The Introvert Introspects

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” ― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary 

“Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?”
 ― Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”
 ― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.” ― Stephen Fry

“I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]”
 ― Anne Sexton

“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes which has no speech”
 ― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.” ― Aldous Huxley, The Genius And The Goddess

Music: How Come You Never Go There by Feist