Glenn Ligon Quotes

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

Any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood

Sometimes, words are twisted and don't reach people in their intended way.

When you're being earnest, people think you're being sarcastic, and when you're being sarcastic, they think you're being earnest. The moral in all this, of course, is that people should never attempt to communicate.

When you fail to communicate, there are gray areas. And when there's gray areas, then bad things happen.

It's stupid and embarrassing that you can describe something to one person and not to another. Until I've solved that problem I'm not going to feel like I've achieved too much.

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.

There's been more than one time when I've said something, and sort of the middle of what I've said is not said but thought, and therefore assumed to be understood, which is a ridiculous assumption on my part, but sometimes gets me in trouble.

I actually don't understand a word Paula's saying anymore. It's like a new language.

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

I don't know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

I find myself having these conversations where I go...You know, the guy, in that place. The guy in the place with the thing, you know. And it becomes this game of charades. And then finally, we realize that I mean the Pope.

When one man speaks to another man who doesn't understand him, and when a man who's speaking no longer understands, it's metaphysics.

In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

None of it meant anything, and all of it was important.

Words strain, crack, and sometime break, under the burden.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints that you do.