Quotes & Sayings About Utterance

Let not the tongue give utterance to the evil that is in thine heart, but command thy tongue to be silent until good shall prevail over evil. — Brigham Young

The realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuosity into life. — Richard M. Weaver

The question 'Why poetry?' isn't asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: "What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that's unutterable?" You can't generalize very usefully about poetry; you can't reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can't successfully answer the question of "Why poetry?," can't reduce it in the way I think you can't, then maybe that's the strongest evidence that poetry's doing its job; it's creating an essential need and then satisfying it. — Richard Ford

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire had actually believed it, and, most important, how many times the utterance had any impact whatsoever on our dispute. What a lovely chart one could draw of this word Sorry. — Ben Marcus

Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity, - the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heavens artillery, - but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggots life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear od death, of God, of the universe, comes over him, - the hope of the Resurrection and the life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence, - it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.
- The White Silence — Jack London

In my commencement address I gave the language and sources of the prophetic utterance made by the Prophet Joseph that the Constitution of the United States would hang by a single thread, but be saved by the elders of Israel. I hope you will read those sources so you will be well-informed as to this prophecy and be prepared to do your part in its fulfillment. — Ernest L. Wilkinson

A request not to worry is perhaps the least soothing message capable of human utterance. — Mignon G. Eberhart

I compose music because I must give expression to my feelings, just as I talk because I must give utterance to my thoughts. — Sergei Rachmaninoff

In the summer of 2007, I was sitting in a studio in Dublin, debating with a lay spokesman of the Roman Catholic Church who turned out to be the only believing Christian on a discussion panel of five people. He was a perfectly nice and rather modest logic-chopping polemicist, happy enough to go for a glass of refreshment after the program, and I suddenly felt a piercing stab of pity for him. A generation ago in Ireland, the Church did not have to lower itself in this way. It raised its voice only slightly, and was instantly obeyed by the Parliament, the schools, and the media. It could and did forbid divorce, contraception, the publication of certain books, and the utterance of certain opinions. Now it is discredited and in decline. Its once-absolute doctrines appear ridiculous: — Christopher Hitchens

Everywhere that a great soul gives utterance to its thoughts, there also is a Golgotha. — Heinrich Heine

For never has there been, in modern times, such a Homeric world, where so much value is pinned onto the utterance of name! Entire conversations, entire lives, are devoted to the act of naming people, and in Pakistan the affluent would be totally devoid of talk if they were unable to take names in vain. Caste and all its subclassifications are recreated every day in the structure of a conversation that knows which names to name ... — Sara Suleri

Death, as a general statement, is so easy of utterance, of belief; it is only when we come face to face with it that we find the great mystery so cruelly hard to realise; for death, like love, is ever old and ever new. — Amy Levy

At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, "Life is not worth living." We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories do not matter. — G.K. Chesterton

Poetry is not simply a fashion of expression: it is the form of expression absolutely required by a certain class of ideas. Poetry, indeed, may be distinguished from Prose by the single circumstance, that it is the utterance of whatever in man cannot be perfectly uttered in any other than a rhythmical form: it is useless to say that the naked meaning is independent of the form: on the contrary, the form contributes essentially to the fullness of the meaning. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The simple statement, 'God is for us', is in truth one of the richest and weightiest utterances that the Bible contains. — J.I. Packer

He used to say that it was no wonder if from the human soul, by some higher instinct that does not know what goes on within itself, some utterance emerges not by art but by 'chance' which is in sympathy with the affairs or actions of the inquirer.7 — Augustine Of Hippo

Often your utterances and expressions of your face leak out the secrets of your hidden thoughts. — Ali Ibn Abi Talib

The summer Night comes brooding down on Earth, As Love comes brooding down on human hearts, With bliss that hath no utterance save rich tears. She floats in fragrance down the smiling dark, Foldeth a kiss upon the lips of Life
Curtaineth into rest the weary world
And shuts us in with all our hid delights. — Frank Herbert

Aesthetic culture is not the high-road to all the virtues, and, indeed, certain of the vices have been known to infest it. Neither, on the other hand, is there any special grace in ugliness. Art is only utterance. It must express something; and the vital question is, what does it express? — Lewis Foreman Day

Let us rise in the moral power of womanhood; and give utterance to the voice of outraged mercy, and insulted justice, and eternal truth, and mighty love and holy freedom. — Maria Weston Chapman

I was an utterance in absentia. I was a forgotten word, uttered and mislaid long ago. I was the word that existed because there was another word that was my opposite, and without it I was nothing. I gained meaning only by acknowledging that possible other.
Nida — Faiqa Mansab

