“I think communication starts when words are not present at all. I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important”— Marina Abramovic, theodysseyonline.com
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”— Roland Barthes, amazon.com
“As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.”— Milan Kundera, amazon.com
“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, me…”— Vladimir Nabokov, thereviewreview.net
“That is the ultimate project for me—figuring out how language can perform this same kind of trick that music does.”— John Edgar Wideman, theparisreview.org
“Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.”— Frances Hodgson Burnett, amazon.com
“Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.”— Martin Luther King Jr., amazon.com
“You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then re…”— Lily King, amazon.com
“If we can imagine particularly original or compelling metaphors, it can help people to imagine what we're feeling! Good metaphors make my experiences more real to you, and yours more real to me, which is kind of what language is supposed to do, right?”— John Green, youtube.com
“If love is a dying language, I want you to be the last word I will ever know.”— Michelle Manese, twitter.com
“Realise that humour transcends all boundaries; that laughter is language that knows no borders.”— Emi Mahmoud, youtube.com
“Every sentence is a wispy net, capturing a few flecks of meaning. The sun shines without vocabulary. The salmon has no name for the urge that drives it upstream. The newborn groping for the nipple knows hunger long before it knows a single word. Even with an entire dictionary in one's head, one even…”— Scott Russell Sanders, amazon.com
“Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”— Ursula K. Le Guin, amazon.com
“Letters lie before you, so release them from their neutrality and play with them like a conqueror in a delirious universe.”— Mahmoud Darwish, amazon.com
“Feel like your spouse is a master at twisting your words into something ugly when they weren’t intended that way? Standard tactic.”— James J. Sexton, huffingtonpost.com
“Our language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.”— Anne Rice, amazon.com
“This tweet was brought to you by our shared belief in human language.”— Night Vale podcast, twitter.com