language

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

The thing he said aloud did not succeed.

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

What a gulf between impression and expression! That__ our ironic fate__o have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse__ouch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness__ am nothing.

And adab towards language means the recognition and acknowledgement of the rightful and proper place of every word in a written or uttered sentence so as not to produce a dissonance in meaning, sound and concept. Literature is called adabiyat in Islam precisely because it is seen as the keeper of civilization, the collector of teachings and statements that educate the self and society with adab such that both are elevated to the rank of the cultured man (insan adabi) and society.

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former.