Books & Lit
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Sometimes I had beautiful words living inside of me and I just couldn’t push those words out so that other people could see they were there.
Benjamin Alire Saenz • Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Ursula K. Le Guin • Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin
I’ve wasted part of my life in confusedly interpreting nothing at all, and the rest of it in writing these verses in prose for my incommunicable sensations, which is how I make the unknown universe mine.
Fernando Pessoa • The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)
“And sometimes I have kept
my feelings to myself because
I could find no language to describe them in.”
-Jane Austen
I’m asking her about the gaps where language fails us. I want to know because those stories are the making of me.
Caleb Azumah Nelson • Small Worlds
Language contains our knowledge and at the same time fails to contain it. All it really contains is our performance of control.
Anton Hur • Toward Eternity: A Novel
