Top 60 Pip Williams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Women don’t have to live lives determined by others. They have choices, and I choose not to live the rest of my days doing as I’m told and worrying about what people will think. That’s no life at all.”

— Pip Williams

2. “I am beginning to feel the English language is burdened by this war, Es. Everyone I meet has a new word for toilet paper, and I have not heard one that doesn’t accurately convey its origin or the experience of using it. Yet only a handful of words exist to convey a thousand horrors.”

— Pip Williams

3. “It’s not about forgiveness, Essymay. We can’t always make the choices we’d like, but we can try to make the best of what we must settle for. Take care not to dwell.”

— Pip Williams

4. “The Dictionary is a history book, Esme. If it has taught me anything, it is that the way we conceive of things now will most certainly change.”

— Pip Williams

5. “A vulgar word, well placed and said with just enough vigour, can express far more than its polite equivalent.”

— Pip Williams

6. “What are they so scared of?” Lizzie sighed. “All of them are scared of losing something; but for the likes of him that spat in your face, they don’t want their wives thinking they deserve more than they’ve got. Makes me glad to be in service when I think that men like that might be the alternative.”

— Pip Williams

7. “Problem is, Esme, you’re scared of the wrong thing. Without the vote nothing we say matters, and that should terrify you.”

— Pip Williams

8. “Once the question of women’s political suffrage has been dealt with, less obvious inequalities will need to be exposed. Without realising it, you are already working for this cause. As grandfather said, it will be a long game. Play a position you are good at, and let others play theirs.”

— Pip Williams

9. “My Dictionary of Lost Words was no better than the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons: it hid what should be seen and silenced what should be heard.”

— Pip Williams

10. “Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us.”

— Pip Williams

11. “Sometimes I think there may be more than two sides.”

— Pip Williams

12. “I’m not sure I could like a man without opinions,” I said.”

— Pip Williams

13. “It occurred to me that the intimidation I always felt might have been of my own creation. – Esme.”

— Pip Williams

14. “SISTERS Women bonded by a shared political goal; comrades.”

— Pip Williams

15. “Some men are very kind, and some men are not. It makes no difference whose uniform they wear.”

— Pip Williams

16. “Fear ’ates the ordinary,” she said. “When yer feared, you need to think ordinary thoughts, do ordinary things. You ’ear me? The fear’ll back off, for a time at least.”

— Pip Williams

17. “Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us. But what happens when words that are spoken are not recorded? What effect does that have on the speaker of those words?”

— Pip Williams

18. “I feel like a dandelion just before the wind blows.”

— Pip Williams

19. “My Dictionary of Lost Words was no better than the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery of the House of Commons: it hid what should be seen and silenced what should be heard. When Mabel was gone and I was gone, the trunk would be no more than a coffin.”

— Pip Williams

20. “Some words are more than letters on a page, don’t you think? They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath you can feel its sharp edge against your lip.”

— Pip Williams

21. “I was going to miss the waves of green hills. I would miss the silence. When we first came, I found it too quiet, my thoughts too loud. But the silence had turned out not to be complete: the valley hummed and sang and bleated. When my thoughts had been heard and argued with, and when some kind of peace had been struck, I’d begun to listen to the valley like some would listen to music or a holy chant. There was solace in its rhythm, and it slowed the beat of my heart.”

— Pip Williams

22. “The hill demanded payment, and I knew I would never reach the top without the pain of the climb in my lungs and legs, no matter how fit I became. I’d complained about it those first few days – sat down and cried for lack of breath, and other things. I didn’t want to be there. But Lizzie had never let me turn back. “It’s the kind of pain that achieves something,” she said.”

— Pip Williams

23. “This is an important one, Angus,” I said, holding my list of Esperanto words, “but I have no idea how to define it for him.” “What is it?” “Sekura.” “What does it mean?” “Safe.” We sat in silence for a while, Angus holding his chin in mock thought, me staring at the word and coming up blank, Bertie between us both, unresponsive. “Hug him, missus,” said Angus. “Hug him?” “Yeah. I reckon the only time any of us feel really safe is when our mum’s hugging us.”

— Pip Williams

24. “But when we talk about her, she comes to life.” “Never forget that, Esme. Words are our tools of resurrection.”

— Pip Williams

25. “I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned – at the end of a day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.”

— Pip Williams

26. “LOSS ‘Sorry for your loss, they say. And I want to know what they mean, because it’s not just my boys I’ve lost. I’ve lost my motherhood, my chance to be a grandmother. I’ve lost the easy conversation of neighbours and the comfort of family in my old age. Every day I wake to some new loss that I hadn’t thought of before, and I know that soon it will be my mind.”

— Pip Williams

27. “I missed them. It was as if they had written a play and constructed the set, and whenever I was with them I ha a part to perform. I fell into it so easily: a secondary character, someone ordinary against whom the leads could shine. Now that they had packed up and left I felt I had forgotten my lines.” p. 174.”

