Verbality Quotes

“All those Zen Masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can’t answer their silly word questions.'
'That’s because they want them to realize mud is better than words, boy.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river.

When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk
to the language-river. Listen to the ocean,
and bring your talky business
to an end.

Traditional words are just babbling
in that presence, and babbling is a substitute
for sight. When you sit down beside your beloved,
send the chaperones away, the old women
who brought you together.”
― Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things. I would like this hovering of presentiments and suspicions to reach the person who reads me not as an accidental obstacle to understanding what I write, but as its very substance; and if the process of my thoughts seems elusive to him who, setting out from radically changed mental habits, will seek to follow it, the important thing is that I convey to him the effort I am making to read between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler