Jennifer Egan Quotes

Words are an imperfect medium for explaining.

There is also a particular frustration that I have with language. It's so clumsy. And the reason I'm feeling that is more because on your breathing and your intonation than the actual words.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

The charge of being ambiguous and indefinite may be brought against every human composition, and necessarily arises from the imperfection of language. Perhaps no two men will express the same sentiment in the same manner and by the same words; neither do they connect precisely the same ideas with the same words.

A picture can say a thousand words but maybe not the correct ones.

If there is an interpreter sitting between two friends, he may be able to translate the words but not the feelings with which I say something.

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.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one's experiences in common.

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they're all we have.

I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.

You cannot explain to someone who comes with no idea of what you are talking about without being misunderstood.

To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation.

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.

Besides the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other adds a fresh embarrassment.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.

It is difficult to speak of what is common in a way of your own.

It is very frustrating not to be understood in this world. If you say one thing and keep being told that you mean something else, it can make you want to scream. But somewhere in the world there is a place for all of us, whether you are an electric form of decoration, peppermint-scented sweet, a source of timber, or a potato pancake.

Communication: the thing humans forgot when we invented words.

Where I feel something that I had written was misinterpreted in a way that made people feel bad, that is absolutely horrifying to me. I feel so embarrassed and I feel ashamed that I should make people feel bad.