Timothy D. Snyder Quotes

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).

Words are an imperfect medium for explaining.

Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.

Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

Three problems we have: lack of boundaries, insufficient language, incompletions.

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.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell.

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.

You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well.

No matter what you wear, not everyone is going to understand what you're saying.

Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

The diversity of language alienates man from man

I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.

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.

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.

Now we'd known each other for two years, the side of my calf was touching his shins, and his stomach was against my ribs. He said, "I don't think it's end of world to be my girlfriend." I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.

In Japan, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what's missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space.

I want to be able to control things and that's very difficult to do if you're not 100% in a particular language. It makes you uncertain and it makes you nervous.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.