— Pip Williams

28. “Of course with you, but I can’t be a wife and mother and a scholar as well. It just isn’t possible, and I can’t deny you those things that you want.’ My voice faltered. I’d never said it aloud, never even articulated it in thought. ‘The life you offer is too much.’ ‘You think you have to choose?’ ‘Oh, Bastiaan, I know I have to choose.”

— Pip Williams

29. “What’s so funny?’ ‘Nothing. It’s just that you don’t speak often, but when you do it’s perfect.”

— Pip Williams

30. “She is mistress of this place, I thought on our second morning, the idea breaking through the fog of my mind like a shaft of light, but quickly retreating from the effort of further contemplation.”

— Pip Williams

31. “Words are like stories... They change as they are passed from mouth to mouth; their meanings stretch or truncate to fit what needs to be said.”

— Pip Williams

32. “She understood, I think, that most of what people said was meaningless. That people spoke to fill the silence or pass the time; that, despite our mastery of words and our ability to put them together in infinitely varied ways, most of us struggled to say what we really meant. Maude filtered conversation like a prism filters light. She broke it down so that each phrase could be understood as an articulation of something singular.”

— Pip Williams

33. “But what’s so important about these words?” she asked. I didn’t know, exactly. It was more feeling than thought. Some words were just like baby birds fallen from the nest. With others, I felt as though I’d come across a clue: I knew it was important, but I wasn’t sure why.”

— Pip Williams

34. “Words are our tools of resurrection.”

— Pip Williams

35. “It’s so romantic, isn’t it? But I was incensed. I told him I’d had my fill of poetry that painted ordinary men as saints for dying worse than ordinary deaths or getting injuries that meant they’d live worse than ordinary lives. I told him there was nothing noble about dying in a bloody cornfield – it was just a waste.”

— Pip Williams

36. “The past came towards me, and I closed the book.”

— Pip Williams

37. “Bondmaid. If I hadn’t found it and explained what it meant would Lizzie see herself differently?”

— Pip Williams

38. “You are correct in your observation that words in common use that are not written down would necessarily be excluded. Your concern that some types of words, or words used by some types of people, will be lost to the future is really quite perceptive.”

— Pip Williams

39. “I find that the more I define, the less I know. I spend my days trying to understand how words were used by men long dead, in order to draft a meaning that will suffice not just for our times but for the future.”

— Pip Williams

40. “Was I better? Before Shropshire I’d felt broken, as though I would fall should the scaffold of my work be removed. I didn’t feel that now, but there was a fine crack through the middle of me, and I suspected it might never mend. I remembered Lizzie apologising to Mrs Lloyd the first time she stayed to chat, for the chip in the cup. ‘A chip doesn’t stop it from holding tea,’ Mrs Lloyd had said.”

— Pip Williams

41. “There were so many words to describe the bleeding. Menstrue was the same as catamenia. It meant unclean blood. But what blood was clean? It always left a stain.”

— Pip Williams

42. “When we bound these books, I thought, they were identical. But I realised they couldn’t stay that way. As soon as someone cracks the spine, a book develops a character all its own. What impresses or concerns one reader is never the same as what impresses or concerns all others. So, each book, once read, will fall open at a different place. Each book, once read, I realised, will have told a slightly different story.”

— Pip Williams

43. “I felt the weight of Her, so much heavier than when I first held Her. I tried to think of a word that could match Her beauty. There was none. There are none. There never would be a word to match Her.”

— Pip Williams

44. “Words change over time, you see. The way they look, the way they sound; sometimes even their meaning changes. They have their own history.”

— Pip Williams

45. “I had hoped that time would restore you, but it seems you need more. You are in my heart, dear girl, even if I have been dislodged from yours. I hope it is not permanent.”

— Pip Williams

46. “Was it more obscene to say it, to write it, or to set it in type? On the breath it could taken by a breeze or crowded out by chatter; it could be misheard or ignored. On the page it was a real thing. It had been caught and pinned to a board, its letters spread in a particular way so that anyone who saw it would know what it was.”

— Pip Williams

47. “James immediately agreed she should build her strength. He is firmly of the belief that a good walk can cure anything and was keen to point out that he doesn’t agree with wrapping people up and sitting them in lounge chairs by the sea the moment they start to cough.”

— Pip Williams

48. “When Dr. Johnson undertook to compile his dictionary, he resolved to leave no word unexamined. This resolve was soon eroded when he realized that one inquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to scratch was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed.”

— Pip Williams

49. “So you and Dr Murray could make the words mean whatever you want them to mean, and we’ll all have to use them that way forever?”

— Pip Williams

50. “Menstruosity was the condition of being menstruous. And menstruous had once meant horribly filthy or polluted. Menstruous. Like monstrous. It came closest to explaining how I felt. Lizzie had called it “The Curse”. She had never heard of menstruation and laughed when I said it.”

— Pip Williams