language
There is no word in the language for end-of-summer sadness, but the human spirit has a word for it and picks up the first sound of its approach.
“Cold Weather,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 349.
Our metaphors matter. Indeed, our metaphors about trees by and large determine the fate of trees.
Second Nature (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 171.
In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.
Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 197.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
“The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 90.
Other people’s words are the bridge you cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.
“That Crafty Feeling,” in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2010), 102
Don’t let anyone say there aren’t magic words.
The Blazing World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 17.
I have always been a very innocent speller. I never sense that I am spelling something incorrectly and so don’t look up the words. The simpler the word, the more liable I am to come up with a rare spelling.
Letter to Ben Griffith, March 3, 1954, in The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 69.
He could read the phonebook and make it sound terrific.
Describing Dylan Thomas in “A Useful Poetry,” interview by Wen Stephenson, The Atlantic, April 8, 1999.
At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word “moon” came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa took off his vine and gave me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio.
Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10.
The etymology of fiction is from fingere (participle fictum), meaning “to shape, fashion, form, or mold.” Any verbal account is a fashioning and shaping of events.
Reality Hunger (New York: Random House, 2010), 10.
My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published.
June 5, 1962 interview at the St. Regis hotel in New York City, in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), 4.
I make drawings to suppress the unspeakable. The unspeakable is not a problem for me. It’s even the beginning of the work. It’s the reason for the work; the motivation of the work is to destroy the unspeakable.
The Drawing Book edited by Tania Kovats (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 240.