I think when dictionaries define words, there's a sort of hair-splitting that to most people doesn't make any sense, which is we're not describing what a thing is.

Lexicographers may be nerds who don't like human contact, but we're still people.

Whenever you try and simplify how people speak, it's just hard to squish them into a simple rule. Language doesn't work that way.

Words have always been political, and that means that, in many people's minds, dictionaries are political. Because that's what dictionaries do: they do words.

We want to emulate the educated class, even if we don't think of educated people as a class these days.

ALL words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine from them in some remote part of Wales?

He kissed her so gently she wondered if she had imagined it

The shadow is dark and the woods are cold, but they are not endless. No matter how lost you are now, you are not lost forever. You are findable.Love just keeps on looking. Love is forever tries.

God hasn't called you to walk in someone else's shoes (purpose). He wants you to walk in the shoes that fit you, for which He made you. You aren't going to succeed walking in another woman's shoes.

Reason is the slow and torturous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it

Real learning, attentive, real learning, deep learning, is playful and frustrating and joyful and discouraging and exciting and sociable and private all the time, which is what makes it great.

You can't get blood from a stone.

She knows who she is, because she knows who she isn't.

I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.

I'm not that clued up on the American sports yet, really.

I don't cause riots, but I do cause confusion. People freeze when they spot me.