Pre Verbal Quotes & Sayings

I think I'm the most underrated superstar that's out there, but that doesn't matter to me. — Carmelo Anthony

If only we could return to those ages when no utterance shackled existence, to the laconism of interjections, to the joyous stupor of the pre- verbal! — Emil M. Cioran

It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail. — Tim Powers

What is life but a Spectrum and what is music but life itself. — Billy Cobham

True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless "thing" and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the "thing" that is waiting to be articulated. — John Berger

As I say so often, "Observe and wait." Sometimes you may even find out that what you believed the infant wanted was only your assumption. It is natural to make mistakes and easy to misunderstand pre-verbal children. Nevertheless, it is important to keep trying — Magda Gerber

This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue ... So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision ... it already has the quality of an idea ... unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself. — Ian McEwan

Just about killed ourselves out there in the dark," Carver said. "He's gone. Put a few concrete blocks on top of him, just in case." "In case of what?" Taryn asked, fascinated in spite of herself. "Well . . . body gases," Carver said. "The ground was a little wet, you wouldn't want him popping up. — John Sandford

At the Veracruz Mexico Temple dedication six weeks later, he spoke of the temple helping the members there. "We all have certain talents, and the Lord knows what they are," he said. "We all have limitations and the Lord knows what they are. Whatever our limitations may be, the Lord said this: 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,' [Matthew 5:48.] He would not give us commandments we could not fulfill. We can become perfect in our love of God. We can become perfect in our love of our fellow men. We can become perfect in the payment of our tithing. We can become perfect in living the Word of Wisdom. We can become perfect in our home teaching. In other words, all of those degrees of perfection are within our reach... We know what we must do. — Heidi S. Swinton

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal — John Berger

I think when I stop fighting, I die in a sense. — Tavis Smiley

I think Dexter is a man who ... a part of himself is very much frozen, or arrested in a place that is pre-memory, pre-conscious, pre-verbal. Something very traumatic happened to him, he doesn't know what that is. And I think on some level he wants to know. He denies his humanity, he describes himself as someone who is without feeling, and yet I think that he maybe suspects - in a way that maybe isn't even conscious yet when we first meet him - that he is in fact a human being. — Michael C. Hall

It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language. — Ben Marcus

Poetry for me is a result of lyrical meditation, pre-verbal in origin, and much of the craft has to do with finding a contemporary diction that embodies, at times subverts but never betrays that pre-verbal lyrical source: the presence of song before it is sung. — John Allison