Quotes & Sayings About Written Language

The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears. — John Muir

[John Clare's] father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days' wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean.
("John Clare, poet of the environmental crisis 200 years ago" in The Guardian.) — George Monbiot

Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means. — Edmund Morgan

The only word in the Martian language is written phonetically:
Kay-ray-kh-kuh-ko-kex.
It means whatever you want it to mean. — Blaise Cendrars

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities that author has to offer; and that for a host of reasons the bound book is the ideal vehicle for the written word. — Sven Birkerts

I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all. — Claire-Louise Bennett

Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy. — Bertrand Russell

I saw it, the first time I looked in her eyes. The language that lived within her. It was a language that has no name. It cannot be seen. It cannot be heard. All I can say is, her heart must beat the same rhythm as mine and mine must have known it. She was the greatest poem never written. The greatest song never sung. She was art. Before its creation. After its completion. Forever lovely. Timelessly perfect. This world is divided between feelers and thinkers. Spirits and minds. — Andrea Michelle

The English language was spoken and written - but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air - it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were - who knew? — Simon Winchester

The one thing I've always liked about that boy. As much as I hate his body language screaming he owns you, with him next to you ain't no one gonna mess with my little girl.It may as well be written on his chest in neon lights. — Elizabeth Reyes

In living literature no person is a competent judge but of works written in his own language . I have expressed my opinion concerning a number of English writers; it is very possible that I may be mistaken, that my admiration and my censure may be equally misplaced, and that my conclusions may appear impertinent and ridiculous on the other side of the Channel. — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

Trying to read his face. It was like a book written in a foreign language she'd studied all too briefly. — Cassandra Clare

The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and it's never the same as written. — Emir Kusturica

A mystery is not something that cannot be known, but something that for the time being is hidden. I hand you a sealed letter. What it contains is a mystery to you. Break the seal and read the letter and it ceases to be a mystery. But you may not be able to read the letter, because it is written in a language with which you are not familiar. Learn the language and the mystery ceases. But perhaps the letter contains technical terms which you do not understand, learn their meaning and all will be plain. That is the way with the Mysteries of the Scriptures, learn to read them by the help of their author, the Holy Spirit, and they will no longer be mysteries. — Clarence Larkin

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand. — Alice Walker

The use of language around drugs is really important. So we find that it's increasingly difficult in our society to find the word "drug" not connected to the word "abuse." The notion of a responsible use of drugs is written out in the language of our culture. — Graham Hancock

He couldn't understand how I could be so bright in my other classes and a total failure in his. I must not be trying hard enough, he told me. In truth, I didn't care, and I didn't want to care. Geometric shapes with their dangerously sharp angles seemed the mortal enemies of words, and formulas were written in a hostage-taking language that made me despair of ever freeing the words from their captors. The best I could do was to avoid the enemy and save myself. — Thom Satterlee

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language. — Pierre Boulle

In the rare moments I permitted any stillness, I noted a small fluttering at the pit of my belly, a barely perceptible disturbance. The faint whisper of a word would sound in my head: writing. At first I could not say whether it was heartburn or inspiration. The more I listened, the louder the message became: I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself. The gods, we are taught, created humankind in their own image. Everyone has an urge to create. Its expression may flow through many channels: through writing, art, or music or through the inventiveness of work or in any number of ways unique to all of us, whether it be cooking, gardening, or the art of social discourse. The point is to honor the urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits. When I did not write, I suffocated in silence. — Gabor Mate

Nevertheless, should you have any doubts that we are stating sound doctrines, look up the references and see exactly what the Bible says and believe it in preference to any man. You cannot go wrong with this kind of advice. But in doing this, be sure you adhere to what is written, and that you do not let preconceived ideas cause you to be biased on any point. Do not try to make the Bible conform to your ideas. Always reconcile your ideas to the Bible. Let the plain language of the references given be read and understood in the same literal way that we would understand similar statements in any other book — Finis Jennings Dake

When we lift our inward eyes to gaze upon God we are sure to meet friendly eyes gazing back at us, for it is written that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout all the earth. The sweet language of experience is "Thou God seest me." When the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has begun right here on this earth. — A.W. Tozer

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language. — Alfred North Whitehead

Parks stares at her for a moment, like she's something written in a language he doesn't speak. "Got it all figured out," he acknowledges. "Yes." He leans forward to look her in the eye. "And you're not scared?" Melanie hesitates. "Of what?" she asks him. Justineau is amazed at that momentary pause. Yes or no would be equally easy to say, whether they were true or not. The pause means that Melanie is scrupulous, is weighing her words. It means she's trying to be honest with them. As if they've done a single thing, ever, to deserve that. "Of — M.R. Carey

