Jack Gilbert Quotes

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.

For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Unlike the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of language does reach a limit.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

Words are the motes of thought, and nothing more.

Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love.

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).

Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.

There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.

Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

All names mean something.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.