Wordsmith Quotes

“It's really not about reading a good book.  Rather, it about being transformed by great ideas.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“But when he spoke, that great voice of his poured out of his chest in words like the snowflakes of winter, and then no other mortal could in debate contend with Odysseus. Nor did we care any longer how he looked.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Your words control your life, your progress, your results, even your mental and physical health. You cannot talk like a failure and expect to be successful.”
― Germany Kent

“It (a singer's voice) sounds as if it was aged in a whiskey cask, cured in an Ozarks smokehouse, dropped down a stone well, pulled out damp, and kept moist in the palm of a wicked woman's hand.”
― Michael Perry

“When you paint your lips, eye lids, nails or whatever, to look attractive, don't forget your up stairs(intellect) if you leave it behind, i will consider all other colors invalid.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I'll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.”
― David Scheier

“I am lover of words... I am wickedly drunk with the magic of words... the poetic nature whispers through and to my very heart and soul.”
― Jennifer Hillman

“Creativity is not intelligence, it is the ability to do what you did not know through the use of what you know.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.”
― Octavio Paz

“This is almost always the case: A piece of art receives its f(r)ame when found offensive.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“I got that same glorious hit of ecstasy, like the opposite of getting hit in the face with a frying pan.”
― Alexander Wales, Book I

“The audacity of my sagacity is instrumentality to my successity.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“Real writing is about changing lives for eternity rather than entertaining a life for a moment.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It’s not saying something that’s been said a million times before. It’s saying something that’s been said in a way that feels as if it was missed a million times before.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“All words have to be coined by a wordsmith at some point in the mists of history. The wordsmith had an idea to get across and needed a sound to express it. In principle, any sound would have done - basic principle of linguistics is that the relation of a sound to a meaning is arbitrary - so the first coiner of a term from for a political affiliation, for instance, could have used glorg or schmendrick or mcgillicuddy. But people are poor at conjuring sounds out of the blue, and they probably wanted to ease their listeners understanding of the coinage rather than having to define it or illustrate it with examples. So they reached for a metaphor that reminded them of the idea and they hoped would evoke a similar idea in the minds of their listeners, such as band or bond for a political affiliation. The metaphorical hint allowed the listeners to cotton on to the meaning more quickly than if they had had to rely on context alone, giving the word an advantage in the Darwinian competition among neologisms […] The word spread and became endemic to the community, adding to the language’s stock of apparent metaphors. But then it came to be used often enough, and in enough contexts, the speakers kicked the ladder away, and today people think not a whit about the metaphorical referent. It persists as a semantic fossil, a curiosity to amuse etymologists and wordwatchers [stet], but with no more resonance in our minds than any other string of vowels and consonants.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“A writer leads a hyphenated-life with words”
― Munia Khan

“In the waves of layoffs that accompanied these paroxysmal death-throes, this bearded shit-in-a-suit whacked the newspapers most profitable sections and bureaus and its best writers and shooters, all to protect his ring of beholden pets , a phalanx of talent-challenged ass-sniffers and the cadre of bulbous interns that he hired from his Midwest alma mater and it’s pretentiously name H—School of Journalism (there are two things that should never be named: j-schools and penises), an equally overrated institution that he hoped to eventually return to in some kind of endowed bean bag chair.”
― Jess Walter, The Financial Lives of the Poets

“I present a full proof method for discovering whether or not your being a writer, a natural wordsmith, is your gift or just your talent. Get high! If it is your gift, you'll know. Better you find this out first then the reading public.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“It’s not saying something that’s been said a million times before. It’s saying something that’s been said in a way that’s feels as if it was missed a million times before.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Gansey understood on a basic level that Henry made outrageous and offensive fun of himself because the alternative was storming into a room and flipping tables onto the money changers behind him”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King

“I get excited about stringing old words together in new ways.”
― Janet Autherine

“And he said...

...a master wordsmith has no need of a sword for his words will suffice.”
― Anthony T. Hincks