Top 83 Short Word Sayings
#1. If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
Louise Erdrich
#2. Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
Henry Watson Fowler
#3. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. Second: if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.
Bertrand Russell
#4. Want is such a short word, and yet it can encompass so many infinite things.
Katy Evans
#5. Charity may be a very short word, but with its tremendous meaning of pure love, it sums up man's entire relation to God and to his neighbor.
Aelred Of Rievaulx
#6. I'll tell thee what it says; it calls me villain, a treacherous husband, a cruel father, a false brother; one lost to nature and her charities; or to say all in one short word, it calls me - Gamester.
George Edward Moore
#7. Cure is one of the most precious words in the English language. It's a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn't so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children's children?
Lauren DeStefano
#8. Music is for people. The word 'pop' is simply short for popular. It means that people like it. I'm just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as my brain and fingers work, I'm cool.
Eddie Van Halen
#9. I sometimes get short-tempered in a public situation because I think, Oh God, I can't go back over that again. I can't put that into a two-word answer. I can't. Wherever I go, people say, "Can I ask you a quick question?" It's always, "a quick question." Well, my answers are slow.
James Hillman
#10. When Americans think of college these days, the first word that often comes to mind is 'debt.' And from 'debt' it's just a short hop to other unpleasant words, like 'payola,' 'kickback,' and 'bribery.'
James Surowiecki
#11. Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praisefrom your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before.
Samuel Beckett
#12. The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word - and doesn't go any further.
Daniel H. Pink
#13. She had not thought of them as "fat," though. She had thought of them as "big," because one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that "fat" in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment like "stupid" or "bastard," and not a mere description like "short" or "tall.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#14. Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.
Etty Hillesum
#15. The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words... "Mad" has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van.
Julian Barnes
#16. Duden Dictionary Meaning #4. Wort - Word: A meaningful unit of language / a promise / a short remark, statement, or conversation. Related words: term, name, expession.
Markus Zusak
#17. I use "perpetrated" because it's the kind of word that passive-voice writers are fond of. They prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words - which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences still more glutinous. Short is better than long. Of the 701 words in
William Zinsser
#18. More contact means more sharing of information, gossiping, exchanging, engaging - in short, more word of mouth.
Gary Vaynerchuk
#19. In short, it is more than reasonable that so holy a rule as is the holy Word of God should be kept in fixed languages, since it could not be maintained in this perfect integrity within bastard and unstable languages.
Francis De Sales
#20. Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.
David Whyte
#21. At 18, my first short story was published - I was paid a penny a word by a science fiction magazine. I continued to write, and five years later I published my first novel, 'Sweetwater.'
Laurence Yep
#22. I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
#23. I used to move gracefully. I used to know the word grace to the center of my bones. Now I seek it every day and fall short, inevitably, every day. I lost grace.
Katherine Locke
#24. Zoology, eh? That's a big word, isn't it."
"No, actually it isn't," said Tiffany. "Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.
Terry Pratchett
#25. The word "story" is short for the word "history." They both have the same root and fundamentally mean the same thing. A story is a narrative on an event or series of events, just like history.
James M. Kouzes
#26. I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.
Steve Earle
#27. Diction is not memorizing vocabulary, not memorizing word lists, not overusing the thesaurus, not replacing all the short words with long ones.
Jeff Anderson
#29. One should not utter a word about his own inadequacies. In the Oxo it says: 'When a man lets out a single word, the long and short of him will be known.'
Takeda Nobushige
#30. The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God's name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?
Stephen King
#31. Exactly. You like me. The word you use was like. You'll find someone better than me. Someone you'll love and not just like.
Kristine Cuevas
#32. As you may follow, they are an extremely hostile species (i.e. there is no word for 'welcome' in the Ruminarii language.) In four short centuries they had managed to lay waste to almost a thousand star systems, enslaving their populations and stripping them of all they wanted.
Christina Engela
#33. You can call it wisdom, or sanity, or health, or enlightenment. I use the word God as a short-cut. I am comfortable with the word God because I don't have the foggiest idea of what it means.
Stephen Levine
#35. Yes, she probably thought he was a few displays short of an exhibition, seeing as he had yet to utter a single word.
Liz Bower
#36. Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life ...
Elizabeth Goudge
#37. I loved them all equally, from the short story, to the poem, to the play, for nothing could touch me so deeply as a well-placed word.
Cheryl Anne Gardner
#38. Gloaming," Dad said. "What?" "That word I couldn't remember. Gloaming. That short, murky time between half-light and dark.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#39. Craig Johnson is not what you might expect . . . and yet he is everything you might expect. He is a man of letters and a man of his word. A laureate with a lariat, if you will. In short, Craig is the spring that feeds the very deep well that is Walt Longmire.
Craig Johnson
#40. if i ever have a daughter, the first thing i will teach her to love will be the word "no" & i will not let her feel guilty for using it. - "no" is short for "fuck off."
Amanda Lovelace
#41. You can't change a single word. What is tensile strength? It is that all the components are working together. I repeat: You can't change a single word. The best short stories are built on this premise.
Norman Mailer
#42. The first step in gaining the upper hand is always to seize the moral high ground, and to be able to do this with no more than a single word is nothing short of genius. I
Alan Bradley
#43. Too often the word 'prayer' induces guilt because we don't do enough of it. After all, I've never met anyone who said they pray too much! All of us fall short. And we often feel like our prayers fall flat.
Mark Batterson
#44. You said that it was because almost held failed potential. That it represented our ability to be just not good enough, that we had come to the brink of something beautiful but fell short so many times we crafted a word for it.
Bianca Phipps
#45. I've been fortunate to get involved with 'Short Term 12.' I was just a young teenager on the Internet, clicking on anything that had the word 'actor' in it. One day, someone called me in for a movie audition.
