A Quote by Eleanor Catton
To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.
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I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova... All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.
Describing beauty is almost impossible because we perceive it, rather than describe it. If you look at a Rembrandt painting and start to try and describe what the beauty is you see, your words sound absolutely pathetic.
No words will ever describe the exquisite beauty and charm of this mountain park – Nature’s landscape garden at once tenderly beautiful and sublime. No wonder it draws nature-lovers from all over the world.
One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.
Most words evolved as a description of the outside world, hence their inadequacy to describe what is going on inside me.
Does inadequacy not characterize all that we make use of to perceive and describe the world? Are the signs of language not just as inadequate, albeit differently, as are images?
We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.
You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film.
You cannot rise about your words. A lot of people use foul, pornographic, filthy, language and you SEE, all of those words paint pictures and they reveal the internal thinking of the person on the inside. YOU cannot RISE (forward, onward upward) above your words.
I feel as though I am trying to describe a three-dimensional experience while living in a two-dimension world. The appropriate words, descriptions, and concepts don't even exist in our current language. I have subsequently read the accounts of other people's near-death experiences and their portrayals of heaven and I am able to see the same limitations in their descriptions and vocabulary that I see in my own.
Love is a mystery. We embrace it where we can. Mostly we do not choose whom we love. It just happens. A voice speaks to us, in ways the ears cannot hear. We recognize a beauty the eye does not see. We experience a change in our hearts that no voice can describe.
Japan lives with drastic segregation between the sublime, the ugly, and the utterly without qualities. Dominance of the last 2 categories makes mere presence of the first stunning: when beauty 'happens', it is absolutely surprising.
Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.
Be able to describe anything visual, such as a street scene, in words that convey your meaning.
I didn't go to university; I hardly went to school, but I grew up among people well versed in Henry James and Proust, and just felt this endless, total inadequacy.
I love those moments on stage, on screen and in life when you dispense with language, when you sort of transcend it in a way, and certainly the experience of falling in love, I think, defies words, which is why poets, painters, musicians, actors have tried to describe that feeling, writers have just tried to put words to that.
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