Pastoral Resources

Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds.

Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.

I think the most overused words in our vocabulary in the South are black and white.

At that time, the people that were in the animated film business were mostly guys who were unsuccessful newspaper cartoonists. In other words, their ability to draw living things was practically nil.

There are new words now that excuse everybody. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains, the people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch.

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.

Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning.

Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm.

I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

I have my warts. I sometimes say things that get me in trouble. In other words, I lead with my heart and not my head. That's the only chance we have against George Bush.

In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express what it too deep to find for words.

We don't teach kids how to feel, we don't give them the words to go by.

Just as a flower which seems beautiful and has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of the man who speaks them but does them not.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I can write music but I'm not much for words.