Words Failed Quotes

#1. Finally, and most of all, words failed him.

Albert Camus

#2. There, fighting their way toward Harry, were Ron and Hermione. Words failed them. They simply beamed as Harry was borne toward the stands, where Dumbledore stood waiting with the enormous Quidditch Cup.

J.K. Rowling

#3. She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words failed me to express), The lady is ugly!

Wilkie Collins

#4. When words failed I realized there was something unspeakably beautiful in not being able to put words to your happiness.

R. YS Perez

#5. Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

Virginia Woolf

#6. Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her - the opportunity, the courage.

Gustave Flaubert

#7. This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#8. Words had failed us that night, and I'd welcomed the silence. Words had escaped me the next morning as well but in a different way, when I came to realize that I was married to a fisherman for the rest of my days."--Abigail Whimble, Return to the Outer Banks House

Diann Ducharme

#9. Actually, I failed drama in high school because of nerves. I wasn't able to memorize the words. I had complete stage fright.

Constance Marie

#10. We may mean them in the moment the words leave our lips, but as time goes on, good intentions get rubbed raw by failed expectations.

Kandi Steiner

#11. Fire, water, earth, and air,
All meet in the dragon's lair.
Six brave hearts have failed the test;One continues in the quest.
Remember well the words you know
When on to find your fate you go.

Emily Rodda

#12. In not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each case, I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating vindicated. And what I very often say is that I've lived to see my lost causes found.

Pauli Murray

#13. I feel like I failed," I said. "Don't beat yourself up," Jim said. "She might not have turned out like you planned, but that don't mean she turned out wrong.

Jeannette Walls

#14. Scriptures were just words on a page and my prayers failed to lift ...

Lynn Austin

#15. I knew that my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to and I was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love.

Catherine Lacey

#16. For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.

M.L. Rio

#17. I struggle to discover what these silent sons of mine want, but words have always failed me. They are sullen even as they tell me they are okay. I know they are lying but there is nothing I can do.

Jinat Rehana Begum

#18. People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.

Stephen Jay Gould

#19. Well in case you failed to notice, In case you failed to see, This is my heart bleeding before you, This is me down on my knees These foolish games are tearing me apart Your thoughtless words are breaking my heart You're breaking my heart

Jewel

#20. What other option did I have, now that words had failed me? What do any of us have when words fail us?

Patrick Rothfuss

#21. Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.

Elise Boulding

#22. I cared more about your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act.

J.K. Rowling

#23. I was never a man of great ambition
I cried too easily
I didn't have a head for science
Words often failed me
While others prayed I only moved my lips

Nicole Krauss

#24. In other words, RBS had its origins in a failed speculation, a bail-out, and a financial crash so big it helped destroy Scotland's status as a separate nation.

John Lanchester

#25. For a long time, rich countries have promised to reduce poverty but have failed to match their words with adequate action. Of course, some important progress has been made and millions of lives have been saved, but millions more could be saved.

Peter Singer

#26. But there was a saying in Hebrew, "We survived Pharoah, we'll survive this too." In the words of the old joke, it was the theme of every Jewish holiday: they tried to kill us, they failed, so let's eat!

John Connolly

#27. I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.

Sigmund Freud

#28. If he could communicate to her with his body, perhaps he failed to see the need to communicate with words.

Sylvain Reynard

#29. You loved to teach. In time, you tried the rabbinate. And you failed. But a great Jewish scholar said two words you would later invoke many times with many of us: "try again." And you did. Thank God you did.

Mitch Albom

#30. History will not judge HIV/AIDS kindly ... the harshest words will be reserved for how the world responded, or rather failed to respond, to the epidemic.

Seth Berkley

#31. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it. Patients

Atul Gawande

#32. People tried and failed to combine the words Izzy and Ymir. The closest they came was Izmir, but that had been the name of a city in Turkey.

Neal Stephenson

#33. Readers have the power that professors pretend they wield. Millions of words of professorial contempt have failed to kill Kipling. Praising Shaw to the skies has been vain.

Gene Wolfe

#34. In other words, I think that if an audience listens to something as an experience of how in tune it is or something of that kind, that the whole point is somehow being missed, and the music has failed.

John Eaton

#35. Let's cut to the chase, the sharia controversy. I don't think I, or my colleagues, predicted just how enormous the reaction would be. I failed to find the right words. I succeeded in confusing people. I've made mistakes - that's probably one of them.

Rowan Williams