#language

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing. ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#metaphor #vocabulary #experience

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience. ↗

— Nancy Mairs

#gender #language #experience

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies? ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#lightning #nature #rain #thunder #wind

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

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language. ↗

— Sterling Lord

#language #writing #home

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. ↗

— Siri Hustvedt

#language #memory #words #imagination

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them. ↗

— Jasper Fforde

#imagination

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

To abandon language is to stop/creating a place other than your own life/in which to live. It is to enter/the terrible certainty of the flesh. Even god/is only possible through language. ↗

— Jude Nutter

#life