I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. — Marilynne Robinson

That utterance of Jesus, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," is one of the most revolutionary and history-making utterances that ever fell from those lips divine. That utterance, once and for all, marked the divorcement of church and state. It marked a new era for the creeds and deeds of men. — George W Truett

Poetic effect is the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.. — Dan Sperber

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something. — W. H. Auden

The wrong Democratic reaction to a stupid Republican utterance is to play hurt. — Hooman Majd

Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience
the recognitions or revelations
out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions. — Denise Levertov

What sort of man is this, who over and over again, gave numerous details about His death, months before it occurred, and added to each such utterance that on the third day after His decease He would rise again from the dead - and DID RISE, as even the city of Jerusalem soon came to believe? No other founder of a great world religion (or a small one) ever made such statements, or ever came forth from the dead. — Wilbur Moorehead Smith

Sinning persons are just like this boy who fell into the drain. Now, high or low, upgraded or degraded, all are equal. All are equal for Him because heaven is His creation, hell is His creation. If we say the Supreme is only in heaven, it will not be a correct utterance, because He is in hell also. His sons, His daughters, are never alone, He is with you even in hell. — Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection. — Oscar Wilde

Whether or not an utterance can be called law depends on how it is heard, not how it is meant. — William McDavid

Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavour does: the extent of the negation of man's corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented. — Stanislaw Lem

He hesitated for a moment. Then he said softly, 'I love you, Mother.' He took my hand and kissed it, and folded my fingers round the stem of the rose. He had stripped it of its thorns.
I was too moved to speak. But maternal affection was not the only emotion that prevented utterance; as I watched him walk away, his head high and his step firm, anger boiled within me. I knew I had to conquer it before I saw Nefret again, or I would take her by the shoulders and shake her, and demand that she love my son! — Elizabeth Peters

When I began painting, all my paintings were of words which were gutteral utterances like Smash, Boss, Eat. Those words were like flowers in a vase. — Edward Ruscha

Marner took her into his lap, trembling with an emotion mysterious to himself, at something unknown dawning on his life. Thought and feeling were so confused with him, that if he had tried to give them utterance, he could only have said that the child was come instead of the gold
that the gold had turned into the child. — George Eliot

For in the absence of debate unrestricted utterance leads to the degradation of opinion. By a kind of Greshams law the more rational is overcome by the less rational, and the opinions that will prevail will be those which are held most ardently by those with the most passionate will. For that reason the freedom to speak can never be maintained merely by objecting to interference with the liberty of the press, of printing, of broadcasting, of the screen. It can be maintained only by promoting debate. — Walter Lippmann

I know nothing but my open body giving birth to words. Until the pain is over. Until the end of living. Until the end of utterance. Since they have condemned me to say what they want to forget. — Jeanne Hyvrard

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances. — Gary Saul Morson

The Bible is the truest utterance that ever came by alphabetic letters from the soul of man, through which, as through a window divinely opened, all men can look into the stillness of eternity, and discern in glimpses their far-distant, long-forgotten home. — Thomas Carlyle

Surely she'd heard voices like his, so low-pitched as to make every commonplace utterance seem of the deepest intimacy, every cliche a delicious secret. — Loretta Chase

WHEN reading my present treatise, bear in mind that by "faith" we do not understand merely that which is uttered with the lips, but also that which is apprehended by the soul, the conviction that the object [of belief] is exactly as it is apprehended. If, as regards real or supposed truths, you content yourself with giving utterance to them in words, without apprehending them or believing in them, especially if you do not seek real truth, you have a very easy task as, in fact, you will find many ignorant people professing articles of faith without connecting any idea with them. — Maimonides

Alone with my wine and my misery, I was convinced that life was composed of a string of "if only's" leading from one self-inflicted bungle to the next until at some point, one's final iteration of the excuse became one's final utterance, and one expired. — Andrew Levkoff

When words fail to express the exalted sentiments and finer emotions of the human heart, music becomes the sublimated language of the soul, the divine instrumentality for its higher utterance. — Hans Hinrich Wendt

I sleep - I sleep long.
I do not know it - it is without name - it is a word unsaid,

It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,

To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?

