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"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."
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"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."
"Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape."
"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love."
"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."
"Why people use "Was" I have heard some people to say "I was a smart kid at school - Eminem", but why "Was", was is a word for describing the past... which will mean that has started and ended... so what??? How to get it now? You aren't wise, are you?"
"He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out."
"Words are the fallen ruins of silent majesty."
"Kitai blinked slowly. "Why would you use the same word for these things? That is ridiculous.""We have a lot of words like that," Tavi said. "They can mean more than one thing.""That is stupid," Kitai said. "It is difficult enough to communicate without making it more complicated with words that mean more than one thing."
Explore more quotes by Marilyn Hacker
"I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem."
"Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically."
"Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other."
"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me."
"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative."
"I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer."
"Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English."
"I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts."
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