"A poet is a person translated into words."
—
Anna Kamienska, from Industrious Amazement: A Notebook
"We cling to words like drowning men to straws. But still we drown, we drown."
—
Anna Kamienska, from In That Great River: A Notebook
"I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture."
—
Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus (trans. Klara Glowczewska)
"Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity."
—
Hermann Hesse
"Words are all we have."
—
Samuel Beckett
"The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That’s the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures."
—
Anna Kamieńska, from her Diary, 1970
"But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."
—
from Don Juan, Byron
"Here I am, trying to give an account of something, and as soon as I pause I realize that I have not yet said anything at all. A marvelously luminous, viscid substance is left behind me, defying words. Is it the language I did not understand there, and that must now gradually find its translation in me? There were incidents, images, sounds, the meaning of which is only now emerging; that words neither recorded nor edited; that are beyond words, deeper and more equivocal than words….What is there in language? What does it conceal? What does it rob one of?"
—
from The Voices of Marrakesh, Elias Canetti (trans. J. A. Underwood)
