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"Language is not an abstract construction of the learned or of dictionary-makers but is something arising out of the work needs ties joys affections tastes of long generations of humanity and has its bases broad and low close to the ground."
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"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."

"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."

"Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet."
Explore more quotes by Walt Whitman

"You sea! I resign myself to you also-I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me.We must have a turn together,I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,Cushion me soft, rock me billowy drowse,Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you."

"I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep."

"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."

"When the full-grown poet came,Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone;- Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand;And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,And wholly and joyously blends them."

"Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes;It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music."

"TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty."
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