A Quote by Ernest Hemingway

Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness. — © Ernest Hemingway
Writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for wordlessness.
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.
I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.
Illness is a clumsy attempt to arrive at health: we must come to nature's aid with intellect.
[This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.
If my life was a song the title would probably be 'Clumsy', 'cause I'm clumsy.
I love that "furious and gorgeous barrage." That helps me see the relation between the introduction and the book's final section, where writing about a fire (and about the attempt to understand the event), also becomes an attempt to understand how writing might get closer to the fire, in so many ways.
My first attempt at writing was very unstructured and formless, with shifting points of view. I was trying to understand how long form might work, and I realized I had something shapeless. It was a total car wreck. But I still felt I could pull it off. So I ditched that attempt and started writing in the opposite manner, in first person, with a driving narrative.
Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find new ways of outwitting ourselves, in our writing and thinking.
Sometimes kindness can be delivered in a clumsy way. But it's far more sincere in its clumsiness than those distinguished men you read about in books. Your father was very clumsy.
Raw, real human conversation can be the most direct path to greater awareness and stronger relationships, even when it's unrehearsed and clumsy-perhaps especially when it's unrehearsed and clumsy!
One main reason why the separate nature of the science of operations has been little felt, and in general little dwelt on, is the shifting meaning of many of the symbols used in mathematical notation. First, the symbols of operation are frequently also the symbols of the results of operations.
One of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself.
If you have to find devices to coax yourself to stay focused on writing, perhaps you should not be writing what you're writing. And if this lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte. I mean, what is the problem? If writing bores you, that is pretty fatal. If that is not the case, but you find that it is hard going and it just doesn't flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work.
Yes, time can be buoyed by wordlessness, but it needs to be anchored in words.
The twentieth-century artist who uses symbols is alienated because the system of symbols is a private one. After you have dealt with the symbols you are still private, you are still lonely, because you are not sure anyone will understand it except yourself. The ransom of privacy is that you are alone.
Do we play Chicago again? I going to hit Othella Harrington right in the mouth. If he didn't have his clumsy ass on the floor, I wouldn't have fell. How he got on the ground, I don't know. He's clumsy. Quote me on that. I'm going to get him.
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