Sounds In Words Quotes & Sayings

Challenging, darling," Anjoli corrected. "Release the struggle consciousness. Challenges can be overcome. One can rise to a challenge. Difficulty sounds so hopeless. Words are affirmations. Affirmations are manifestations. Manifestations - " "All right already! Eating will be challenging, are you happy?" "In general or at the moment?" "Good God, Mother! — Jennifer Coburn

Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. — Eckhart Tolle

For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude. - Virginia Woolf, The Waves — Virginia Woolf

Pleasant things to hear, though hearing them from him embarrasses me. I soak up the praise but feel obliged to disparage the gift. I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something
forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something. — Wallace Stegner

Glint, glisten, glitter, gleam ...
Tiffany thought a lot about words, in the long hours of churning butte. Onomatopoetic , she'd discovered in the dictionary, meant words that sounded like the thing they were describing, like cuckoo. But she thought there should be a word that sounds like the noise a thing would make if that thing made a noise even though, actually, it doesn't, but would if it did.
Glint, for example. If light made a noise as it reflected off a distant window, it'd go glint!And the light of tinsel, all those little glints chiming together, would make a noise like glitterglitter. Gleam was a clean, smooth noise from a surface that intended to shine all day. And glisten was the soft, almost greasy sound of something rich and oily. — Terry Pratchett

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. — Bill Bryson

You're not safe to go back there," he said.
"I'm going," I returned.
"We'll see."
Jeez, there was just no shaking this guy.
"You do know that there's this little thing called the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote?" I asked.
"I heard of that," he said and there was a smile in his voice.
"And there's this whole movement called fem ... in ... is ... im." I said it slowly, like he was a dim child. "Where women started working, demanding equal pay for equal work, raising their voices on issues of the day, taking back the night, stuff like that."
He rolled into me, which made me roll onto my back.
"Sounds familiar."
"Do you have an encyclopedia? Maybe we can look it up. If the words are too big for you to read, I'l read it out loud and explain as I go along."
He got up on his elbow. "Only if you do it naked." I slapped his shoulder. — Kristen Ashley

Words aren't just sounds or shapes. They're meaning. That's what language is: a protocol for transferring meaning. When you learn English, you train your brain to react in a particular way to particular sounds. As it turns out, the protocol can be hacked. — Max Barry

Fate was not kind, life was capricious and terrible, and there was no good or reason in nature. But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than nature and fate, if only for a few hours. And we can draw close to one another in times of need, and live to comfort each other.

And sometimes when the black depths are silent, we can do even more. We can then be gods for moments, stretch out a commanding hand and create things which were not there before and which, when they are created, continue to live without us. Out of sounds, words and other frail and worthless things, we can construct playthings--songs and poems full of meaning, consolation and goodness, more beautiful and enduring than the grim sport of fortune and destiny. — Hermann Hesse

Professor Ramachandran believes this synesthetic connection between our hearing and seeing senses was an important first step towards the creation of words in early humans. According to this theory, our ancestors would have begun to talk by using sounds that evoked the object they wanted to describe. For example, words referring to something small often involve making a synesthetic small i sound with the lips and a narrowing of the vocal tracts: Little, teeny, petite, whereas the opposite is true of words denoting something large or enormous. If the theory is right, then language emerged from the vast array of synesthetic connections in the human brain. — Daniel Tammet

Perhaps the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born. Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records be kept in images and sounds. — Nancy Newhall

In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced. — Gaston Bachelard

But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude. — Virginia Woolf

Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translation must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator's felt understanding of the two languages involved. Rodney — Siri Hustvedt

And so we must dig in to see where raw words and fundamental sounds are buried so that the great silence within can finally be decoded. — Raymond Federman

I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person.
So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person's inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of, yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows? — Carl R. Rogers

If you had come to me a hundred years ago, do you think I should have dreamed of the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it! I use it every day, I transact half my correspondence by means of it, but I don't understand it. Think of that little stretched disk of iron at the end of a wire repeating in your ear not only sounds, but words - not only words, but all the most delicate and elusive inflections and nuances of tone which separate one human voice from another! — William Crookes

Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going. — John Darnielle

Since it was my car, and since I felt confident it would make Marcus miserable, I pushed the Pearl Jam cassette into the tape deck as I got back on the freeway and turned it up. After a couple of tracks, Bas got hung up on trying to figure out the lyrics to "Yellow Ledbetter" - an unattainable goal since they were basically undecipherable sounds with a few words sprinkled in. The song was all feeling, but he was determined. We listened to it over and over, and caught a little more each time. Metaphorically, the song felt perfect for the mission we were on. — Veronica Rossi

But this discourse, expressed in our paternal language, keeps clear the meaning of its words. The very quality of speech and of the Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the object they speak of.

