“My grief, like all great sorrows, cannot be expressed in words. The dictionary does not contain the adequate words.”— Paolo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello, Stefano Bises, Giovanni Paolo III / Sir John Brannox, John Malkovich, imdb.com
“There is no way to break down into individual articulated items the absolute totality of even one person’s history, much less of the entirety of human existence or of the entire universe—or even of a baseball game.”— Walter Ong, amazon.com
“There are moments that the words don’t reach. There is suffering too terrible to name.”— Renée Elise Goldsberry, open.spotify.com
“I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”— Unknown, biblehub.com
“Here in your lovely face I see, my lord, what in this life no words could ever tell.”— Michelangelo Buonarroti, amazon.com
“It struck me at some point that the things I wanted to say had to be wordless. I had to renounce words in order to go deep into the practice of making materials and textures that would express what I'm trying to say more accurately.”— Alejandro Ghersi, pitchfork.com
“I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.com
“How much my words miss my conception, which is itself so far from what I saw that to call it feeble would be rank deception!”— Dante Alighieri, amazon.com
“Oh, how scant is speech, and how feeble to my conception! And this, to say what I saw, is such that it is not enough to can it little.”— Dante Alighieri, amazon.com
“Even the most virile of imaginations can apprehend in only the barest and formal sense the ravishing splendor that lies ahead.”— David Pearce, hedweb.com
“I couldn’t have put into words what I felt, though it was something deep and primary.”— Donna Tartt, Theodore Decker, amazon.com
“I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition.”— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.com