Anthony Doerr Quotes

All language is but a poor translation.

Words fall short sometimes.

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.

Language cannot say everything, fortunately.

I mean, I have moments of huge frustration because of my inability to express myself linguistically as clearly as I would like to.

If you can't pronounce a word correctly, just don't use it.

Speech happens to not be his language.

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

'Why' is a question no animal can ask, because both the question and answers require speech. Have you ever seen an animal shrug?

It's funny because I've made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican.

Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

I have drawn from the well of language many a thought which I do not have and which I could not put into words.

The phone conversation where I haven't had a smoke, it's like trying to talk without using adverbs.

And as far as I can see the world is too old for us to talk about it with our new words.

How does it come about that what an intelligent man expresses is much stupider than what remains inside him?

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

The grand canyon which yawns between the writer's concept of what he wants to capture in words and what comes through is a cruel abyss.

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

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

"Is," "is," "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.