Quotes About Communication

Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly–they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...

Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe;

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.

Las palabras, como los rayos X, atraviesan cualquier cosa, si uno las emplea bien.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them (...) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.

That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable.

The writer proposes, the readers dispose.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students—how to write piercingly.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say...

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something to say and the power to say it -- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make use of the power. If there was some different way of writing...Or else something else to write about.

You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students-how to write piercingly.

Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory.

By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?

And it's what you never will write, said the Controller. Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello.

Glad to hear what? asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last I see, and popped back, clapping shut the door behind her.

Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them.

Shut lips, sleeping faces, Every stopped machine, The dumb and littered places Where crowds have been:. All silences rejoice, Weep (loudly or low), Speak-but with the voice Of whom, I do not know.

Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say ... Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel-works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.