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"PU'RIST: one superstitiously nice in the use of words."
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Personal Development
"Words can change their meaning, just by repeating them."
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Personal Development
"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"Chameleonesque, hobbitish, unicorned, stompled, selfishism, and unwakeable may not be real words, but you do know what they mean."
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Personal Development
"One should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least."
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Personal Development
"Where do the words gowhen we have said them?"
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Personal Development
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"After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?"
Philosophy
"Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions."
Talent
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
Earth
"Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
Creativity
"When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed."
Creativity
"To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That's all right. I like to have my heart broken."
Emotion
"I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead."
Philosophy
"The mind reels."
Psychology
"A woman's not a woman till the pills wear off."
Health
"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
Literature
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