James Geary Quotes

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

Clarity is so important for Shakespeare.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

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.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.

Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

Something's that written out is okay, but it's not always a clear indication of what a person means.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it's composition. If you don't understand what it's about, you're depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.