John Edgar Wideman Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Children, Wall, Kids

• Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We're dreamers and - since we only have one life, and if we screw up we can get in a world of trouble - we're very intense dreamers. That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is. There is no American or Frenchhistory. There are all these dreams that are floating around. People construct them and fight with them and criticize them, and the world goes on. I don't think the stars pay much attention.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Dream, Distance, Fighting

• I really love James Joyce, Dubliners and other work. And I was interested in the way the dash was used in English topography - in his work particularly - and I realized there was no compulsion to use those ugly dot-dot curlicues all over the place to designate dialogue. I began to look around, and found writers who could make transitions quite clear by the language itself. I'm a bit of a maverick now. I'm always trying to push the medium.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Always Trying, Topography, Transition

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• When you're at the basketball court watching a game, one person may be talking about a fight he had with his wife, another is talking about the last hard-on he got, someone else is talking about the presidential election. The language and the tone and the voice - I'd love to be able to capture that spontaneity.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Basketball, Fighting, Talking

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Art, Distance, Trying

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• That's the beauty and the terror of being human beings: We just have these symbolic languages, these dreams, and that's all it ever is.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Dream, Language, Being Human

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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