top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Language quotes
"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
"Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories."
"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
"Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles."
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."
Explore more quotes by Robert Fitzgerald
"In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary."
"Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce."
"Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way."
"Yes, and there were changes of light on landscapes and changes of direction of the wind and the force of the wind and weather. That whole scene is too important in Homer to neglect."
"That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way."
"One should indeed read Pope with his notes available, in the Twickenham edition possibly, to see what a vast amount he did understand about Homer."
"Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek."
"The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer."
"There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know."
"In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?"
bottom of page