A Quote by Eudora Welty

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

Eudora Welty

Quote Topics

Express Human Human Life Language Lies Life Mystery Use Use Of Language

Quote Author

Eudora Welty
American - Novelist
April 13, 1909 - July 23, 2001

The mystery of being human and, certainly, of being a Catholic lies in our embracing together the imperfect state known as the human condition. First and foremost, if we could ever be perfect or do things perfectly, we would eliminate mystery, an essential ingredient in the good life and the spiritual life.

Eugene Kennedy

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

Carol Shields

I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.

Chuck Palahniuk

The point here is what makes human beings different from other creatures is our ability to use language. We can use words to express ourselves in very eloquent and complex ways. We grow up telling and listening to stories. That's what turns us into the people we are.

Flemming Rose

In your relationship with God there are also times when you want to say things and you're trying to find the words to express them. In a human relationship sometimes you struggle for words and you've got to do it, but in a relationship with God he can actually give you a language which enables you to communicate. In a relationship with God you feel things and you want to express them and you're not limited by human language. You can express what you really feel in your heart, through a language that he gives you, and that helps you to communicate with God.

Nicky Gumbel

Those who use language and have nothing but language to express themselves live in a cage that cannot feel comfortable.

Martin Walser

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

Antonin Artaud

The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.

Edward Hirsch

The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life... Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

Joseph Addison

Being a slow reader would normally be a deficiency; I found a way to make it an asset. I began to sound words and see all those qualities - in a way it made words more precious to me. Since so much of what happens in the world between human beings has to do with the inconsideration of language, with the imprecision of language, with language leaving our mouths unmediated, one thing which was sensuous and visceral led to, in the use of language, a moral gesture. It was about trying to use language to both exemplify and articulate what good is.

Richard Ford

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

John Milius

I definitely have moments in my life where I discovered a film, and the language of the film itself spoke to me in a way, as if someone came up to you and started speaking a language you'd never heard but understood and was able to express things the language you knew could not.