top of page
"Words are the clothes thoughts wear."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Language quotes

"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."

"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."

"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."

"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."

"Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet."

"Chameleonesque, hobbitish, unicorned, stompled, selfishism, and unwakeable may not be real words, but you do know what they mean."
Explore more quotes by Samuel Beckett

"The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."

"But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head."

"There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket."

"Spend the years of learning squanderingCourage for the years of wanderingThrough a world politely turningFrom the loutishness of learning."

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

"In reality I said nothing at all, but I heard a murmur, something gone wrong with the silence, and I pricked up my ears, like an animal I imagine, which gives a start and pretends to be dead."
bottom of page