The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

But they woke him with words, their cruel bright weapons.

An occasional short sentence can carry a
tremendous punch. It stays in the reader’s ear.

She struck out like a wounded animal.

IfI wanted to eat an apple, and someone punched me in the stomach, taking away my appetite, then it was this punch that I originally wanted

i use pain to push me to greatness

I'm pretty good at inventing phrases- you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too...I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly-they'll go through anything. You read them and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing-you know, like the very hardest X-rays when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

Every command leaves behind a painful sting in the person who is forced to carry it out.

Only a rebuke that 'has something in it' will sting, will have the power to stir our feelings, not the other sort, as we know.

I experienced so intense a moment of despair, frustration and rebelliousness that irony, my most trusted weapon of defense, became instead another scalpel for probing my own wounds.

Then the pain of loss leaped out on me, like a knife in the night when one has been on one’s guard all day.

True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.

Revenge is as the tigers spring,
Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real
Torture is theirs, what they inflict they feel.