Virginia Woolf on language and words

[…] Words do not live in the dictionaries, they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love and mating together. […] They seem to like people to think before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. […] They hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. […] They mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people that they survive. […]

English novelist and critic Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941), 1902. (Photo by George C. Beresford/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)