Therefore, my king, in so far as you have the power (who are all powerful), keep the discourse uninterpreted, lest mysteries of such greatness come to the Greeks, lest the extravagant, flaccid and (as it were) dandified Greek idiom extinguish something stately and concise, the energetic idiom of usage. For the Greeks have empty speeches, O king, that are energetic only in what they demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks, an inane foolosophy of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches but sounds that are full of action. (Chapter XVI) — Hermes Trismegistus

And when in doubt, Josh, follow your heart. Words can be false, images and sounds can be manipulated. But this ... This is always true. — Michael Scott

In other words, the four-month-olds who thrashed their arms like punk rockers did so not because they were extroverts in the making, but because their little bodies reacted strongly - they were "high-reactive" - to new sights, sounds, and smells. The quiet infants were silent not because they were future introverts - just the opposite - but because they had nervous systems that were unmoved by novelty. The — Susan Cain

Celadon, azure, crimson and amber.
They are beautiful, for sure.
But they have nothing on you.

Even the piano and its shades of melodic sounds.
And even, when I have the chance, Chopin in the park in Paris.
These are some of my fondest memories.

But still it is hard to think of the subtle nuances in the gold of the sun when I see you.
In you there is no viridian, cerulean, venetian, or citrine.

This is not to say that there is no color in you, because there is.
I just have not found the right words to describe you, and somehow,
I feel that I never will. — Queenbe Monyei

When I open the door in front of the bus station, he says, "Take care, Cody," in a quiet voice.
... As much as I want to put miles between me and Ben McCallister, now that I'm doing just that, I understand what a relief it's been to share this weight with someone.
"Yeah. You too," I tell him. "Have a good life."
It's not what I meant to say. It sounds too flippant. But maybe it's the most you can hope for someone. — Gayle Forman

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters. — Norman Maclean

Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images ... it bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish and coordination; to be ugly; to have no belief in the possibilities of life, the pleasures of sex, the exquisiteness of music or the ability to make yourself and others laugh. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Rhymes make me feel better when I'm down ... When you say the words and the sounds match, it feels like everything in the world is in its place and whatever you say is powerful and true. — Liesl Shurtliff

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words. — Abraham Verghese

In the writings of a recluse one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave - it may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine - his ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odour, as much of the depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passer-by. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Communication is not only about words and numbers. Some thoughts can't be properly expressed in these ways at all. We also think in sounds and images, in movement and gesture, which gives rise to our capacities for music, visual arts, dance, and theater in all their variations. — Ken Robinson

Interest in the arts among entrepreneurs, inventors, and eminent scientists obviously reflects their curiosity and aptitude. People who are open to new ways of looking at science and business also tend to be fascinated by the expression of ideas and emotions through images, sounds, and words. — Adam M. Grant

Words have a force far beyond that of ink stains on pages or spoken sounds... Whether written or spoken, language found in forbidden books can warp space-time and tear the fabric of reality. — Daniel Harms

W-MT: There was a book I read about in the New York Times Book Review. It had a red cover, maybe? A.J.: Yeah, that sounds familiar. [Translation: That is excessively vague. Author, title, description of the plot - these are more useful locators. That the cover might have been red and that it was in the New York Times Book Review helps me far less than you might think.] Anything else you remember about it? [Use your words.] — Gabrielle Zevin

Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words. — Dionne Brand

Then he shifts a little and points to a page in an open book before us. "There," he says. "River. That's one of the words we need," and the way he says it, the way his mouth looks and his voice sounds, makes me want to leave these papers alone and spend my days in this cave or in one of the little houses or down by the water, trying only to solve the mystery of him. — Ally Condie

The one I tell everyone, the one I'm very, very proud of is 'Call Me Irresponsible.' Simply because I want to say and it's not as facetious as it sounds. It has five syllable words in it. — Sammy Cahn

