Jenny Downham Quotes

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

After my recent brush with voicelessness, I thought I'd share with you a few thoughts about speech. Don't take it lightly my friends. If music is the pathway to the heart as Voltaire suggested, then speech is the pathway to other people. Live in silence and you live alone.

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.

He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone.

Reading aloud sounds like a good idea, but honestly, it doesn't work very well. Good dialogue in a book doesn't actually bear much resemblance to real-life dialogue. For example, if you've ever seen a word-for-word transcript of people talking, it doesn't read off the page very well. The trick is to make it *seem* like it's being spoken, not to make it speakable.

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

For me, speaking is work. It's not like when you breathe.

To really be known and really let someone else be known is very vulnerable. It's a weird thing. Just being an actress in Hollywood is very vulnerable. To let all these other people decide whether you're really of value or not, you have to really be strong to know that, of course, they have a right to their opinion, but their opinion doesn't matter as far as yourself.

Words are what created our world. Words are what keep it going.

Public people are definitely captives. It wasn't really my ambition, but that's what happened. If I could find another word that would be more precise, I'd tell that I'm captive of my need for acknowledgement. People ask me, "Isn't it terrible to be famous?" Not for me! I sort of need it. To be honest, I always enjoyed it. It's as if it gave me some structure. It's as if I needed someone else's eyes to look at myself.

If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is mightier than them both put together.

Maybe other people's ideas of us are truer than our own.

It's not what enters men's mouth that is evil," said the alchemist. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.

I think that I speak a lot like I write.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

Thy words, I grant are bigger, for I wear not, my dagger in my mouth.

Demetrius was wont to say that there was no difference between the words and speech of the unskilled and ignorant and the sounds and rumblings caused by the stomach being full of superfluous wind. This he said, not without reason, for, as he held, it did not in the least matter from what part of them the voice emanated, whether from the lower parts or the mouth, since the one and the other were of equal worth and importance.

So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

I act as the tongue of you, ... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened.

Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.

I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression.