Quotes About Language

Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.

I am charmed by concrete poetry (but it's very hard to do well, I think) and in general by the idea of mixing the visual and the textual.

Poetry cannot be translation

Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

The poetry of speech.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

I've always had a fondness for language... English. Not that I use it correctly but I like words. I like books and I like poetry.. I like the written word... and the sung word.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

Poetry is always close kin to the impossible, isn't it?

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

At McCormick Theological Seminary I had to take Hebrew, so I began to read prophetic poetry, and suddenly it became the life I wanted to spend.