“Words are the litmus paper of the mind.”

Source: When My Name Was Keoko

Source: Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two

Songs of Kabîr (1915)
Context: He comes to the Path of the Infinite on whom the grace of the Lord descends: he is freed from births and deaths who attains to Him.
Kabîr says: "It cannot be told by the words of the mouth, it cannot be written on paper: It is like a dumb person who tastes a sweet thing — how shall it be explained?"

The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (1976)
Context: These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of our hearing; and just as the touch of button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart.

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

(zh-TW) 字字看來皆是血，十年辛苦不尋常 。

Poem in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, present in its 1754 jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本), quoted in Zhou Ruchang's Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181

(zh-TW) 字字看來皆是血，十年辛苦不尋常 。

Red Inkstone, couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); quoted in Zhou Ruchang's Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181.
Couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); the couplet is "generally considered to be written by Cao Xueqin" according to Wong Kwok-pun in Dreaming across Languages and Cultures (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), footnote on p. 71, but Zhou Ruchang attributes it to Red Inkstone in Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181. note: Variant translations: note: Every word [in the novel] which one looks at is a drop of blood. The ten years ' painstaking labour is no commonplace.
Source: From On The Red Chamber Dream by Shichang Wu (Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 24

<span class="plainlinks"> Foreword, 'Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika', Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018). https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DQPD8F4/</span>
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