#lang

There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into dipthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught in surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay. ↗

— Tony Burgess

#zombies #change

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#harmony #language #listening #nature #waves

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so resolute, it’s almost like a meeting. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#language #tongue #nature

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#nature #reality #nature

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing, but a compromise- that which is common to you, me, and everybody. ↗

— Thomas Hulme

#nature

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have. ↗

— Frances Mayes

#poetry #nature

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language. ↗

— Chuck Palanhiuk

#language #words #nature

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#nature #symbolism #nature

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange to us, because they had not been in England. We named the things of this place in reference to things that were not of this place—cat briar for the thickets of vine whose thorns were narrow and claw-like; lambskill for the low-growing laurel that had proved poisonous to some of our hard-got tegs. But there had been no cats or lambs here until we brought them. So when he named a plant or a creature, I felt that I heard the true name of the thing for the first time. ↗

— Geraldine Brooks

#names #nature #nature

She walks to a table She walk to table She is walking to a table She walk to table now What difference does it make What difference it make In Nature, no completeness No sentence really complete thought Language, like woman, Look best when free, undressed. ↗

— Wang Ping

#syntax #woman #nature