Quotes & Sayings About Speaking Mean Words

What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? Would the inside of your head overgrow with every word that has ever come into it, every word that has ever silently taken seed or fallen dormant? Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you'd ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you? — Ali Smith

There's a crack in my mind,
That I don't know how to heal.
There are demons in my head,
People tell me are not real.

The voices are my own,
Speaking words I don't believe.
Convincing me I'm worthless,
And that everyone will leave.

You want me to be better,
Don't you think I want the same?
But you've convinced yourself it's nothing,
Or that I'm the one to blame.

So I'll tell you that I'm 'fine,'
Because that's all you want to hear.
And I'll conceal it with a smile,
While hiding all the fear.

I'll bury all the feelings,
And I'll cut out all the pain.
But that won't mean I'm healed,
I've just chosen to not 'complain.'

Because being sad was only half of it,
And it was not the half to kill.
The downfall began when I started to feel nothing,
When I slowly lost my will. — Jeannine Allison

As I watched all the problems you were struggling with, I realized how much you meant to me. It changed everything. I was worried about you - so, so worried. You have no idea. And it became useless to try to act like I could ever put any Moroi life above yours. It's not going to happen, no matter how wrong others say it is. And so I decided that's something I have to deal with. Once I made that decision ... there was nothing to hold us back." He hesitated, seeming to replay his words as he brushed my hair from my face. "Well, to hold me back. I'm speaking for myself. I don't mean to act like I know exactly why you did it."
"I did it because I love you," I said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. And really, it was. — Richelle Mead

Humanly speaking, it is possible to understand the Sermon on the Mount in a thousand different ways. But Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and obedience - not interpreting or applying it, but doing and obeying it. That is the only way to hear his words. He does not mean for us to discuss it as an ideal. He really means for us to get on with it. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists there do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: "All language is prayer." This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy. — Zoketsu Norman Fischer

In other words, the biblical writers were speaking to those who shared a rich cultural context, which shaped the way they communicated. I grew up in Detroit and share a rich cultural context with other Detroiters. When I say words like lions, tigers, and wings, I don't have to specify that I mean the professional football, baseball, and hockey teams. Fellow Detroiters get it because we share a rich cultural context. — Ken Wilson

If I say to some kids roughhousing in church, "Don't kill anyone," they know what concern I am addressing. They know I'm exaggerating for emphasis and not speaking in general terms - that I'm not, for example, commenting on the morality of military service. Stripped of the rich context we share, the mere words, "Don't kill anyone" could easily be understood to mean don't kill anyone, anytime, ever. — Ken Wilson

I didn't understand him. I mean, he was speaking English, and I understood the words, but I was confused. "What do you mean? What are you doing? — Gayla Twist

I do not think I wish you smashing my pie with your truncheon." Adrian stilled and blinked. There was that truncheon word again and he had no idea what she was talking about. Smashing her pie with his truncheon? That did not even make sense. "I fear I have no idea what you are talking about, wife." Clarissa gave a little jerk at the last word, then said, "I mean, I do not want you breaking my veil with your key." Rather than helping him understand, her words simply confused him further. "What?" "My lock is too small for your truncheon." "Are you speaking in tongues?" Adrian asked. "Clarissa, I have no idea what - — Lynsay Sands

Don't bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING ... The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely miss the point ... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion. — Vera Nazarian

But Christian illiteracy is only the first part of the crisis. Even more seriously, even for those who think they speak "Christian" fluently, the faith itself is often misunderstood and distorted by many to whom it is seemingly very familiar. They think they are speaking the language as it has always been understood, but what they mean by the words and concepts is so different from what these things have meant historically, that they would have trouble communicating with the very authors of the past they honor. — Marcus J. Borg

I've permanently yanked
the silver spoon from my mouth,
and I buried it miles beneath the Earth's crust.

I mean, figuratively

speaking, of course.

I mean, who could do such a thing?

That would be insane.

:Oh, Nathanial.

Your words melt

like butter in my brain.

[ Birds Chirping ] — Cabin Boy

Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean. — Northrop Frye

In other words, Foxx represented what Sarah Palin (speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Greensboro three weeks before the election) called "the real America," by which she did not mean fallow farms and disability checks and crack. — George Packer

Right here let me make as vigorous a plea as I know how in favor of saying nothing that we do not mean, and of acting without hesitation up to whatever we say. A good many of you are probably acquainted with the old proverb: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick
you will go far.' If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power. In private life there are few beings more obnoxious than the man who is always loudly boasting; and if the boaster is not prepared to back up his words his position becomes absolutely contemptible. So it is with the nation. It is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification, and, above all, in loose-tongued denunciation of other peoples. — Theodore Roosevelt

"Repeat that?"
"It's National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Didn't you know?"
"Somehow I missed the memo."
"You mean, 'Somehow I missed the memo, arrr!'"
"Precisely. Arr. So, Mrs. Jack ... Er, is that still your name? Or, I tremble to ask, have you adopted a pirate identity?"
"Arr, matey, of course I have! It's ... " She pulled an eggplant from the grocery bag. "Captain Eggplantier." She needed to stop speaking the first words that popped into her mind.
"Captain Eggplanteir." He sounded very doubtful.
"That's right. A family name. It's Belgian. — Shannon Hale

When William Johnson and slave walked down that long, winding American road toward freedom and justice, they didn't realize they would be speaking out for all those left behind. They learned that it would take hard work to make the words of the Declaration of Independence mean what they said. Ellen and William Craft were willing to do their part. — Joy Hakim

To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning. — Peter Senge

There are times when I can't stop speaking, when a million words leave my mouth in a matter of seconds ... a million words that mean nothing ... but when I want to find some words that mean everything, I just can't speak. Like: I miss you. Like: I love you. Like: My world is falling apart and I need you by my side. — Rae Earl

People never mean to do thingd that are hurtful, yet sometimes it just happens, through an intense moment, through brief rationalization, or by simply speaking words that only belong inside one's head. — Jessica Sorensen