“How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.”
Theodore Dreiser book Sister Carrie
Source: Sister Carrie
“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”
— Theodore Dreiser, book Sister Carrie
Variant: How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Source: Sister Carrie
Last update June 3, 2021. History
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Theodore Dreiser20
Novelist, journalist 1871–1945Related quotes
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
1910s, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)
Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki
A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Exploring with Wiki
Context: My specific purpose for the first wiki was to create an environment where we might link together each other's experience to discover the pattern language of programming. I had previously worked with a HyperCard stack that was set up to achieve the same kind of goal. I knew people liked to read and author in that HyperCard stack, but it was single user.
“I mean, sure, like all prophecy the wording is vague.”
Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist
Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 2, “Possibilities and Myths” (p. 27)
“All songwriters are links in a chain.”
Pete Seeger (1919–2014) American folk singer
Interview with Paul Zollo in 1988 https://americansongwriter.com/2014/01/american-icons-pete-seeger/
“I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver”
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet
Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver
And in solitary vigil
After flights triumphal
My head rise
From this scythe
Through a clean rupture
That serves to dissever
The ancient disharmony
With the body
As drunk from fasting
It persists in following
With a haggard bound
Its gaze profound
Up where the frozen
Absolute has chosen
That nothing shall measure
Its vastness, O glacier
But according to a ritual
Illumined by the principle
That chose my consecration
It extends a salutation.
“Soundlessly, shadow with shadow, we wrestled together,
Till the grey dawn.”
Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet
"The Shadow" in The Empire Review (1923) Vol. 37, p. 620