Anthony Doerr Quotes

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.

The best prose is written by authors who see their universe with a poet’s eyes.

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun.

Take eloquence and wring its neck.

Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

I think communication starts when words are not present at all ... I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

The simple Wordsworth . . . / Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

If you do not know his language, you will never understand a foreigner's silence.

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.

Silence is never-ending speech. Vocal speech obstructs the other speech of silence. In silence one is in intimate contact with the surroundings. Language is only a medium for communicating one's thoughts to another. Silence is ever speaking.

Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." ...On the other hand, he SAID it.

Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

The highest truth cannot be put into words.

O mysterious Night! thou art not silent; many tongues halt thou.

Love will heal What language fails to know

Silence is God's language, and it's a very difficult language to learn.

Words are the weak support of cold indifference; love has no language to be heard.

The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.