Janet Frame Quotes

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

Society matters not so much. Words are everything.

"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.

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy , taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words. You say:;: The point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.

When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.

Words are the motes of thought, and nothing more.

Grammar is the analysis of language.

The word devil is very beautiful, if you read it backwards it becomes lived.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

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

Words are mighty, words are living:Serpents with their venomous stings,Or bright angels, crowding round us,With heaven's light upon their wings:Every word has its own spirit,True or false, that never dies;Every word man's lips have utteredEchoes in God's skies.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

I find that readers are very interested in how things are translated. I just turned in the first part of this father-son Odyssey, and there is a part when I digress and explain that the name Odysseus is related to the word for pain. Like "-odyne" in the word "anodyne," pain. It's the same, "-odyne" as in Odysseus. He's the man who both suffers endlessly, in trying to get home, but also inflicts a lot of suffering on everyone he visits.

All names mean something.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.

A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words.... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.