Words matter. These are the best Roy Blount, Jr. Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they’re easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves.
I heard on public radio recently, there’s a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It’s in Vermont. I don’t think I’d be very good at Weed Dating.
A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.
To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don’t remember what I was like before I learned my ABC’s, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.
I just think lots of words have physicality. How about the word ‘wobble?’ You think that’s arbitrary? When you say the word ‘wince,’ you wince. How about that?
I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.
Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo clinic.
I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.
We don’t want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.
Being president of too many well-meaning organizations put my father into an early grave. The lesson in this was not lost on me.
English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.
The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.
Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.
