#lang

Oh how the candles will be lit and the wood of worm burn in a fiery dust. For on all Hallow's Eve will the spirits come to play, and only the fruit of thy womb will satisfy their endless roaming. ↗

— Solange nicole

#hallows #new-age #solange #wicca-poem #age

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#age

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#language #poetry #age

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#reading #age

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go. ↗

— Rebecca Solnit

#cities #language #possiblity #walking #architecture

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#books #language #life #reading #words

For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. (on commenting the text of Genesis 1:6) ↗

— Jean Calvin

#astronomy #calvin #genesis #art

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books. ↗

— Simon Armitage

#always #appears #been #between #books

Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti] ↗

— Irving Stone

#artist #michelangelo #art

Actualmente, hablamos de lenguajes en plural, por tanto, de lenguajes cuyo significante no es la palabra: por ejemplo, el lenguaje del cine, de las artes figurativas, de las emociones, etcétera. Pero éstas son acepciones metafóricas. Pues el lenguaje esencial que de verdad caracteriza e instituye al hombre como animal simbólico es «lenguaje-palabra», el lenguaje de nuestra habla. ↗

— Giovanni Sartori

#art