“It’s beyond words, there’s no such thing.”

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 0.3 (p. 29)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Dec. 2, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It’s beyond words, there’s no such thing." by China Miéville?
China Miéville photo
China Miéville 102
English writer 1972

Related quotes

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo

“Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)
Context: Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited — dimly, briefly — by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking.
Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see — not yourself — but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan...

Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo
Rainer Maria Rilke photo
Abby Sunderland photo

“The things that happen on the sea take you beyond yourself, beyond human capability.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 178

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. photo

“Courts are apt to err by sticking too closely to the words of a law where those words import a policy that goes beyond them.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 469 (1928) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
1920s

Patrick Modiano photo

“There are moments when we are incapable of exchanging a single word with anybody…it’s beyond us…”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

Source: Honey Moon (1990), p. 26

Diogenes Laërtius photo

“It was a common saying of Myson that men ought not to investigate things from words, but words from things; for that things are not made for the sake of words, but words for things.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Myson, 3.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers

Related topics