The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 64.
Statements in PBS interview with Margaret Warner (October 11, 2013)
“He was so arrogant that he spoke of himself in the plural.”
Source: The Children of Eve' series of novels (historical fiction), The City of Palaces (2014), p.173
“He adorned whatever subject he either spoke or wrote upon, by the most splendid eloquence.”
Character of Bolingbroke; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968)
Context: Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
“He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good”
“Even God had a Welsh name:
He spoke to him in the old language”
"A Welsh Testament"
Tares (1961)
Context: Even God had a Welsh name:
He spoke to him in the old language;
He was to have a peculiar care
For the Welsh people. History showed us
He was too big to be nailed to the wall
Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him
Between the boards of a black book.
The Last Unicorn (1968)
Context: Schmendrick stepped out into the open and said a few words. They were short words, undistinguished either by melody or harshness, and Schmendrick himself could not hear them for the Red Bull's dreadful bawling. But he knew what they meant, and he knew exactly how to say them, and he knew that he could say them again when he wanted to, in the same way or in a different way. Now he spoke them gently and with joy, and as did so he felt his immortality fall from him like an armour, or like a shroud.