I'm not a guy who curses very much in my personal life. When I curse it sounds like a kid trying to be cool. But I think there are quite a few people, my father being one of them, who use curse words rather eloquently. — Justin Halpern

Quincy and Fisher walked through all this in silence. Silence was the most common stock-in-trade between them, and the portfolio of their friendship was thick with it. So, without words, they stepped across the streets, their feet pressing the pavement with the same sounds, their toes turned just so; they knew what life was like at each other's side. Sometimes he would speak, or she would, small offerings on the altar of their joint survival. — Beth Brower

Let's say (since in writing a book one has to say something) that reality or existence is a multidimensional and interwoven system of varying spectra of vibrations, and that man's five senses are attuned only to very small bands of these spectra. That sounds very profound and may mean nothing at all, but in reading it one should attend to the sound of the words rather than their meaning. Then you will get my point. — Alan W. Watts

I grew up hearing words like snakeroot, sassafras, mullein - things that had wondrous, mysterious sounds in their names. — Jan Karon

(1) Phonological awareness is recognizing the sound structures of spoken language, not just the meanings it conveys. This is a reading prerequisite. (2) Phonemic awareness is the skill of recognizing and manipulating individual speech sounds or phonemes. Students must be able to segment words and syllables into phonemes to learn to read. (3) The Alphabetic Principle is the concept that printed language consists of alphabet letters that are deliberately and systematically related to the individual sounds of spoken language. Reading depends on understanding this concept. (4) Orthographic awareness is recognition of printed language structures, such as orthographic rules, patterns in spelling; derivational morphology and inflectional morphology, i.e. structural changes indicating word types and grammatical differences; and etymology, i.e. word and meaning — MTEL Exam Secrets Test Prep Team

The words of Pyotr Stephanovich come into my mind: You must love God because He is the only one you can love for Eternity.
That sounds very profound to me, and tears come into my eyes whenever I say it. I never heard anyone else say it. But I don't believe in God and if I did I couldn't love Him/Her/It. I couldn't love anyone I thought had created this world. — Marilyn French

Bring it up, make amends, forgive yourself. It sounds simple, but don't think for a second that it is easy. Getting free from the tyranny of past mistakes can be hard work, but definitely worth the effort. And the payoff is health, wholeness and inner peace. In other words, you get your life back. — Steve Goodier

Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cares what the meanings of words were anymore.
So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music. — Kurt Vonnegut

He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. — Ray Bradbury

her legs and lifted. "Well, for starters, I thought we could take that bath you were talking about." "And then?" "We'll see where the night takes us." "As long as it takes us someplace together, I'm fine with an adventure," Ivy offered. "We might want to grab the pie first, though. I've never eaten pie in a bathtub and that somehow sounds magical to me." "I love the way your mind works." "You just want the pie." "I just want you and the pie. I'm a simple man." "And yet you complicate everything in my life and make it so much better." Jack's heart warmed at her words. "Right back at you, honey. Now grab that pie. It's time for a Thanksgiving treat. I have a feeling this is going to be one for the record books." "That makes two of us. — Lily Harper Hart

Would you believe I was in the neighborhood?"
"No."
"Well, how about that I needed to see you."
"Why? Did one of my neighbors call and say my cat's been stalking their bunny?"
One corner of his mouth went up. "You know, that sounds like a euphemism. A kind of salacious one"
"Ooh, big words for Mr. Average Joe street cop," she said, knowing she sounded bitchy but unable to help it.
"Can you take out the angry eyes, Mrs. Potato Head, and just let me talk to you? — Leslie Parrish

I know this sounds ridiculous," he spoke solemnly, lacing his fingers in my hair. "But sometimes I feel like I'm caught in your gravity. And no matter where I am, anywhere in the world, if I wrote 'I love you' on a note, and made a paper airplane, and threw it into the breeze...it would still find you. My words couldn't escape you, any more than I can." (Ryan) — Dan Skinner

I find I think of myself not as a writer so much as someone who provides a gateway, a tangential route for readers to reach the circus. To visit the circus again, if only in their minds, when they are unable to attend it physically. I relay it through printed words on crumpled newsprint, words that they can read again and again, returning to the circus whenever they wish, regardless of time of day or physical location. Transporting them at will.
When put that way, it sounds rather like magic, doesn't it? — Erin Morgenstern

I grunted. It's something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words - and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I'd been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant I acknowledge that I've heard what you said; please continue. — Jim Butcher

