Twyla Tharp Quotes

Confusion of sign and object is original sin coeval with the word.

I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.

If you present your dog to a veterinarian with the instruction to put him to sleep, you would normally mean something very different than you would upon taking your wife or husband to an anesthesiologist with the same words.

I don't understand the word 'hunk.'

A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Diva has a negative connotation.

Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord? HAMLET: Words, words, words.

All names mean something.

To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

I wasn't sure if the word boys should mean dim or incomprehensible. I was hovering between the two, with a healthy dose of testosterone-poisoned.

'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word 'pain' meant-so that he constantly called different things by that name-but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'-in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

Why, you might just as well say that, I see what I eat, is the same as, I eat what I see.

For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

Meow” means “woof” in cat.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

Of Rhetoric various definitions have been given by different writers; who, however, seem not so much to have disagreed in their conceptions of the nature of the same thing, as to have had different things in view while they employed the same term.

Names govern the world.

A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

A tired exclamation mark is a question mark.

I remember having a discussion with [Kaz] about his translation of the word shunyata as "boundlessness," instead of the more traditional "emptiness." I said: "Kaz, everyone is used to the word emptiness for shunyata. This might not sit well with people. He said: "Translator's prerogative!" Then he added, "One cannot assume we know what they meant...." I agreed.