Vocabulary Quotes

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“We’re sick of hearing people say, “That band is so gay,” or “Those guys are fags.” Gay is not a synonym for shitty. If you wanna say something’s shitty, say it’s shitty. Stop being such homophobic assholes.”
― Pete Wentz

“Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
― James D. Nicoll

“A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.”
― Baltasar Gracián

“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.”
― Woody Allen

“We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.”
― Abigail Adams

“Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”
― Mark Twain

“Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.”
― Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat

“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.”
― Goethe

“Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”
― A.S. Byatt

“As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses!”
― Sheri S. Tepper, A Plague of Angels

“There should really be a word for the feeling you get when you do a thing you don't particularly want to do to support somebody else but then realise they didn't actually need you and nobody would have noticed if you'd stayed home in your pyjamas eating Nutella straight from the jar.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary.”
― Tim Gunn, Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style

“Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.”
― John Dewey, How We Think

“Words were secret doorways and I held all the keys.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“So what's the point of using words nobody else knows or can say comfortably? I just don't understand that.”
― Stephen Chbosky

“My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.”
― Margaret Edson, Wit

“I collect words--they are sweets in the mouth of sound.”
― Sally Gardner, Maggot Moon

“We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. ”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“Right!"
"Right!"
"You can get there!"
"I can get there!"
"You're a natural at counting to two!"
"I'm a nat'ral at counting to two!"
"If you can count to two, you can count to anything!"
"If I can count to two, I can count to anything!"
"And then the world is your mollusc!"
"My mollusc! What's a mollusc?”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

“I understand the gist of your speculation,' said Rhialto. 'It is most likely nuncupatory.”
― Jack Vance, Rhialto the Marvellous

“There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.”
― Chris Gardner, The Pursuit of Happyness

“Emily said ... Well, I read that it's important to sleep. While you sleep, the hippopotamus in your brain replays things that happend during the day, e.g. what you studied. So therefore it remembers it for you.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, The Ghosts of Ashbury High

“To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up.

For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.”
― Charles Harrington Elster

“All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.”
― Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

“Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over.”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.”
― José Saramago