Explore a collection of the most beloved and motivational quotes and sayings about Textual. Share these powerful messages with your loved ones on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or on your personal blog, and inspire the world with their wisdom. We've compiled the Top 100 Textual Quotes and Sayings from 96 influential authors, including W. J. T. Mitchell,Clarice Lispector,Ellen Lupton,William H Gass,Sam Shepard, for you to enjoy and share.

We inhabit a world so inundated with composite pictorial-verbal forms [...] and with the technology for the rapid, cheap production of words and images that nature itself threatens to become what it was in the Middle Ages: an encyclopedic illuminated book overlaid with ornamentation and marginal glosses, every object converted into an image with its proper label or signature By W. J. T. Mitchell Ages Middle Forms Rapid Cheap

What Angela writes can be read aloud: her words are voluptuous and give physical pleasure. I am geometric, Angela is a spiral, all finesse. She is intuitive, I am logical. She is not afraid to err in the use of words. And I do not err. I am well aware that she is the succulent grape and I am the raisin. By Clarice Lispector Angela Aloud Pleasure Writes Read

Typography is what language looks like. By Ellen Lupton Typography Language

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal By William H Gass Fiction Verbal Visual

Words are tools of imagery in motion, By Sam Shepard Words Motion Tools Imagery

A coherent text is a designed object: an ordered tree of sections within sections, crisscrossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors, and themes, and held together by connectors that tie one proposition to the next. Like other designed objects, it comes about not by accident but by drafting a blueprint, attending to details, and maintaining a sense of harmony and balance. By Steven Pinker Points Actors Sections Crisscrossed Topics

As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader's hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words. By Alberto Manguel Reader Space Paper Ink Words

Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop By Gabrielle Zevin Written Love Fast Dull Mountiantop

Words have not just the astonishing capacity to banish boredom and create wonders. They also enable contact with the lives of others and with story worlds, arousing endless curiosity about ourselves and the places we inhabit. By Maria Tatar Words Astonishing Capacity Banish Boredom

For centuries, we in the West have thought of ourselves as rational animals whose mental capacities transcend our bodily nature. In this traditional view our minds are abstract, logical, unemotionally rational, consciously accessible, and, above all, able to directly fit and represent the world. Language has a special place in thie view of what a human is - it is a privileged, logical symbol system internal to our minds that transparently expresses abstract concepts that are defined in terms of the external world itself. By George Lakoff West Centuries Nature Rational Logical

I am convinced that abstract form, imagery, color, texture, and material convey meaning equal to or greater than words. By Katherine Mccoy Imagery Color Texture Form Words

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be. By Francis Spufford Goblins Earth Elves Trees Reading

The act of expressing oneself is a physical one. It materializes the thought. By Asger Jorn Act Expressing Oneself Physical Thought

The distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces. By Sigmund Freud Murder Deed Traces Distortion Text

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course. By Stephen King Telepathy Writing

Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words. By Thomas Kinkade Literature Words Stringing Pictures

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic. By Leslie Fiedler Psychological Historical Literature Sociological Anthropological

Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing. By Robert Bringhurst Typographic Printing Writing Style Founded

Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images, By Steven Pinker Images Experiments Shown Readers Understand

Literature is language charged with meaning By Ezra Pound Literature Meaning Language Charged

Writing is acting on paper. By Lydia Anne Klima Writing Paper Acting

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception. By Jacques Derrida Text Comer Glance Game Hides

Ink is the transcript of thought. By Alphonse De Lamartine Ink Thought Transcript

Writing is a supernatural thing. By Silas House Writing Thing Supernatural

The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read. By Richard Feynman Visual Symbolic Channels Individual Member

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expressiona kind of rudimentary theateras do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means. By John Barth Printed Peculiar Stories Anesthetic Senses

In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land. By David Abram Absence Natural Speech Utterance Site

Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words. By Debasish Mridha Writing Words Abstract Art Drawing

Words are life set down on paper. By Paulo Coelho Words Paper Life Set

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows ... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul. By Fernando Pessoa Street Metaphors Real Walk People

Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul. By Guy De Maupassant Lips Language Faces Beguile Dazzles

When typography is on point, words become images. By Shawn Lukas Point Words Images Typography

Effective stream-of-consciousness narration is the product of verbal precision, not just of literal documentation. It is decidedly not a matter of unedited free-association. By Albert Murray Effective Narration Precision Documentation Product

There is a world of communication which is not dependent on words. By Mary Martin Words World Communication Dependent

Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic. By Fay Weldon Writing Statements Connotations Season Ripe