Keith Stanfield
#46. Tom Cruise isn't that big of a guy," my mom always says. I love how she tries to avoid using the word "short."
Yeah," I tell her in return, "but he compensates by being Tom Cruise."
Not that anyone really wants to BE Tom Cruise anymore now that he's a crazy couch jumper. But whatever.
Ann Edwards Cannon
#47. Whisper a word in the wrong ear and before you knew it you'd be short a head.
George R R Martin
#48. Charisma is a word that erodes stale on the page. When compared with the tangible, flesh experience it tries to label, it falls short. The only way to understand it, is to meet it.
Brian D'Ambrosio
#49. The name of God should no longer come from the mouth of man. This word that has so long been degraded by usage no longer means anything ... To use the word God is more than sloth, it is a refusal to think, a king of short cut, a hideous shorthand.
Arthur Adamov
#50. A Short Southern Screw? So I was right. You're craving something south ot the Mason-Dixon Line."
He moved closer, crowding her even though there was still a good twelve inches between them.
"I can assure you, though, I'm a man who isn't short in any sense of the word.
Katee Robert
#51. Scrivener is where I live. I'm planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it's amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.
Michael Marshall Smith
#52. Tomorrow at the press conference would be dreadful. She would be surrounded by nice young men who spoke Big Business or Computer or Bachelor on the Make, and she would not understand a word they said."
"Short Story: Blued Moon
Connie Willis
#53. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#54. The written word held a power she almost revered: to be able to write so as to influence the hearts and minds of other readers seemed nothing short of a miracle.
Patti Callahan Henry
#55. I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.
Susan Hill
#56. European carmakers pledged to reduce CO2 emissions by 25 percent from 1995 to 2008. We kept our word and reduced the value even more. This is not the result of short-term gimmickry. We decided years ago to develop the relevant models and engines, otherwise we wouldn't be able to offer them today.
Norbert Reithofer
#57. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
George Orwell
#58. Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.
John Steinbeck
#59. You were a hero round these parts. That's what they call you when you kill so many people the word murderer falls short.
Joe Abercrombie
#60. Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their life long - a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the full-grown man,
Arthur Schopenhauer
#61. What gets posted online is not short term, and is open for easy misinterpretation. Messages and pictures spread faster through the Internet than they ever could by word of mouth.
Anna Maria Chavez
#62. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
Karen Russell
#63. Overall I think the show went well, kudos to Miss Jeanie It was well rounded. From artwork to singing, to spoken word to short films, I think it definitely stimulated the audience's senses.
Angie Brown
#64. Imagination is a safety net that catches you. There is no going too far, no need for a safe word inside your mind. This world is your creation.
K. Kiker
#65. Now tell me something. What's your word for husband?"
"Hellren, I suppose. The short version is just hell."
She laughed softly. "Go figure.
J.R. Ward
#66. It is true that Bible prayers in word and print are short, but the praying men of the Bible were with God through many a sweet and holy wrestling hour. They won by few words but long waiting.
Edward McKendree Bounds
#67. One question keeps troubling me: Why? ... The short answer: I don't know. and yet that single word, why, remains the consummate human query. By nature, we're curious. We want to know.
Don Piper
#68. I identify as being an independent artist. I think people often forget that Indie is actually short for independent. For me, the word has a meaning more than what it connotes from an industry standpoint.
Mirah
#69. Spy' is such a short ugly word. I prefer 'espionage.' Those extra three syllables really say something.
Howard Tayler
#70. He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals' relatively short lives. The trick - if "trick" was the right word - was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to
John Connolly
#71. I used to think the Lord's Prayer was a short prayer; but as I live longer, and see more of life, I begin to believe there is no such thing as getting through it. If a man, in praying that prayer, were to be stopped by every word until he had thoroughly prayed it, it would take him a lifetime.
Henry Ward Beecher
#72. She'd already memorized the short Psalm and was hungry for more. Indeed, each word seemed woven into her soul the way the weaver wove his wares, taking the barest threads of her faith and making something beautiful and enduring as fine cloth deep inside her.
Laura Frantz
#73. Men who would face torture without a word become blasphemous at the short fourteenth. It is clear that the game of golf may well be included in that category of intolerable provocations which may legally excuse or mitigate behaviour not otherwise excusable.
A.P. Herbert
#74. Many stop short of a divine encounter because they are satisfied with good theology. The word of God is to lead us to the God of the word.
Bill Johnson
#75. One word after another. That's the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes into Chapter Nine, it's the only way to do it. So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.
Neil Gaiman
#76. I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.
Annie Proulx
#77. 'With God all things are possible' (Mk. 10:27). With God the thought itself is deed. He speaks and it is. Short and clear. And all the worlds stand by the Word of God.
John Of Kronstadt
#78. This is what God requires of us: to fulfill our obligations, to be faithful to our contracts, to pay our debts, and to honor our word. Anything short is fraud, regardless of how much we think the other party "deserves" what we owe.
Michael S. Horton
#79. The word far is too short for me to spell.
Toba Beta
#80. Dyslexia, for me, is rather like being a six-fingered typist on LSD!
Stephen Richards
#81. Early versions of Microsoft Word left a lot to be desired. However, to the company's credit, it quickly learned where Word fell short, made the necessary changes, and repeatedly introduced new versions of the software.
Naveen Jain
#82. Be you, be true to your word, don't sell yourself short and don't waste your life worrying.
Sam Owen
#83. Regalverborgenheiten" word found in Gabriele Wohmann's short story "Die Feindin" meaning the comforting seclusion of being surrounded by book cases.
Gabriele Wohmann
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