872 quotes found
“By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language can no longer describe the world in which we live. With antique ideas and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that i...”
“Gods were preserved but languages were exterminated: thus was the conquerors will”
“Since language produces meaning within an enclosed system, there is always a built-in untranslatability, which national languages began to deliberately pursue. The process added to the creation of ...”
“Every language has its own word for the sun, but the sun us always the same.”
“Language is a ladder that always falls short of reality.”
“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.”
“The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”
“The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”
“Therefore am I still / A lover of the meadows and the woods, / And mountains; and of all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half create...”
“Language is the medium of literature, and the state of the language at any time can hardly fail to carry literary consequences.”
“Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometime...”
“A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once e...”
“Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.”
“In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it m...”
“He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]”
“I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Pl...”
“The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must strugg...”
“I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My bo...”
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
“On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, i...”
