Language Quotes (page 44)
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It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language
Jane Austen
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.
Pat Conroy
We passed a street minstrel who was singing in one of the more obscure Eastern languages, and I dropped a few orbs into his instrument case.
"Boss, was he singing what I thought he was singing?"
"A young man tells his beloved of his love for her."
" 'My little hairy testicle—' "
"It's a cultural thing, Loiosh. You wouldn't understand.
Steven Brust
For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.
Virginia Woolf
He[Tom] read from the Almenak."'The song that the Vigil Snake sings is in fact one immensely long word; the longest in the ancient language of the species. It is so long that an individual can sing it for a lifetime and never come to the end of it.'"That sounds like a Kleppism to me," Geneva said. "How would they ever learn it?"Good question," said Tom. "Maybe they're born with it, like a migration instinct?"'"Born with a song,"said Geneva. Tom smiled. "Yes. Don't you like that idea?"Liking...
Clive Barker
As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible -- or at least visible, at least discussible -- those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains where science's tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of...
Annie Dillard
to become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words...the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. the world of things we perceive is but a veil. It’s flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. It’s silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear--filling grandeur.
Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak...
Abraham Joshua Heschel