There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."
 Stephen King

"Images are the midwives between experience and language. The miracle of image making, even a rudimentary scribble or doodle, is that it helps birth a story that holds countless memories and emotions." Cathy Malchiodi

"Language is the dress of thought." Samuel Johnson

"Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man." Benjamin Franklin

"Music is the universal language of mankind." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"A man of words and not of deeds Is like a garden full of weeds." Mother Goose

"He that flings dirt at another dirties himself most." Thomas Fuller

"Words and feathers are easily scattered, but not easily gathered up." Anonymous

"Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill." Buddha

"Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes." Carl Sandburg

"A fair realization of the incredible degree of diversity of linguistic system that ranges over the globe leaves one with an inescapable feeling that the human spirit is inconceivably old; that the few thousand years of history covered by our written records are no more than the thickness of a pencil mark on the scale that measures our past experience on this planet." Benjamin Lee Whorf, American linguist and anthropologist, Science and Linguistics, 1940

"The act of describing a horrid, ruined, confused day, if you describe it accurately, purges the sensation of it." Hannah Hinchman

"You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements." Norman Douglas, novelist (1868-1952)

"Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes." Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word." Stephen King

"The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man." Jose Ortega y Gasset

"Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." George Orwell, 1984

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?" Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., novelist (1922-2007)

"There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories." Ursula K. LeGuin

"Where there is rhythm, there is grace.Where there is grace, there is efficiency." Christopher Bergland

"There are hundreds of languages in the world, but a smile speaks them all." :-)

"In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied often to prayer." Mark Twain

"Slang is the poetry of everyday life." S. I. Hayakawa

"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us." W.H. Auden, poet (1907-1973)

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)

"I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once." John Coltrane

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them." John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads." Marianne Moore

"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think." James McCosh

"The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word." Galileo Galilei. 1564-1642. Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist.

"The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression." Eugene Wigner

“Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing.” Cicero

“When words escape, flowers speak.” Bruce W. Currie

"The body says what words cannot." Martha Graham

"The true poem rests between the words." Vanna Bonta

�Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.� Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860)

“Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.” Jim Rohn

"One of the things we admire most in fiction is an ending that is surprising, yet inevitable. This is also what characterizes elegance in design: the invention that's clever, yet seems totally natural." Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life

“It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.” Robert Southey (1774-1843)

"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others." Clarence Day, writer, (1874-1935)

"Art is our one true global language. It knows no nation, it favors no race, and it acknowledges no class. It speaks to our need to reveal, heal, and transform. It transcends our ordinary lives and lets us imagine what is possible." Richard Kamler,

“Slang is humanity's first play toy.” John Algeo, University of Georgia professor

"Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up." Margaret Atwood

“Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction. “ Jimi Hendrix

“A different language is a different vision of life.” Federico Fellini, film director and writer (1920-1993)

“Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.” Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)

“It is possible that scientists, poets, painters [artists] and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to ‘re-present’ them to us (the world) in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.” Gary Zukav "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"

“As I write this, for example, I am sitting comfortably in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I'm never at a loss for what to type. I just look deep into the heart of the rose, read its story, and then write it down.” Steve Martin

“In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” Mortimer J. Adler, philosopher, educator and author (1902-2001)

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” Ernest Hemingway

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Franz Kafka

“Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.” Oprah Winfrey

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way -- things I had no words for.” Georgia O'Keeffe

“Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.” James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)

“Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.” Mark Twain

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time. The approach must involve getting something down on the page: something good, mediocre or even bad. It is essential to the writing process that we unlearn all those seductive high school maxims about waiting for inspiration. The wait is simply too long.” Leonard S. Bernstein

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)

"It is almost a truism to say that words have the power to transform us and crystallize our vision of the world. I say almost because, though the statement may seem trite, it is unassailable. Every literate one of us has experienced its truth." Charles Harrington Elster, American writer and broadcaster, The New York Times, September 21, 2003

“Exercise your words. Try them out in new relationships.” William Sloane

“Grasp the subject, the words will follow.” Cato the Elder, statesman, soldier, and writer (234-149 BCE)

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” Edwin Schlossberg, designer

“Language always tells long stories if we listen; it's littered with the ways we look at things.” Michael Wood, American academic and writer, The New York Times, May 21, 1995

“Jargon and slang speak volumes about the people who use them. Like a form of data compression, they can pack a tremendous amount of information -- the values, ideas, anxieties, and humor of a subculture -- into a single word or phrase. We can learn a lot about a subculture by decompressing its language. “ Gareth Branwyn, American journalist and writer, Jargon Watch, 1997

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.” Henry Miller, novelist (1891-1980)

“Good music is very close to primitive language.” Denis Diderot, philosopher (1713-1784)

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Muriel Rukeyser

"To possess another language is to possess a second soul." King Charlemagne, 9th century

“There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting that the text. The world is one of these books.” George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)

“Words are the only things that last forever; they are more durable than the eternal hills.” William Hazlitt, essayist (1778-1830)

“The living language is like a cow-path: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay.” E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)

“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.” Maya Angelou

“The body says what words cannot.” Martha Graham (1893 - 1991)

“Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?” Marcel Marceau

“Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.” Muriel Rukeyser

“The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.” J. Michael Straczynski

“Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.” Joseph Pulitzer

“The mind starts working the moment you are born, and doesn't stop until you stand up to make a speech.” Steve Allen

“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality--the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.” Arthur Christopher Benson

“Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write; for only in such response do we find truth.” Madeleine L'Engle, "The Writer" - June 2002

“Every word both separates and links; it depends on the writer whether it becomes wound or balm, curse or promise.” Elie Wiesel

“Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.” Rudyard Kipling

“Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Robert Frost

“The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.” Jean Cocteau

“Slang is the poetry of everyday life.” S. I. Hayakawa

“Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.” Stanley Kunitz