Quotes
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
The way a dream, untold, vanishes, never having taken place to begin with.
Sally Rooney • Intermezzo: The global #1 bestseller from the author of Normal People
“And sometimes I have kept
my feelings to myself because
I could find no language to describe them in.”
-Jane Austen
It’s always caught between somewhere, something always lost between expression and emotion.
Caleb Azumah Nelson • Small Worlds
“It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”
― Anthony Doerr
It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.
Barbara Kingsolver • The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
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)
Inadequacy of expression is merely a minor part of the great tragedy of humanity. Only an ass thinks that he has succeeded in uttering the perfect content of his thought without either excess or defect."