“The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.”
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns.
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Toni Morrison 184
American writer 1931–2019Related quotes

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Lecture (December 19, 2007)
“Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things.”
Word Play (1974)

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Vincent Blasi, The First Amendment And The Ideal of Civic Courage: The Brandeis Opinion in Whitney v. California, 29 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 653, 686 (1988).

On if the poet has a responsibility in “‘The language is constructing our ideas more than we are deploying the language’: An interview with Gregory Pardlo” http://gulfcoastmag.org/reviews-and-interviews/art-and-reviews/an-interview-with-gregory-pardlo/ in Gulf Coast Magazine (2019 Jul 17)

“Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.”
Worldfest video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnhqmF-RBu4