She spoke and he could not understand. The sounds were distinct in his ear but they had no shape or meaning. It was as though his head were the prow of a boat and the sounds were water that broke on him and then flowed past. He felt he had to look behind to find the words already said. — Carson McCullers

Some words have a power that has nothing to do with supernatural forces. They resound in the heart and mind, they live long after the sounds of them have died away, they echo in the heart and the soul. They have power, and that power is very real. Those three words are good — Jim Butcher

And now above and beyond the birds' song, Andy hears a more distant singing, whether of voices or instruments, sounds or words, he cannot tell. It is at first faint, and then stronger, filling the sky and touching the ground, and the birds answer it. He understands presently that he is hearing the light; he is hearing the sun, which now has risen, though from the valley it is not yet visible. The light's music resounds and shines in the air and over the countryside, drawing everything into the infinite, sensed but mysterious pattern of its harmony. From every tree and leaf, grass blade, stone, bird, and beast, it is answered and again answers. The creatures sing back their names. But more than their names. They sing their being. The world sings. The sky sings back. It is one song, the song of the many members of one love, the whole song sung and to be sung, resounding, in each of its moments. And it is light. — Wendell Berry

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest. — Anatole France

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, "Le jeu et les moi." It's impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound. It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction. — Agnes Varda

And when he had put his hand on mine with a cheerful look, wherefrom I took courage, he brought me within to the secret things. Here sighs, laments, and deep wailings were resounding through the starless air; wherefore at first I wept thereat. Strange tongues, horrible utterances, words of woe, accents of anger, voices high and faint, and sounds of hands with them, were making a tumult which whirls always in that air forever dark, like the sand when the whirlwind breathes. — Dante Alighieri

I squint my eyes and glare at him.
"I don't have a crush on Quinn anymore."
He raises a golden eyebrow.
"No?"
I shake my head. "No."
"Why is that?"
I stare at him long and hard, trying to decide what to say. Should I be downright, painfully honest? I've always found that the best way to be, so I nod.
"Two words."
He waits.
"Dante. Giliberti."
I hear him suck in his breath and I smile. Sometimes, honesty is refreshing and so very worth it.
"Me?" He sounds so surprised, as though he doesn't know that he is practically a living breathing Adonis. I nod.
"You."
He studies me again and I fight the need to fidget as I wait for his reaction.
After a minute of nerve-wracking silence, he finally answers.
"So, will you keep the bracelet?"
I nod.
"Can I kiss you again?"
I nod.
So he does. — Courtney Cole

Verbal imagery (such as a simile or a description of a place or an event) is more physical, more bodily, than thinking or feeling, but less physical, more internal, than the actual sounds of the words. Imagery takes place in "the imagination," which I take to be the meeting place of the thinking mind with the sensing body. What is imagined isn't physically real, but it feels as if it were: the reader sees or hears or feels what goes on in the story, is drawn into it, exists in it, among its images, in the imagination (the reader's? the writer's?) while reading. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Conversely, every moderate seems to believe that his interpretation and selective reading of scripture is more accurate than God's literal words. Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. It really isn't hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery - you just put in a few lines like "Don't take sex slaves!" and "When you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don't rape any of them!" And yet God couldn't seem to manage it. This is why the approach of a group like the Islamic State holds a certain intellectual appeal (which, admittedly, sounds strange to say) because the most straightforward reading of scripture suggests that Allah advises jihadists to take sex slaves from among the conquered, decapitate their enemies, and so forth. — Sam Harris

Few boys have been as fortunate as I, raised into manhood with only the gentlest of words and blandishments in my ears and the kindest of caresses upon my person, by a mother who sheltered us from everything that is harsh and ugly in this world. I was spoiled, utterly unprepared for cruelty, and perhaps this sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm not! You mustn't think I blame you. I'm afraid I must sound like the most ungrateful son in the world, when in fact the opposite is true. I am more grateful now than ever for the way you raised us, teaching us the value of kindness, of education, of independent thinking and liberal ideals, in the face of the fascism that is sweeping our country. The cruelest punishments now fail to bring even a tear to my eye, but the thought of the hardship you've suffered on behalf of your ideals makes me weep like a baby. — Ruth Ozeki

