“Words have weight, something once said cannot be unsaid. Meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what back they wash against.”
Source: The Constant Princess
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Philippa Gregory 47
English novelist 1954Related quotes
As quoted in Women on War : Essential Voices for the Nuclear Age (1988), by Daniela Gioseffi, p. 103
Variant: A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.
As quoted in Singing the Living Tradition (1993) by the Unitarian Universalist Association, p. 560
Context: What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. Going to jail for distributing leaflets advocating war tax refusal causes a ripple of thought, of conscience among us all. And of remembrance too. …. There may be ever improving standards of living in the U. S., with every worker eventually owning his own home and driving his own car; but our modern economy is based on preparation for war. … The absolutist begins a work, others take it up and try to spread it. Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.
“Once you have seen the larger patttern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”
"A Man of the People", p. 140
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)
Context: “Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial,” Havzhiva said with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking to foreign merchants. “No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger patttern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole."
“If you said more words to him than "mommy'll be back", he might know something!”
Bigger and Blacker (HBO, 1999)
Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Drugs and Governments
Focus Fourteen
Source: The Sea of Monsters
“Ripples on a pond cannot touch a bird hovering above it.”
Source: Titans of Chaos (2007), Chapter 18, “Dream Storm” Section 14 (p. 250)
Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness (1976)
Context: The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.