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Quotes About Utterance

From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
~ Natasha Trethewey
Much of a poet's experience takes place in imagination only; the life he tells is oftenest the life that he strongly desires to live, and the power, the purity and height of his utterance may not seldom be the greater because experience here uses the voices of desire.
~ George Edward Woodberry
Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.
~ Jonathan Lethem
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
~ Rabindranath Tagore
The words walked right out of my mouth.
~ James Brady
A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word - the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt. The heaven and earth must not be shaken. I suppose - at least, not by us who know so many truths about either.
~ Joseph Conrad
He sealed the utterance with that smile of his, as though it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping.
~ Joseph Conrad
Oh, Heavens' ejaculated the engineer in a feeble voice.
~ Joseph Conrad
Such utterance staggers and offends among the listeners. But it also opens vistas of possibility where we had not thought to go and where in fact, we are most reluctant to go.
~ Walter Brueggemann
Prophecy in this context may be understood as a redescription of the public processes of history through which the purposes of Yahweh are given in human utterance.
~ Walter Brueggemann
The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use
~ Washington Irving
The tongue is the only instrument that gets sharper with use.
~ Washington Irving
Once again, the expression uttered (in speech or writing) is not the sole or even the primary object of translation when the force of an utterance is what matters, as it always does.
~ David Bellos
It can be done only by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are.
~ David Bellos
the quality of onset determines the quality of the ensuing phonation.
~ James Stark
Adam said, 'Christ!' and Danny Hislop, wriggling past said, 'No. Lord Culter, I do declare.
~ Dorothy Dunnett
If utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man. Always the seer is a sayer.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.
~ Herman Melville
The art of utterance persuades initially by its music and its rhythm, before semiotic or personal characteristics come into play.
~ Helen Vendler
When words fail to express the exalted sentiments and finer emotions of the human heart, music becomes the sublimated language of the soul, the divine instrumentality for its higher utterance.
~ Hans Hinrich Wendt
poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.
~ Vernon Lee
Your say is not yours unless you say it
~ Satyajeet Mujgule
But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
~ Thomas Lynch