“The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.”

Source: Surfacing

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 animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word." by Margaret Atwood?

Margaret Atwood348

Canadian writer 1939

Related quotes

“I keep wondering why the Academy decided that they needed a separate category for animated films just at a moment when there are a lot of people who couldn't tell you whether a film is animated or not.”

Roy E. Disney (1930–2009) longtime senior executive for The Walt Disney Company

Roy Edward Disney (2003) as quoted in Disney Stories: Getting to Digital (2012) by Newton Lee and Krystina Madej, p. 3

“Evil is something that, when you see it, when you know it, it's intimate. It's almost sensual. That is why people who have been tortured know it by instinct. They don't need to be told what it is, and they may have a very hard time putting it into words. … That's the nature of the phenomenon. It's hard to put into words.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Orual
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

“To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.”

Joseph Conrad book Under Western Eyes

Pt. I
Under Western Eyes (1911)
Context: Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.