“Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words.”
Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
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Haruki Murakami655
Japanese author, novelist 1949Related quotes
Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.) Similarly, in my play The New Tenant, there is no speech, or rather, the speeches are given to the Janitor. The Tenant just suffocates beneath proliferating furniture and objects — which is a symbol of death. There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.
Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)
1960s, Memorial Day speech (1963)
Context: On this hallowed ground, heroic deeds were performed and eloquent words were spoken a century ago. We, the living, have not forgotten– and the world will never forget– the deeds or the words of Gettysburg. We honor them now as we join on this Memorial Day of 1963 in a prayer for permanent peace of the world and fulfillment of our hopes for universal freedom and justice.
“Our Lord the Devil's their Word, the Word Thelema, spoken of me The Beast.”
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist
Source: Magical Record of the Beast 666: The Diaries of Aleister Crowley 1914-1920 (1972), p. 242
Javier Marías (1951) Spanish writer
La verdadera unidad de los matrimonios y aun de las parejas la traen las palabras, más que las palabras dichas—dichas voluntariamente—, las palabras que no se callan—que no se callan sin que nuestra voluntad intervenga—.
Source: Corazón tan blanco [A Heart So White] (1992), p. 132
“Their words were spoken to the breezes nor swayed appointed fate.”
Dicta dabant ventis nec debita fata movebant.
Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica
Source: Argonautica, Book V, Line 21
Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) Queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until 1603
To Robert Cecil when he said, in her final illness (March 1603), that she must go to bed.
“Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.”
Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping
Source: Lighthousekeeping