Outlines Quote by Jean Aitchison

Words have weight, something once said cannot be unsaid. Meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you…

— Philippa Gregory

Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.

— Peter De Vries

I think when dictionaries define words, there's a sort of hair-splitting that to most people doesn't make any sense, which is we're not describing…

— Kory Stamper

Words are objects of a color and a size and a form and a shape.

— Robert Barry

Words are probes. Some reach very deep, some only to a little depth.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Words don't change their shape, they change their meaning, their function...They don't have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other…

— Marguerite Duras

Words take on many different meanings.

— Erin McKean

“I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek…

— Anne Carson

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they…

— Janet Fitch

The shape the words end up taking are themselves the meaning of the words, they are retrospectively what we meant to say. There's no…

— Teju Cole

What do the contours of your body mean, laid out like the lines on a hand, so that I no longer see them except…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I have become intrigued with the combining of seemingly unrelated ideas or images, or the drawing upon the many, sometimes dissimilar, meanings a word…

— Anonymous