Although all new talkers say names, use similar sounds, and prefer nouns more
than other parts of speech, the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives varies
from place to place (Waxman et al., 2013). For example, by 18 months, Englishspeaking infants speak far more nouns than verbs compared to Chinese or Korean
infants. Why?
One explanation goes back to the language itself. The Chinese and Korean
languages are "verb-friendly" in that verbs are placed at the beginning or end of
sentences. That facilitates learning. By contrast, English verbs occur anywhere in
a sentence, and their forms change in illogical ways (e.g., go, gone, will go, went).
This irregularity may make English verbs harder to learn, although the fact that
English verbs often have distinctive suffixes (-ing, -ed) and helper words (was, did,
had) may make it easier (Waxman et al., 2013). — Kathleen Stassen Berger

I do realize how this all sounds. I realize that in this account of my journey to the Little House on the Prairie, a journey that in Pa's time would have taken at least ten days, my litany of misfortunes contains words like power windows and Wi-Fi. I realize, yes, that one of the greatest hardships I had to contend with involved a car that starts with the push of a button. — Wendy McClure

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds. — Henry Moore

The world slowed to the beat of an ancient, ageless drum.
Celaena behold the room.
The blood was everywhere.
Before the bed, Nehemia's bodyguards lay with their throats cut from ear to ear, their internal organs spilling out onto the floor.
And on the bed ...
On the bed ...
She could hear the shouts growing closer, reaching the room, but their words were somehow muffled, as though she were underwater, the sounds coming from the surface above.
Celaena stood in the center of the freezing bedroom, gazing at the bed, and the princess's broken body atop it.
Nehemia was dead. — Sarah J. Maas

I said I heard them, it's like a, like a chittering I guess. You hear it, you don't hear it really but you just get the sound in the middle of your head, like an itch. It's not so much like a swarm of bees but more like a crowd, a crowd at a concert because you can pick out words and, I say it out loud and it sounds insane, but you can hear them talking to each other, coordinating. And more than that, you can hear their hate. — David Wong

We are our own worst enemies. How banal and trite that sounds, but [ ... ] have come to believe that all the greatest truths are trite and banal, when spoken aloud in their simplest and most honest terms. Perhaps they can only be imparted in the Cant, in a language which writes itself onto your heart so that you understand not just the words but all the shattering ramifications of of a sentence which, when heard without true understanding, seems quite risibly simplistic.
We are our own worst enemies.
People die. — Hal Duncan

God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble ... The musical art speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart ... Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The struggle for a life extracts all our attention, and leaves us blind, deaf, dumb and senseless. The writer, the artist, the musician vanishes, without even the charity of a proper cremation. At this point words become formless sounds, and thoughts run out of paper and jump out of the terra firma and fly in the air, forcing us to find someone to share them with, someone who could understand. The fear of wasting words is the worst kind of it, only a writer knows. — Anu Lal

A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds. — Marianne Moore

The girl didn't notice that her boyfriend's head had transformed into a big microphone. So when she whispered her secrets into his ear, her words echoed trough the city. In her embarrassment, she ran out of the house to hide somewhere. And what she saw scared her: couples with microphone heads walked the streets hand in hand. What a sad new world this was, where everybody had to learn how to hold back from saying things.
Sounds of slammed doors echoued through the city. Apart from this, there was only silence. — Zoltan Komor

Ma'am is yet another horrible-sounding word in the lexicon of words that women are stuck with to describe various aspects of their body/life/mental state/hair. Vagina. Moist. Fallopian tubes. Yeast infection. Clitoris. Frizz. These are all terrible words, and yet they are our assigned descriptors. Who made up these words? Women certainly didn't. If, at the beginning of time, right after making vaginas, God had asked me, 'What would you like your most intimate and enjoyable part of yourself to be called?',' I most certainly wouldn't have said, 'Vagina.' No woman would, because vagina sounds like a First World War term that was invented to describe a trench that has been mostly blown apart but is still in use. Even off the very top of my head I feel like I could have come up with something better, like for instance the word papoose, which actually as I'm typing it feels like an incredibly brilliant word for vagina. — Jessi Klein

I don't write the way I speak. I'm afraid you would think I didn't know any better. I don't write the way I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it. That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I guess is inevitable. I will resist that inflection, nevertheless. — Marilynne Robinson

Books saved you. Having become your refuge, they sustained you. The power of books, this marvelous invention of astute human intelligence. Various signs associated with sound: different sounds that form the word. Juxtaposition of words from which springs the idea, Thought, History, Science, Life. Sole instrument of interrelationships and of culture, unparalleled means of giving and receiving. Books knit generations together in the same continuing effort that leads to progress. They enabled you to better yourself. What society refused you, they granted. — Mariama Ba

I can say it, but it doesn't seem convincing to most people. I can call it an 'injustice,' but that doesn't always sink in either. You have to understand the nature of the culture in New York. Words that are equal to the pain of the poor are pretty easily discredited. A quarter of the truth, stated with lots of indirection, is regarded as more seemly.

