Quotes About Language

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Poetry can magnify experience.

Every word was once a poem.

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.

We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.

The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.

I think translation is an impossible job, and I admire the people who do it in a way that brings poetry to us that we wouldn't have access to.

Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

Poetic effect is the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.