Words

A word is a powerful instrument. When well chosen and well used, words can move us, inspire us, and force us into action. The following are a few well crafted passages that have captured my attention, inspired me, and moved me.

Words! Words, when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music, and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't.

spoken by Josiah Barlett
The West Wing
Season 3 Episode 5: "War Crimes"
Teleplay by Aaron Sorkin

In the West, of course, God has been dead for some time. What remains is religion as social belief, which is at best a moral code and at worst social etiquette. A real belief feels to the believer to be a natural state and does not respond to questioning. That is one of the reasons that we have so much difficulty dealing with the Islamic world. They don't want to discuss fundamentals. They are not interested in a rational analysis. They believe the way we once believed. Not only do we find this incomprehensible and frustrating, we also find it troubling, because their certainty is a reflection of our own past.

pp348, "The Hero and the Politics of Immortality"
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
John Ralston Saul

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them. Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

"A River Runs Through It"
Norman Maclean

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

"Dead Poets Society"
Written by Tom Schulman