Even when people do accept the idea of 'injustice,' there are ways to live with it without it causing you to change a great deal in your life. A mildly embarrassed toleration of injustice is an elemental part of cultural sophistication here. the stile is, 'Oh yes. We know all that. So tell us something new.' There's a kind of cultivated weariness in this. Talking about injustice, I am told, is 'tiresome' unless you do it in a way that sounds amusing. — Jonathan Kozol

They sang the words in unison, yet somehow created a web of sounds with their voices. It was like hearing a piece of fabric woven with all the colors of a rainbow. I did not know that such beauty could be formed by the human mouth. I had never heard harmony before. — Anita Diamant

All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world. — Hassan Blasim

Your ears are not simply for hearing tuneful sounds, mellow and sweetly played in harmony: you should also listen to laughter and weeping, to words flattering and acrimonious, to merriment and distress, to the language of men and to the roars and barking of animals. — Seneca.

Lacan wrote about two levels of speaking, one in which we know what we are saying (even when struggling with something difficult or contradictory) and another in which we have no idea of what we are saying. In this second level of speaking there are repeating words, phrases, and even sounds that function as magnets of unconscious meaning, condensing multiple scenes, times, and ideas. He called such markers in speech 'signifiers. — Annie Rogers

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art. — Leo Tolstoy

In his head he felt the confused whirling of images seeking a name. Words, sounds, surged up inside him, clean and clear, and settled on everything around him. He named, and saw what he named recognize itself. — Gioconda Belli

What in life can love not penetrate? Mabel Hubbard, deaf since childhood, gave Alexander Bell a piano as a wedding gift and asked that he play it for her every day, as if his music could pierce her silence. Decades later, at Bell's deathbed, it was his wife who made the sounds, saying the words, "Don't leave me," while he, no longer able to talk, used sign language to answer, No. — Mitch Albom

I don't think meaning is something that can be explained. You have to understand
hopeful and selectively blind as the next guy, but because I don't think meaning is something that can be explained. You have to understand
it on your own. It's like when you're starting to read. First, you learn the letters. Then, once you know what sounds the letters make, you use them to sound out words. You know that c-a-t leads to cat and d-o-g leads to dog. But then you have to make that extra leap, to understand that the word, the sound, the "cat" is connected to an actual cat, and that "dog" is connected to an actual dog. It's that leap, that understanding, that leads to meaning. And a lot of the time in life, we're still just sounding things out. We know the sentences and how to say them. We know the ideas and how to present them. We know the prayers and which words to say in what order. But that's only spelling. — David Levithan

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way. — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Taciturn, adj.
There are days you come home silent. You say words, but you're still silent. I used to bombard you with conversational crowbars, but now I simply let the apartment fall mute. I hear you in the room
turning on music, typing on the keys, getting up for a drink, shifting in your chair. I try to have my conversation with those sounds. — David Levithan

Monsieur Foinet got up and made as if to go, but he changed his mind, and, stopping, put his hand on Philip's shoulder.
"But if you were going to ask me my advice, I should say: take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else. It sounds very hard, but let me tell you this: I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and I had taken it."
Philip looked up at him with surprise. The master forced his lips into a smile, but his eyes remained grave and sad.
"It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it's too late. It does not improve the temper."
He gave a little laugh as he said the last words and quickly walked out of the room. — W. Somerset Maugham

There are many words for push, take, shove, carry, load, and no words for love, or happiness, or the sounds which birds make in the morning. — Alexander McCall Smith

I had just sat down with my plate of food and hit play on the new CD player I'd received the night before, ready to hear the sounds of Handel's opening movement, when I remembered the horses.

