It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.
Interpretation
Words have a profound impact on our emotions and well-being, often more than physical harm.
This quote highlights the powerful psychological effect that words can have on individuals. While the saying 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me' suggests that verbal insults are insignificant compared to physical harm, the author argues that this belief is misguided. Words can deeply wound and influence one’s emotional state, illustrating the importance of being mindful of the language we use and the potential consequences it can have on others.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about the power of language and communication.
My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.
If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.
That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.
Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.
But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them―the best ones―are doors.
It's surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty-strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage.
The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas.
I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.
Even in the worst tragedies and crisis, there’s no reason to add to everyone’s misery by looking miserable yourself.
I certainly have a lot to lament, as do we all, everybody has their griefs. But the griefs we can fix, shouldn't we go around fixing them?
One of the advantages of travelling the world is that you get to know the world broadly. And one of the advantages of staying in one place is that you get to know the world deeply.
You are not now to think what's best to do, _x000D_ As in beginnings, but what must be done, _x000D_ Being thus enter'd; and slip no advantage _x000D_ That may secure you. Let them call it mischief; _x000D_ When it is past, and prosper'd , 'twill be virtue.
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