Writing
“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)
However, the meaning that can be discerned from the words are mere trails, left behind by what cannot be expressed. People make books because they value words, but I think words are not themselves worthy.
Laozi • Laozi's Dao De Jing
“And sometimes I have kept
my feelings to myself because
I could find no language to describe them in.”
-Jane Austen
Consider film and television, an easy target for cultural pessimists, and for good reason. The signs of decay are hard to ignore. If it’s not the slurry of superhero blockbusters, remakes and reboots, then it’s the straight-to-streaming slop. The familiar three-act structure, that is the craft of screenwriting, seems mysteriously missing from even ... See more