Pastoral Resources

Songs are life in 80 words or less.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

I've been asked to say a couple of words about my husband, Fang. How about short and cheap?

Programme names have been changed, and we have Andrew Neil saying he won't be using long words.

The advantage is I have my family with me all the time. When your daughter takes her first steps or says her first words and your son is going through potty training, I'm not missing any of those things.

The Blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

Some actors just won't bend, and then it's a bitch. You either fight or find ways of putting your words in their mouth and letting them say it back at you.

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

My dear colleague James Hansen, I believe, has finally gone off the deep end... The global warming 'time bomb,' 'disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control.' These are the words of an apocalyptic prophet, not a rational scientist.

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.