It is not chaos or death - it is form, union, plan - it is eternal

life - it is Happiness.

from "Song of Myself," Strophe 50. — Walt Whitman

Have gentle utterances that will inspire a superior longing for all time ... — Philip The Apostle

Prayer is a sacred-utterance to God. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Technopoly is to say that its information immune system is inoperable. Technopoly is a form of cultural AIDS, which I here use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome. This is why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words "A study has shown ... " or "Scientists now tell us that ... " More important, it is why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence. Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, when there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, when there is no higher purpose that it serves. Alfred North Whitehead called such information "inert," but that metaphor is too passive. Information without regulation can be lethal. — Neil Postman

If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance. — A.J. Ayer

At last the sun rose, and then my companions seemed to sleep easier. The difficulties under which they had laboured all night, and which had found utterance in the most terrific gasps and snorts, are not to be conceived. As the sun got higher, their sleep became lighter, and so they gradually one by one awoke. I recollect being very much surprised by the feint everybody made, then, of not having been to sleep at all, and by the uncommon indignation with which everyone repelled the charge. I labour under the same kind of astonishment to this day, having invariably observed that of all human weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of having gone to sleep in a coach. — Charles Dickens

Here! 'Not thread nor glue, not nails nor screws, will ever self and shadow wed.' Helpful, those poet-types. Perhaps this one: 'Seek the grimy queen of dread machines, if you your errant shadow miss.' Now that's quite good! As a Prophetic Utterance, Third Class (Vague Hints and Mysterious Signs), you couldn't ask for better. It's downright plain-spoken! — Catherynne M Valente

I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away. — Walter Lippmann

An utterance can have Intentionality, just as a belief has Intentionality, but whereas the Intentionality of the belief is intrinsic the Intentionality of the utterance is derived. — John Searle

God has frequently to knock the bottom board out of your experience if you are a saint in order to get you into contact with Himself. God wants you to understand this is a life of faith, not a life of sentimental enjoyment of His blessings ... "Though He slay me yet will I trust Him" - this is the most sublime utterance of faith in the whole of the Bible. — Oswald Chambers

and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. ACT2:05 — Anonymous

God makes many poets, but he only gives utterance to a few. — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

It was this impulsive utterance which made Mrs Chartley say, later: 'My dear John, I marvel at your countenancing this most improper dance! When they went down the room together, with his left hand holding her right one above their heads, his right hand was clasping her waist! — Georgette Heyer

If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our own standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything. — Donald Davidson

Themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Every legislative limitation upon utterance, however valid, may in a particular case serve as an inroad upon the freedom of speech which the Constitution protects. — Stanley Forman Reed

In Tetrad form, the artifact is seen to be not neutral or passive, bur an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground. — Marshall McLuhan

The ineffable utterance of one solitary man, absent, perhaps dead (Swann did not know whether Vinteuil were still alive), breathed out above the rites of those two hierophants, sufficed to arrest the attention of three hundred minds, and made of that stage on which a soul was thus called into being one of the noblest altars on which a supernatural ceremony could be performed. — Marcel Proust

If there be any one principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than another imprinted on every atom of the visible creation, that principle is not liberty, but law. — John Ruskin

This is a marvel of the universe:
To fling a thought across a stretch of sky
Some weighty message, or a yearning cry,
It matters not; the elements rehearse
Man's urgent utterance, and his words traverse
The spacious heav'ns like homing birds that fly
Unswervingly, until, upreached on high,
A quickened hand plucks off the message terse. — Josephine Preston Peabody

The soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses
all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The Great Being saith: Human utterance is an essence which aspireth to exert its influence and needeth moderation. As to its influence, this is conditional upon refinement which in turn is dependent upon hearts which are detached and pure. As to its moderation, this hath to be combined with tact and wisdom as prescribed in the Holy Scriptures and Tablets. — Baha'u'llah

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. — Rabindranath Tagore

I ask myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist in which he loomed interesting if not very big, with floating outlines - a straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And besides, the last word is not said, - probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? ... There is never time to say our last word - the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt.
... My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirmed that he achieved greatness. — Joseph Conrad

A transcription doesn't so much repeat words as contextualize and historicize them, uniting them with the time, place, and source of their utterance. A transcript reproduces the words it records; it does not use them. Quoting is an attitude and practice, central to aesthetic and literary experiences as different from each other as the sublime and camp. — William Flesch

When speech is given to a soul holy and true, time, and its dome of ages, becomes as a mighty whispering-gallery, round which the imprisoned utterance runs, and reverberates forever. — James Martineau

Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation- e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data. — Jerry Fodor

The mountain is awake, with utterance
Of flame and burning rock and thunderous sound-
Abode of the ancestral spirits who dance
In blissful fire! Tremors run through the ground
And through men's hearts. The people stand dismayed
By prophecies as mantic ghosts invade
With alien voice the soothsayers in their trance. — James McAuley

