Quotes About Language

Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.

And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature

I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself.

A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming.

Ne sachant quoi lire ni dans quel ordre, j'ai suivi l'alphabet. Dieu merci, elle s'appelait Austen...

I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silences. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody as been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Creo en la ficción y en el poder de las historias porque así hablamos a través de lenguas que no son nuestras. No se nos silencia. Todos nosotros, cuando sufrimos un gran trauma, dudamos, tartamudeamos; hay grandes pausas en nuestro discurso. La cosa se atasca. Recuperamos el lenguaje a través del lenguaje de otros. Podemos recurrir al poema. Podemos abrir el libro. Alguien ha estado allí por nosotros y buceó en las palabras.

I had lines inside me-a string of guiding lights. I had language.

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up to Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language.

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

The saggy armchair of clichés.

The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.

Witchery popery popery witchery – all the same thing.

It is snowing. In the English language we do not know anything about the 'it' that is snowing. It might be God. Maybe not. Anyway. It. Is. Snowing.

For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.

I know how it is. Saying too much. Saying too little. Who says enough? Just enough? My closest conversations are bad translations. That's not what I meant--not what I meant at all.

All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Las palabras son la parte del silencio que puede ser hablada

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)