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Exlpore more Language quotes
"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."
"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."
"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."
"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."
"I am no poet. I do not love words for the sake of words. I love words for what they can accomplish. Similarly, I am no arithmetician. Numbers that speak only of numbers are of little interest to me."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt
"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."
"Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time."
"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."
"I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much."
"Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality."
"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for."
"Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive."
"Is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?"
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