But if any man undertake to write a history, that has to be collected from materials gathered by observation and the reading of works not easy to be got in all places, nor written always in his own language, but many of them foreign and dispersed in other hands, for him, undoubtedly, it is in the first place and above all things most necessary, to reside in some city of good note, addicted to liberal arts, and populous; where he may have plenty of all sorts of books, and upon inquiry may hear and inform himself of such particulars as, having escaped the pens of writers, are more faithfully preserved in the memories of men, lest his work be deficient in many things, even those which it can least dispense with. — Plutarch

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. — Galileo Galilei

In this room, he told himself, history might have been written, the course of cosmic empire might have been shaped and the fate of stars decided.
But now there was no sign of life, just a brooding silence that seemed to whisper in a tongueless language of days and faces and problems long since wiped out by the march of years. — Clifford D. Simak

More good code has been written in languages denounced as "bad' than in languages proclaimed "wonderful' - much more. — Bjarne Stroustrup

Humanists were people who wanted to return to ideas found in old Greek and Latin writing of Greece and Rome, written many centuries earlier. Christian Humanists also wanted to get back to these ideas, but they were mainly concerned with learning about the early Christian Church, before it had become involved with money-making and superstition. They wanted to read the books of the early Church, especially the gospels of Christ, in the original language of Greek, so that they would know exactly what the writings meant. The leader of the Christian Humanists was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who attacked superstitions in the Catholic Church in his writing. — Michael A. Mullett

On my seventh birthday, my father swore, for the first of many times, that I would die facedown in a cesspool. On that same occasion, my mother, with all the accompanying mystery and elevated language appropriate for a prominent diviner, turned her cards, screamed delicately, and proclaimed that my doom was written in water and blood and ice. As for me, from about that time and for twenty years since, I had spat on my middle finger and slapped the rump of every aingerou I noticed, murmuring the sincerest, devoutest prayer that I might prove my parents' predictions wrong. Not so much that I feared the doom itself - doom is just the hind end of living, after all - but to see the two who birthed me confounded. — Carol Berg

He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity. — Amy Tan

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare. — Michael Moriarty

For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communication of friends. Masters of language, poets of long ages, have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes, pushing aside the tea-tray, drawing close to the fire (for letters are written when the dark presses around a bright red cave), and addressed themselves the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart. — Virginia Woolf

Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution. — Jean Berko Gleason

Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down. — Maria Mazziotti Gillan

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Letter to a Young Poet, 1903 — Rainer Maria Rilke

I could never see a book written in a foreign language without the most ardent desire to read it. — Bayard Taylor

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings. — Charlton Laird

...grown up with very bad contemporary literature, and they find it much more fifficult to approach earlier writing than we do. The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in ... He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible. — Andrei Makine

Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn't have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly and American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in ancient Rome? — John Green

The range and variety of Chaucer's English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which was basically the dialect of London which Chaucer himself spoke. Indeed, by the end of the fourteenth century the educated language of London, bolstered by the economic power of London itself, was beginning to become the standard form of written language throughout the country, although the process was not to be completed for several centuries. The cultural, commercial, administrative and intellectual importance of the East Midlands (one of the two main universities, Cambridge, was also in this region), the agricultural richness of the region and the presence of major cities, Norwich and London, contributed much to the increasing standardisation of the dialect. — Ronald Carter

In my judgment, most people don't have the slightest idea of what is actually written in the Old Testament because they, like Dawkins himself, cannot speak the language. The — Brent A. Strawn

There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin — Christopher Morley

Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes. — Spencer Wells

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Nature is written in mathematical language. — Galileo Galilei

Maybe that's why Claire had perfected the art of invisibility. It was a form of self-preservation. You couldn't resent what you could not see. She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language that she could not understand. There was nothing timorous about her, but you got the feeling that she always had one foot out the door. If the situation got too hard, or too intense, she would simply disappear. — Karin Slaughter

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language. — Marcel Proust

All philosophic propositions, every attempt to think including all acts of oral or written articulation of an argument and metaphorically expressed ideas, are subject to the dynamics and limitations of human language. The spoken thought is only part of any philosophic message; the other part is unsaid because it is unsayable. The crux of any philosophic proposition reverberates in the echo of silence, the thought that lies in-between the lines. — Kilroy J. Oldster

