Arca Quotes

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.

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

I kind of do this awkward body language because, growing up, I had a really hard time expressing myself vocally.

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

True net-heads sometimes resort to punctuation cartoons to get around the absence of inflection.

I'm more relaxed. I know I have difficulties with some verbs. But if they get me, they get me. And if they don't understand me, they don't understand me.

Isn't it annoying when your face doesn't do what you want it to express?

Human communication above and beyond the words that we say is so nuanced. It makes it difficult to not only analyze the vocabulary you use but the intention behind it. That's something even humans have difficulty doing, let alone a robot.

Communication feels like it should be the simplest thing, but it's not. Sometimes you don't even understand what you're feeling. You don't know how to put that into words, so how are you suppose to tell the person you love that you're upset.

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

The trouble with words is that they give us the illusory sense that we are making ourselves understood as well as understanding what others are saying. However, when we turn around and come face-to-face with our destiny, we discover that words are not enough.

I think maybe the most frustrating feeling in the world is to have something to say buy not know how to put it into words. To have lived through something but not be able to get it out of you before it festers.

He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

I had always suspected language was quite limited in its ability to communicate the intricate mysteries of truth.

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.

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 couldn't speak the language of his feelings

One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?

It is very hard, that necessity of listening to a man who says nothing

It is almost impossible to translate verbally and well at the same time; for the Latin (a most severe and compendious language) often expresses that in one word which either the barbarity or the narrowness of modern tongues cannot supply in more. ...But since every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words; it is enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense.

I—I adore you, too. Well, I don't know if I adore you. That's not really the word I'd use. But I—I—" I managed to wrench it out. God, this was hard! "I love you." "Of course you do," he said, totally unsurprised. "WHAT? I finally tell you my deepest, most personal feelings and you're all, 'Yeah, I already got that memo'? This, this is why you drive me nuts! This is why it's so hard to tell you things! I take it back.

The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

Emotion is always new and the word has always served; therein lies the difficulty of expressing emotion.

Communication: the thing humans forgot when we invented words.

It seems to me, though, that you always understand very well what I can't say very well. Trouble is I end up being even worse at saying things well.