Thursday 25 September 2014

The power of words

Ever noticed how some writers have a remarkable ability to toy with your emotions? Within a few pages, you can go from great excitement to crying your eyes out. It’s the hallmark of the power of writing
Taking the reader on an emotional roller coaster ride is essential in novels and short stories. Maybe you want to impress them, get them excited, make them cautious, get them angry. The better a job you do at making them feel, the more effective your writing.
I am currently teaching a course on the power of words and came across these quotes from a number of authors :
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
John Green

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
Tahereh Mafi

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”
Patrick Rothfuss



“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
Diane Setterfield

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”
Joseph Conrad



“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”
Jodi Picoult



“There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.”
Philip K. Dick



 

John Dean


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