A word on words

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly,
they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider
silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your
skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their
magic.”  - Diane Setterfield (The Thirteeth Tale)

"'Some people say the best stories have no words….It is true that
words drop away, and that the important things are left unsaid. The
important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked
tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always
the wrong size to fit the template called language. I know that. But I know something else too….Turn down the daily
noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very
quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of
silence that can be spoken.” – Jeanette Winterson (Lighthousekeeping)

"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 (An Alchemy of the Mind)

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm
me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head
were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know
it. Is there any other way?” 
- Emily Dickinson (Selected Letters)

"Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain Beauty. When you speak, or
read, or write, you can tell if you've spoken or read or written a
fine sentence. You can recognise a well-tuned phrase or an elegant
style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skilfully, you
ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use
grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together,
to see it quite naked, in a way.” - Muriel
Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog)

"I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, 'Mamma,
can I open the light?' She was using the age-old language of
exploration, the language of art." - Ezra Pound

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the
confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what
can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what
is not in the dictionary.” - Italo Calvino (The Literature Machine: Essays)

"Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening."  - Jeanette Winterson

“As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts,
I begin to feel a new world rising up around me. The old world of
houses, rooms, trees and streets shimmers, wavers and tears away,
revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from
the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together
elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces bind up
the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the
unbound world, the world behind the world – how fluid it is, how lovely
and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking
through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because
nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from
me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being.
It's as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and
both roof slopes. But then, there's no 'house,' no 'object,' no form
that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and
nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness,
a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from
every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I amall.
My eyes are suns. My hair streams among the galaxies.”
 
- Stephen Millhauser (Dangerous Laughter)

"There
is language going on out there -- the language of the wild. Roars,
snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning
derived over eons of expression. We have yet to become fluent in
the language -- and music -- of the wild.”  - Boyd Norton (Serengeti)

"How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting
to the other beings -- to foraging black bears and twisted old
cypresses -- that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about
them, as
though they were not present in our world….Small wonder that rivers and
forests no longer compel our focus or our fierce devotion. For we walk
about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not
participant in our lives. Yet if we no longer call out to the moon
slipping between the clouds, or whisper to the spider setting the silken
struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no
longer address us -- and if they still try, we will not likely hear them.”   - David Abram (Becoming Animal)

“Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making
use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.”  - José Saramago

Art above: A detail from a paper sculpture by Susan Hannon (US); "Narrative Dress" by Harriet Popham (UK); One Hundred Million Billion Poems" by Raymond Queneau (France, 1903-1976); "Ships" by Victoria Semykina (Russia & Italy); pawprints on a 15th century book, photographed by medieval historian Erik Kwakkel; "Bambi and His Mother" by Jodi Harvey-Brown (US), and "From With a Book" by Emma Taylor (UK).