#language

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#life

The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effective way of reaching the heart; one must constantly pay attention with one’s mind. The spoken word tends to go to our heads, not our hearts. ↗

— Marcus J. Borg

#experience #faith #god #language #words

The only reality we can ever truly know is that of our perceptions, our own consciousness, while that consciousness, and thus our entire reality, is made of nothing but signs and symbols. Nothing but language. Even God requires language before conceiving the Universe. See Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word. ↗

— Alan Moore

#imagination #language #imagination

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands. ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#german #irish #landscape #language #imagination

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#inspirational #language #virginia-woolf #writing-philosophy #inspirational

The ultimate language of yoga is expressed in doing yoga, a practice that transcends words as we open our lives to living more consciously through the infinite wisdom of the heart. ↗

— Mark Stephens

#inspirational #language #yoga #inspirational

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#life #poetry #life

Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. ↗

— Clarice Lispector

#language #love #life

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life ↗

— William H. Gass

#life

If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered. ↗

— Louise Erdrich

#story #life