All Quotes By Tag: Words

“Hay una estrella mas abiertaque la palabra ‘amapola’?Is there a star more wide openthan the word ‘poppy”?”

“You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloudThat’s the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapersThere are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteriesPortraits of great men and a thousand different headlines(“Zone”)”

“Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?”

“Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.”

“Be a poet in action as well as in words.”

“Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.”

“By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. … What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.”

“I paid the taxi driver, got out with my suitcase, surveyed my surroundings, and just as I was turning to ask the driver something or get back into the taxi and return forthwith to Chillán and then to Santiago, it sped off without warning, as if the somewhat ominous solitude of the place had unleashed atavistic fears in the driver’s mind. For a moment I too was afraid. I must have been a sorry sight standing there helplessly with my suitcase from the seminary, holding a copy of Farewell’s Anthology in one hand. Some birds flew out from behind a clump of trees. They seemed to be screaming the name of that forsaken village, Querquén, but they also seemed to be enquiring who: quién, quién, quién. I said a hasty prayer and headed for a wooden bench, there to recover a composure more in keeping with what I was, or what at the time I considered myself to be. Our Lady, do not abandon your servant, I murmured, while the black birds, about twenty-five centimetres in length, cried quién, quién, quién. Our Lady of Lourdes, do not abandon your poor priest, I murmured, while other birds, about ten centimetres long, brown in colour, or brownish, rather, with white breasts, called out, but not as loudly, quién, quién, quién, Our Lady of Suffering, Our Lady of Insight, Our Lady of Poetry, do not leave your devoted subject at the mercy of the elements, I murmured, while several tiny birds, magenta, black, fuchsia, yellow and blue in colour, wailed quién, quién, quién, at which point a cold wind sprang up suddenly, chilling me to the bone.”

“More sailors have drowned in words than in the sea.”

“Words are power. The more words you know and can recognize, use, define, understand, the more power you will have as a human being… The more language you know, the more likely it is that no one can get over on you.”selection from book: Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community”

“You ask me why I don’t speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill’Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it’s how it mends it”

“GospelThe new grass rising in the hills,the cows loitering in the morning chill,a dozen or more old browns hiddenin the shadows of the cottonwoodsbeside the streambed. I go higherto where the road gives up and there’sonly a faint path strewn with lupinebetween the mountain oaks. I don’task myself what I’m looking for.I didn’t come for answersto a place like this, I came to walkon the earth, still cold, still silent.Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself,although it greets me with last year’sdead thistles and this year’s hard spines, early bloomingwild onions, the curling remainsof spider’s cloth. What did I bring to the dance? In my back pocketa crushed letter from a womanI’ve never met bearing bad newsI can do nothing about. So I wanderthese woods half sightless whilea west wind picks up in the treesclustered above. The pines makea music like no other, rising and falling like a distant surf at nightthat calms the darkness before first light. “Soughing” we call it, fromOld English, no less. How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.”

“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore.”

“If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.”

“Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate…”