Quotes About Expression

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

After all who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of their loneliness

The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

Holy shit, Bird, I whispered through my teeth. At least try to be normal. You have to at least try.

as a rule of thumb, whenever there appears a plural, correct for a singular. Should I ever let slip a royal WE, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.

I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.

It is impossible to distrust one's writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.

At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.

Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the top of his lungs, he shrieked: "I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE!" "But you're only seven," I said.

By heart, this is not an expression I use lightly. My heart is weak and unreliable.

It's also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it - just to name it - must have been like trying to catch something invisible. (pg 107)

As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless.

After all, the world population of artists has exploded, almost no one is not an artist now; in turning our attention inward, so have we turned all of our hope inward, believing that meaning can be found or made there. Having cut ourselves off from all that is unknowable and that might truly fill us with awe, we can only find wonderment in our own powers of creativity.

Who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness?

It took seven languages to make me; it would have been nice if I could have spoken just one. But I couldn't, so he leaned down and kissed me.

The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us--we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

en el momento más importante de su vida no había sabido elegir las palabras.

The third movement is one of the most moving passages ever written, and I've never listened to it without feeling as if I alone have been lifted up on the shoulders of some giant creature touring the charred landscape of all human feeling.

Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

Quand apprendras-tu qu'il n'existe pas un mot pour chaque chose ?

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard […]. How could he have forgotten what he had always known: there is no match for the silence of God.

I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.