To write a book is a preposterously antisocial process involving months, if not years, of self-imposed misery as you become a monomaniacal hermit shunning all loved ones until the moment you finish what in your head is the greatest assemblage of written language since the Babylonians invented cuneiform. — Simon Goddard

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. — Italo Calvino

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. — Steven Pinker

You may translate books of science exactly ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written. — Samuel Johnson

It is difficult to disturb the common usage of Korean that is bent to the perspective of a male-oriented society. Korean society is based on both a politics and history that have been disguised as a solid society of solid male poems, a solid written language, fixed rules of how to write literature, and a narrative language. — Kim Hyesoon

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right. — Iris Murdoch

Many verses of the holy books, above all the Upanishads of Sama-Veda spoke of this innermost thing. It is written: "Your soul is the whole world." It says that when a man is asleep, he penetrates his innermost and dwells in Atman. There was wonderful wisdom in these verses; all the knowledge of the sages was told here in enchanting language, pure as honey collected by the bees. — Hermann Hesse

When I went to Moscow, I felt I was relearning Swan Lake - which was written for the Bolshoi - and being immersed in a tradition and history I had never experienced. It took a while to adjust to living there and learning the language, but now I have lots of friends. I get the best of two completely different worlds. — David Hallberg

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. — Robert M. Pirsig

There is a documentary element in my films, a very strong documentary element, but by documentary element, I mean an element that's out of control, that's not controlled by me. And that element is the words, the language that people use, what they say in an interview. They're not written, not rehearsed. It's spontaneous, extemporaneous material. People — Errol Morris

let us start by picturing the Japan archipelago lying in the sea by the Chinese mainland. If its proximity allowed it to become part of the Sinosphere and acquire a written culture, its distance benefited the development of indigenous writing. The Dover Strait, separating England and France, is only 34 kilometers (21 miles) wide. A fine swimmer can swim across it. In contrast, the shortest distance between Japan and the Korean Peninsula is five or six times greater, and between Japan and the Chinese mainland, twenty-five times greater. The current, moreover, is deadly. . . . Japan's distance from China gave it political and cultural freedom and made possible the flowering of its own writing. — Minae Mizumura

Taste and smell are often the beggars among our five senses - they leave no written language and therefore no standards other than wholly personal ones. Tasting a superlative Moselle wine can be an aesthetic experience no less genuine than hearing a Mozart piano concerto or seeing for the first time an original Breughel painting. — Frank Schoonmaker

It was written in the ancient RUNIX spell-language, and is read-only and can't be modified. — Jasper Fforde

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. You dig the soil and you find pottery from Davidic times, coins from Bar Kokhba, and 2,000-year-old scrolls written in a script remarkably like the one that today advertises ice cream at the corner candy store. — Charles Krauthammer

No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. — Galileo Galilei

A scientist with a poet's command of language, Cristina Eisenberg writes with precision and passion ... takes her reader on a breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking tour of the planet from the Gulf of Maine to the Amazonian rain forests, the tropical coral reefs to old growth forests of the Northwest as well as rivers, lakes, and wetlands. I found the wealth of information not only accessible but riveting ... Eisenberg's powerful, beautifully written book ... has the potential to open many people's eyes, minds, and hearts. — Elizabeth Cunningham

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history ... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day. — Alex Kozinski

It's like the man is an open book but whatever his story is just happens to be written in a different language. — J.M. Darhower

But why has our physical world revealed such extreme mathematical regularity that astronomy superhero Galileo Galilei proclaimed nature to be "a book written in the language of mathematics," and Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner stressed the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences" as a mystery demanding an explanation? — Max Tegmark

Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it. — Steven Pinker

When you choose a language, youre also choosing a community. The programmers youll be able to hire to work on a Java project wont be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages. — Philip Greenspun

Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above. — Matt Ridley

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 ... — Italo Calvino

Dehaene even allows himself a few moments of (justifiable) annoyance at the way that "childhood reading experts" continue their debates about the best strategies for teaching reading to children in complete ignorance of a large and growing body of work on how the human brain processes written language. — Alan Jacobs

Unfortunately, there's still a market for rubbish. I picked up a recently written fantasy book at the weekend, and one character said of another: "He will grow wroth." Oh, my God. And the phrase was in a page of similar jaw-breaking, mock-archaic narrative. Belike, i'faith ... this is the language we use to turn high fantasy into third-rate romantic literature. "Yonder lies the palace of my fodder, the king." That's not fantasy - that's just Tolkien reheated until the magic boils away. — Terry Pratchett