We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself. By William S. Burroughs Function Words Find Images Written

Words are living legends, swollen with significance. We string them together to make stories, but they themselves ARE stories, encapsulating rich, runny histories. By Alena Graedon Words Legends Swollen Significance Stories

The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth. But all of that is nothing if those words fail to touch the heart and make one feel. By Richelle E. Goodrich Make Contemplate Written Pause Depth

The written argument endures. The oral argument is fleeting. By Ruth Bader Ginsburg Endures Argument Written Fleeting Oral

Every phrase had to be captured on paper or it wasn't real, it slipped away. I'd see the words hanging in midairCamille, pass the milk and anxiety coiled up in me as they began to fade, like jet exhaust. Writing them down, though, I had them. No worries that they'd become extinct. I was a lingual conservationist. I was the class freak, a tight, nervous eighth-grader frenziedly copying down phrases ("Mr. Feeney is totally gay," "Jamie Dobson is ugly," "They never have chocolate milk") with a keenness bordering on the religious. By Gillian Flynn Real Captured Paper Slipped Milk

Thoughts to words, words to paper.A gift we give ourselves, both now and later. By Nancy Fraser Thoughts Words Papera Gift Give

Language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories. By Kenneth Goldsmith Language Mold Communication Business Contracts

Text talk? How can the art of writing, once performed by monastic scribes, have degenerated into little more than creative candyfloss? By Fennel Hudson Text Talk Writing Scribes Candyfloss

Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing. By Octavio Paz Human Universe Translation Metaphor Thing

The literary artist lends verbal depth to the visual. The visual artist provides visible articulation for the literary. By Aberjhani Literary Visual Artist Lends Verbal

She might as well have used something other than words, but she had not come across a more appropriate medium. It was as simple as that. By Haruki Murakami Words Medium Simple

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word liberty entire nations. By Novalis Denotation Abstraction Sounds Markings Remarkable

Text is linear; it is black and white; it doesn't zoom around the page in 3-D; it isn't intelligent by itself; in fact, in terms of immediate reaction it is quite boring. I can't imagine a single preliterate was ever wowed at the first sight of text, and yet text has been the basis of arguably the most fundamental intellectual transformation of the human species. It and its subforms, such as algebra, have made science education for all a plausible goal. By Andrea Disessa Text Linear White Fact Boring

Words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. By Geoff Nicholson Words Space Text Walk Inscribe

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. By Henry David Thoreau Relics Written Word Choicest Work

The spoken word and the written - there is an astonishing gulf between them. There is a way of turning sentences that completely reverses the meaning. By Agatha Christie Written Spoken Word Astonishing Gulf

Her hair came undone and rose off her shoulders, quivering as if from a breeze. Static kept snapping through the strands, and Jasmira's eyes turned completely white. Her arms were covered in spiraled script. It crawled and twisted on her skin. The text shone burgundy. Single letters kept separating and slowly flaking off. They resembled tiny red fire sparks, burning brightly, and then disappearing all together. By A.o. Peart Shoulders Quivering Breeze Hair Undone

We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology. By Ted Chiang Technology Writing

There is a fine line between reading a message from the text and reading one into the text. By John Corvino Text Reading Fine Line Message

For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and the picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read! By Betty Smith Word Francie Looked Sounding Read

Typography is a hidden tool of manipulation within society. By Neville Brody Typography Society Hidden Tool Manipulation

Writing can be either readable or precise, but not at the same time. By Bertrand Russell Writing Precise Time Readable

But information is physical. By James Gleick Physical Information

The written word is everything. By John Drinkwater Written Word

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood. By Jane Yolen Literature Disease Childhood Textually Transmitted

Language is the close-fitting dress of thought. By Richard Chenevix Trench Language Thought Closefitting Dress

Words. Just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have! They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt. They even come to look and sound like what they mean. Angry looks angry on the page. Ugly sounds ugly when you say it. By Arthur Gordon Words Sounds Angry Ugly Paper

Sometimes in our zeal to "apply" a text, we fail to read the text in its context. And more often than we may all care to admit, our frustrations over how to apply a text can be completely resolved with a more accurate interpretation. By Scot Mcknight Text Context Apply Zeal Fail

Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words. By Samuel Johnson Style Imaginary Excite Readers Words

Written words can also sing. By Ngugi Wa Thiong'o Written Sing Words

The writing of words can lead to all sorts of absurdities. By Sherwood Anderson Absurdities Writing Words Lead Sorts

The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something "meaningful," we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning. By Kenneth Goldsmith Meaningful Words Experience Constraint Sound

