A Quote by Margaret Atwood

War is what happens when language fails. — © Margaret Atwood
War is what happens when language fails.
We in the West think of peace as society's default position. War is a temporary state of affairs that happens when peace fails. For us, war is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When it is over, win or lose, the warring factions lay down their arms and resume their normal lives.
When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.
Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me.
Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.
Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.
Do the structures of language and the structures of reality (by which I mean what actually happens) move along parallel lines? Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality -- to distort what happens -- because we fear it?
I'm the type of guy who fails and fails and fails, and then, as if failure has become sick of him, succeeds.
We're very good at telling what happens and showing people while it happens... But sometimes television fails to take the time to say 'Why did it happen? What does it mean?' - To step back a little bit.
It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.
I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.
Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we feel; and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are translated into music. Music is the sunshine - the climate - of the soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June.
Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.
Love will heal What language fails to know
...when everything else fails, we communicate in the language of the stars
Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
Every theory I've seen that contains an explanation of war fails. I think they fail for the same reason that explanations of sex fail. War derives from things so deep and so complex, I'm thoroughly baffled by it at the end of the day.
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