No man will treat with indifference the principle of race. It is the key to history, and why history is often so confused is that it has been written by men who are ignorant of this principle and all the knowledge it involves ... Language and religion do not make a race
there is only one thing which makes a race, and that is blood. — Benjamin Disraeli

One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to say, I have to kind of impersonate Tu Fu. I have to take on, if you will, his voice and his skin in English, and I have to try to get as deeply into the poem as possible. I'm not trying to make an equivalent poem in English, which can't be done because our language can't accommodate the kind of metaphors within metaphors the Chinese written language can, and often does, contain. — Sam Hamill

We come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing ... We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say that everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature. — Neil Postman

I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose. — Sol Stein

Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable. — Alfred North Whitehead

Fiona had never learned her mother's language and she had never shown much respect for the stories that it preserved-the stories that Grant had taught and written about, and still did write about, in his working life. She referred to their heroes as "old Njal" or "old Snorri." But in the last few years she had developed an interest in the country itself and looked at travel guides. She read about William Morris's trip, and Auden's. She didn't really plan to travel there. She said the weather was too dreadful. Also-she said-there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for-but never did get to see. — Alice Munro

While they read and talked together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower, and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read. — Harold Bell Wright

Charlie Studd has written me a delightful letter ... He thinks the Chinese language was invented by the devil to prevent the Chinese from ever hearing the Gospel properly. — Ion Keith-Falconer

The mind is like a computer. It runs programs. Most of the software has been poorly written. It is written in the language of fear. — Frederick Lenz

Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access. — Carol Windley

He proposed an imitation game. There would be a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) in a separate room, reading the written answers from the others, trying to work out which was the woman. B would be trying to hinder the process. Now, said Turing, imagine that A was replaced by a computer. Could the interrogator tell whether they were talking to a machine or not after five minutes of questioning? He gave snatches of written conversation to show how difficult the Turing Test would be: Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry. To imitate that a computer would need deep knowledge of social mores and the use of language. To pass the Turing Test the computer would have to do more than imitate. It would have to be a learning entity. — David Boyle

Love has its own communication. It's the language of the heart, while it has never been transcribed, has no alphabet, and can't be heard or spoken by voice, it is used by every human on the planet. It is written on our souls, scripted by the finger of God, and we can hear, understand, and speak it with perfection long before we open our eyes for the first time. — Charles Martin

This is what happens when the discourse of publishing, defined and driven by spoken and written language, is talked about in exactly the same vocabulary and syntax as any widgetmaking industry. Books are reformulated as 'product' - like screwdrivers or flea-bombs or soap - and the majority of writers are perceived as typists with bad attitudes. — Suzette Haden Elgin

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images. — Albert Einstein

Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn't help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make mistakes, but I'm somehow able to make myself understood. On the page I am alone. The spoken language is a kind of antechamber with respect to the written, which has a stricter, more elusive logic. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Romeo and Juliet"

The world is full of girls! Of all different kinds and shapes and sizes. They're all big question marks, incognito and unknown. They're a page in a book that's never been written or perhaps yet read. They're a title that's never been chosen, a language that's never been understood. Yet perhaps a treasure that hasn't been discovered.

Will any of this ever be revealed? That is even a bigger question mark. Yet, adventurous men, the brave and the naive ones, still pursue their endeavor toward their unknown dreams.

Will there ever be another Romeo and Juliet?
Or are we all Romeos and Juliets at the end? — Mauro Lannini

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

Edited by mostly unknown scholars in A.D. 367, compiled from documents written 30 to 110 years after the Christ event by no one who was present at the events, and composed for the most part by unknown authors in the Greek language that Jesus never spoke, it is held up as the only true record of the Christ story. — Leonard Shlain

All things considered, I've learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy
it's tough being creative in a materialistic society
but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don't feel so acutely the weight of language. — Tom Robbins

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I still have a feeling that I haven't written the best that I can write. I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things. — Carol Ann Duffy

The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same. — Italo Calvino

Kate Boo's reporting is a form of kinship. Abdul and Manju and Kalu of Annawadi will not be forgotten. She leads us through their unknown world, her gift of language rising up like a delicate string of necessary lights. There are books that change the way you feel and see; this is one of them. If we receive the fiery spirit from which it was written, it ought to change much more than that. — Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

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