Quotes About Language

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.

what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial.

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

All this is like a dream which the word bears within itself and which, passing through him who writes, is freed and frees him.

Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can only be lived, second by second, which cannot be recorded or remembered? First comes this wordless language of living bodies...then the words books are written with, and attempts to translate that first language are vain...

Le città sono un insieme di tante cose: di memoria, di desideri, di segni d'un linguaggio; le città sono luoghi di scambio, come spiegano tutti i libri di storia dell'economia, ma questi scambi non sono soltanto scambi di merci, sono scambi di parole, di desideri, di ricordi. Il mio libro s'apre e si chiude su immagini di città felici che continuamente prendono forma e svaniscono, nascoste nelle città infelici.

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total word revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that of writing all books, writing the books of all possible authors.

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.

Azt vallom tehát, hogy akkor használjuk helyesen a nyelvet, hogyha tapintatosan, figyelmesen és óvatosan közelítünk vele a (jelen lév? vagy hiányzó) dolgokhoz, tiszteletben tartva azt, amit a (jelen lév? vagy hiányzó) dolgok szavak nélkül is közölnek.

Writing consists no longer in narrating but in sayin that one is narrating, and what one says becomes identified with the very act of saying. The psychological person is replaced by a linguistic or even a grammatical person, defined solely by his place in the discourse.

Will I ever be able to say, "Today it writes," just like "Today it rains," "Today it is windy"?

At this point we must remind ourselves that the idea that the world is made up of weightless atoms surprises us because we have experienced the weight of things. Similarly, we could not admire the lightness of language if we had not also learned to admire language endowed with weight.

Books are the steps of the threshold. . . . All Cimmerian authors have passed it . . . Then the wordless language of the dead begins, which says the things that only the language of the dead can say. Cimmerian is the last language of the living, the language of the threshold! You come here to try to listen there, beyond. . . . Listen .

No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.

there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things

E combattendo, troveranno che le parole non hanno più significato.