Stories and images can be powerful means for conveying ideas. Every time we read a book or watch a movie, we enter into an imaginative By Nancy Pearcey Stories Ideas Images Powerful Conveying

The text is your greatest enemy. By Sanford Meisner Enemy Text Greatest

I am Become Text Message. Destroyer Of Words. By Dean Cavanagh Message Text Words Destroyer

:Paintings are easy to see," he said after a moment. "Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart. By Catherine Fisher Paintings Words Moment Open Easy

Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world. By Alan Moore Trust Process Absolute Fictive Occult

There is beauty in the written word.'-Kevin By T.j. Klune Kevin Beauty Written Word

Metaphor is embodied in language. By Dennis Potter Metaphor Language Embodied

If you subscribe to Sherry Turkle's argument that the prevalence of text-based communications is leading to a decline in face-to-face conversations and the skills to conduct them, the shift makes total sense. By Aziz Ansari Sherry Turkle Conversations Sense Subscribe

The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols. By Steven Pinker Symbols Tethering Words Reality Allay

To be a textual critic requires aptitude for thinking and willingness to think; and though it also requires other things, those things are supplements and cannot be substitutes. Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head. By A.e. Housman Requires Good Substitutes Head Things

The Internet is a tool, a technology, and we like to say that it has all of these properties, but really, it's just a place where our writing is. By Joshua Cohen Internet Tool Technology Properties Place

Words were numbers were codes were formulae. Words held secret maps, the measuring of paces, the patterns of mortal minds, of histories, of cities, of continents and warrens. By Steven Erikson Words Formulae Numbers Codes Maps

Words make the intangible aspects of human experience communicable, and a single sentence can shatter our world view and assist us in the formulation of a new one. By Chris Matakas Words Communicable Make Intangible Aspects

Brevity in writing is very powerful By Lance Greenfield Brevity Powerful Writing

It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source. By Nick Harkaway Eyelines Expressions Voice True Interacting

Language is the medium of our thoughts. By Frederick Lenz Language Thoughts Medium

There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing. By Quinn Norton Writing Computers Aesthetic Crisis Write

Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration. By Tom Bissell Classes Writing Manuscript Lot Creativewriting

To describe an emotion is to feel with words. To communicate a moment of existence is to bridge the eternal and the temporal with an intellectual engagement of body, soul, spirit, and mind. To write, therefore is to entangle the mysteries of the universe in a collection of words, a web of ideas, a single drop of ink on a page. By Charles M. Heyworth Words Describe Emotion Feel Soul

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. By Italo Calvino Words Faculty Pestilence Struck Human

Writing bridges the gap between the subconscious and conscious mind. By Stephen Covey Writing Mind Bridges Gap Subconscious

The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content. By Lidia Yuknavitch Content Practice Employing Metaphor Image

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness. By Robert Bringhurst Typography Composition Interpretation Full Obtuseness

In writing, I search for believability, simplicity and emotional impact. By Hal David Writing Believability Simplicity Impact Search

Words are the tools we use to express our reality. By Steve Maraboli Words Reality Tools Express

I mean, what's thematic? How to put it? Going back to, like, 1980, when I started writing poetry. Language itself became an issue. I'd even think about font as an aspect of text, you know, how something looks on a page. A lot of this is the product of a very solitary existence, it's like, language, I mean, you know. A lot of time spent alone in the creation of all of this stuff. By Richard Meltzer Thematic Language Lot Put Poetry

Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade before the public. By George W. Crane Language Public Apparel Thoughts Parade

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that. By Alison Owen Screen Transcribe Idea Truthfully Page

Words are gifts that give to us all. Packaged songs and poems waiting to be unwrapped. By Calvin W. Allison Words Gifts Give Packaged Unwrapped

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. By Jhumpa Lahiri Fiction Plenty Information Rousing Suspense

There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply ... the person who wants to read what I have written. By Will Self Word Thrilling Idea Intimacy Connecting

Verbal imagery (such as a simile or a description of a place or an event) is more physical, more bodily, than thinking or feeling, but less physical, more internal, than the actual sounds of the words. Imagery takes place in "the imagination," which I take to be the meeting place of the thinking mind with the sensing body. What is imagined isn't physically real, but it feels as if it were: the reader sees or hears or feels what goes on in the story, is drawn into it, exists in it, among its images, in the imagination (the reader's? the writer's?) while reading. By Ursula K. Le Guin Physical Place Imagery Thinking Imagination

The text is a limited field of possible constructions. By Paul Ricoeur Constructions Text Limited Field