Quote by Simon Winchester

That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle…

— T. S. Eliot

“Here there is no doubt that timidity and a total lack of personal initiative have always been regarded among us as the chiefest and…

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of…

— Italo Calvino

“Words are a mirror of their times. By looking at the areas in which the vocabulary of a language is expanding fastest in a…

— John Ayto

“The dictionary’s very flaws made the exertions and enthusiasm of its compilers real to his imagination. The vast array of words—entry words, definitions, examples—was…

— Shion Miura

It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent…

— Susan Sontag

“Yes, it matters. The Great Passage is supposed to be a dictionary for a new age. If we yield to the majority and stay…

— Shion Miura

“To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book…

— Edgar Allan Poe

“it seemed to me that I had mastered words to the point of sweeping away forever the contradictions of being in the world, the…

— Elena Ferrante

“Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which…

— David Hume

“What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do…

— David Levithan

A winning wave, (deserving note.) In the tempestuous petticote, A careless shoe-string, in whose tye I see a wilde civility,-- Doe more bewitch me…

— Robert Herrick