“The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it was usually your best course of action.”

—  Karen Joy Fowler , book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over tha…" by Karen Joy Fowler?
Karen Joy Fowler photo
Karen Joy Fowler 27
American novelist, short story writer, editor 1950

Related quotes

Gail Carson Levine photo

“There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.”

Gail Carson Levine (1947) American writer

Source: Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly

Viktor Schauberger photo

“Implosion is no invention in the conventional sense, but rather the renaissance of ancient knowledge, lost over the course of time.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 83, p. 16 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Jodi Picoult photo

“If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over- only living with the mistakes you've made.”

Jodi Picoult Perfect Match

Source: Perfect Match

Wallace Stevens photo

“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Opus Posthumous (1955)

Arthur Miller photo

“The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

Commenting on After the Fall (1964) in The Saturday Evening Post (1 February 1964)

Tom Stoppard photo

“I'd push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I'd lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.”

Tom Stoppard Arcadia

Bernard, Act II
Arcadia (1993)

T.S. Eliot photo

“The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Choruses from The Rock (1934)
Context: O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

Sheyene Gerardi photo

“Knowledge accumulates over time; it’s not just one person or one set of time but over many hundreds of years. That gives me hope.”

Sheyene Gerardi Venezuelan actor and model

Related topics