William Saroyan Quotes

The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings.

And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

When Harvey Weinstein threatened to sue me, it was like the scene in 'Harry Potter' where an invitation to Hogwarts is coming in through every window and fireplace and every opening in the house.

Words were useless. At times, they might sound wonderful, but they let you down the moment you really needed them. You could never find the right words, never, and where would you look for them? The heart is as silent as a fish, however much the tongue tries to give it a voice.

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.

I would have spoken, had my heart not been in my throat

And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.

Finally, and most of all, words failed him.

...he who remains passive when over-whelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering his elasticity of mind.

Sometimes you're overwhelmed when a thing comes, and you do not realize the magnitude of the affair at that moment. When you get away from it, you wonder, did it really happen to you.

All the men she's been with and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you, the flowers and the birds and the sun streaming in and the fragrance of it choking you, annihilating you.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand

...In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.

An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint.

Language can do what it can’t say.

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

The most difficult thing is that I don't speak Mandarin and I had this experience - of working in a language that I don't understand - before and it's really horrible. Eighteen years ago, I played a mute in one film because I couldn't speak Mandarin. There was another film where I had to speak Vietnamese. It's horrible!

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.