Many false claims are made about God. They exact a heavy toll on people who believe every utterance from the pulpit must surely be the gospel truth. — Philip Gulley

He paid me to discover ways to express the unnameable; to get to the bottom of an utterance; to find words for the things for which there were no words yet, thereby bringing them into existence, committing them to paper, projecting them into the future. The work was part drudgery, part deity. — Ellen Miller

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former. — Northrop Frye

I love you... I want you... I need you. The words chanted in her head with the beat of her pulse, repeating over and over. His voice - or was it hers? - grew more insistent with each utterance. Come to me. Give yourself to me. — C.L. Wilson

Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them. — Luce Irigaray

The utterance of God is a lamp, whose light is these words: Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch. Deal ye one with another with the utmost love and harmony, with friendliness and fellowship ... So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth. — Baha'u'llah

There is a power in names. Olakunde told us of ashe-the power which runs through all things, subtle and flexible, which find its most potent expression in human utterance; so that it is a terrible thing to call down imprecations on an enemy, or to wish for anything but good, for what is said out loud is forged into truth. — M T Anderson

1CO1.4 I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ; 1CO1.5 That in every thing ye are enriched by him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge; 1CO1.6 Even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you: 1CO1.7 So that ye come behind in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ: 1CO1.8 Who shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. — Anonymous

You have waited for me past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, past each of Saturn's rings. It's ridiculous, so stupid, I know, to cross the entire solar system just to hear you and Galina butcher Tchaikovsky. If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours. — Anthony Marra

O chime of sweet Saint Charity, Peal soon that Easter morn When Christ for all shall risen be, And in all hearts new-born! That Pentecost when utterance clear To all men shall be given, When all shall say My Brother here, And hear My Son in heaven! — James Russell Lowell

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, out of the nothing came the Word and the Word was power. Every utterance of the Word gave form to the Void, starting with beings to utter the Word. There was no Adam, no Eve, and no need. What Man named was. — Thomm Quackenbush

As clouds are blown away by the wind, the thirst for material pleasures will be driven away by the utterance of the Lord's name. — Sarada Devi

What we all need most urgently now: to realize that transience is not separation - for we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have passed from us, and they and we exist together in one being where separation is just as unthinkable. Could we otherwise understand such poems if they had been nothing but the utterance of someone who was going to be dead in the future? Don't such poems continually address inside of us, in addition to what is found there now, also something unlimited and unrecognizable? I do not think that the spirit can make itself anywhere so small that it would concern only our temporal existence and our here and now: where it surges toward us there we are the dead and the living all at once. — Rainer Maria Rilke

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history. — Thomas Lynch

The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance. — Oswald Chambers

We must not inquire too curiously into motives,' he interposed, in his measured way. 'Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. — George Eliot

Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would ... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance ... Everything is of the blood, of the senses. — Henry Williamson

My prayers, my tears, my wishes, fears, and lamentations, were witnessed by myself and heaven alone. When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry - and often find it, too - whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonize with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical, perchance, but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart. — Anne Bronte

Get back, you defaulting maggots!" Racso's bellow always made me flinch, each utterance of it scoring the hate I had for him a little deeper. The debtors moved back from the bars as Racso's baton rattled across them, the actual maggots stayed where they were, chewing on the ruins of Artos Mantona's eyeballs with tiny mouths. "Back! — Mark Lawrence

An author's extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea. The art of the novel (worn yet opulent phrase) is in the mix of idiosyncratic language - language imprinted in the writer, like the whorl of a fingertip - and an unduplicable design inscribed on the mind by character and image. Invention has little capacity for the true-to-life snapshot. It is true to its own stirrings. — Cynthia Ozick

At times I like it when he is just a deep echo, one utterance after another filling every crevice of the room, a voice that sounds like it's never been an infant's whimper, a boy's whisper, a young man's mumble, a voice that speaks as if every word it has ever uttered has always been and will always be for me. — Edwidge Danticat

With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people's satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings. — Robert Farrar Capon

Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve? — Charlotte Bronte

Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed. — Terry Tempest Williams

The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability. — Allan Sekula

I actually hear into life - seeing everything that's occurring as a conversation with God in some form. So it really is the next song on the radio - a chance utterance of a friend on the street - it really is what's happening right now. I stop and think, 'What is life trying to tell me right now?' And What does my soul know about this?' — Neale Donald Walsch

The negative way [of describing God] is a cardboard prop of Christianity to conceal its unknowable God. When this prop collapses, theistic agnosticism emerges, complete with its package of contradictions and non-sensical utterances. — George H. Smith

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance — Jawaharlal Nehru