"Ah hell!" I cursed, sounding exactly like my dad. It was hard not to grow up swearing when you lived on a farm. We never took the Lord's name in vain or said the F-word, but pretty much damn, hell, and shit were part of the vernacular of most folks born and raised in Levan. To tell the truth, those words weren't really considered swear words. Last week in church, Gordon Aagard was giving a sermon on trials. He referred to horse shit right in the middle of his talk, and nobody really batted an eye. — Amy Harmon

The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn't work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good. — Thomas Sowell

I thought wulfen howls were bad when I heard them in my own garage. Hearing the high, glassy cry in the middle of the woods at night is infinitely worse, because the howls sounds like it could be words if you just listen hard enough. The horrible thing is that it pulls on that deep hidden part in every person-the blind animal part.
The part that knows you're the prey.
But the worst thing about it?
Is when it sounds right behind you, and something hits you from behind, tumbling you into another thorn-spiked mess of vines and branches, leaf mold and dirt filling your nose, and a huge, hot, hairy hand winds in your hair. — Lilith Saintcrow

They have courses teaching you foreign languages and ballroom dancing and etiquette and cooking. But there are no classes to learn how to be by yourself in a furnished room with chipped dishes, or how to be alone in general without any words of concern or familiar sounds. — Irmgard Keun

Bruner discusses the need for teachers to understand that children should want to study for study's own sake, for learnings's sake, not for the sake of good grades or examination success. The curriculum should, in other words, be interesting. (Yes, it sounds too obvious even to say, but sometimes the emphasis on content has trumped all other considerations, including that of making learning interesting.) — Gary Thomas

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.
-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE — Robert Louis Stevenson

My name is Lev," said Lev.
"My name is Lydia," said the woman. And they shook hands, Lev's hand holding the scrunched-up kerchief and Lydia's hand rough with salt and smelling of egg, and then Lev asked, "What are you planning to do in En gland?" and Lydia said, "I have some interviews in London for jobs as a translator."
"That sounds promising."
"I hope so. I was a teacher of English at School 237 in Yarbl, so my language is very colloquial."
Lev looked at Lydia. It wasn't difficult to imagine her standing in front of a class and writing words on a blackboard. He said, "I wonder why you're leaving our country when you had a good job at School 237 in Yarbl?"
"Well," said Lydia, "I became very tired of the view from my window. Every day, summer and winter, I looked out at the schoolyard and the high fence and the apartment block beyond, and I began to imagine I would die seeing these things, and I didn't want this. I expect you understand what I mean? — Rose Tremain

The Pavlovian view of women voters - plug the words in, and they will respond - sends a chill down my spine because it sounds like an adaptation of something I have written about communication between the sexes: When a woman tells a man about a problem, she doesn't want him to fix it; she just wants him to listen and let her know he understands. But there's a difference between a private conversation and a presidential election, between what we want from our leaders. — Deborah Tannen

One thing people always ask me is 'How do you play outside?' ... I have no idea how to teach that, but when I was discussing this with our bass player Jesse Murphy, he said 'tell them to go cliff diving' ... In other words, when you're jamming, you have to take risks if you want to find new sounds ... — John Scofield

I could be worse, you know."
"How?" I asked, teasing.
"I mean, I have a work of calligraphy over my toilet that reads, 'Bathe yourself in the comfort of God's words,' Hazel. I could be way worse."
"Sounds unsanitary," I said. — John Green

Defending democracy also sounds fine; but to defend democracy by military means, one must be militarily efficient and one cannot become militarily efficient without centralizing power, setting up a tyranny, imposing some form of conscription or slavery to the state. In other words, the miltary defence of democracy in contemporary circumstances entails the abolition of democracy even before war starts. — Aldous Huxley

Poor examples because of mechanical needs of typing, of the flow of river sounds, words, dark, leading to the future and attesting to the madness, hollowness, ring and roar of my mind which blessed or unblessed is where trees sing
in a funny wind
well-being believes he'll go to heaven
a word to the wise is enough
'Smart went Crazy — Jack Kerouac

You're used to city noise and the sounds that come from being in such a crowded place covering up what you don't want people to hear. In the great wide open, there isn't anything to hide behind and all sound carries. You get used to saying what you mean out here and you learn real quick that words are permanent. You can try and take them back but they always linger." "I'll — Jay Crownover

I don't really believe in writer's block or anything like that. If I'm not feeling words, I may pick up an instrument and play with sounds or delve into different types of creativity and expression. — Saul Williams