Written Word Quotes

“The written word endures, the spoken word disappears”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“The spoken word is ephemeral. The written word, eternal. A symphony, timeless.”
― A.E. Samaan

“In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.”
― Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes

“On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind."

I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can't be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared.

If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it's like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another's thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand.

That's why I love books.”
― Simon Cheshire

“Sometimes, when it’s going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.”
― David Nicholls, One Day

“Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“A writer writes knowing that nothing else will elicit the same kind of satisfaction and personal triumph as molding the written word into a reader's great experience.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich

“Don't believe in everything that is written. Not everything that is written is true”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It's not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn't change is a product of literate cultures' reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“Sometimes ideas flow from my mind in a raging river of stringed sentences; I can scarcely scribble on the page fast enough to keep up with the mental current. Sometimes, however, beavers move in and dam the whole thing up.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich

“I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.”
― Ander Monson

“On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer’s feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance.”
― Roy Pascal

“Vulnerability has a strength of its own.”
― William Zinsser

“Words inscribed in a heart can be more durable than words written on a stone”
― Munia Khan

“Explanations are so much easier when one has time to construct them properly.”
― Hazel Gaynor, Last Christmas in Paris

“Bookworms are the most precious worms in the world when they are humans, feeding upon the paper's body with their starving minds.”
― Munia Khan

“I haven't objected any of your allegations written about me, after all, I haven't read them”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Letters are nothing but dead signs, and books are their coffins.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

“And putting something in words----
naming it --- allows us to recognize it
a little better when we come upon it.

It's sorta the point of all this.”
― Lucy Knisley, An Age of License: A Travelogue

“Without written goals, we fail to plan and to run with single-minded purpose.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“Distraction is reading written word and when I seek to make distraction I write the words I wish to be enveloped in.”
― Anastasia Bolinder

“History is an ocean that books help us to navigate.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Nancy Goldstone

“Nonreaders rely almost exclusively upon their senses and tactile interactions to interpret their external environment whereas people who read are apt to rely upon their internal interpretation of other people’s written thoughts. Nonreaders tend to catalogue their life experiences and derive their values exclusively through their interaction with external stimuli.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Electrons are as evanescent as thoughts. History begins with the written word.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016

“...it is not the written word, but the spoken word, which in heated moments moves great masses of people to noble or ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something which every person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual standards, not by what the man standing next to him thinks.”
― E.B. White, On Democracy

“Every thought shines a light.
Every thought shows the way.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“I’m a woman intent on reinventing herself at an age where wiser, saner women are slowing down. The captivating magic of words has infiltrated my soul, my very being. The written word and all its exquisiteness is an essential part of me.”
― Daisy Dexter Dobbs

“The linear order of time then is only true during wakeful states, only during the OUT cycle of consciousness. But again, wakefulness is not a constant linear thing, it is constantly fluctuating even when most of us think that we are quite awake and alert. The only way for humanity to maintain any linear order within physical time at all, is to use external physical devices (like clocks) or to focus the attention and record changes (like in calendars) in the First World. In this way, we may keep track of the physical cycles like the shift of the sun, the moon, the stars, and the seasons. Indeed, the written word, and the keeping of historical records, are ways for the outer self, the conscious ego, to maintain a semblance of linear and stable order within time.”
― John Kreiter, The Way of the Projectionist: Alchemy’s Secret Formula to Altered States and Breaking the Prison of the Flesh

“The power of the written word is grossly exaggerated. The notion that the pen is mightier than the sword is an embellishment of the truth.”
― KRISHNA MURTHY ANNIGERI VASUDEVA RAO, FLOWERS OF STARDUST