Peter Sotos Quotes

We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

From a linguistic point of view, you can't really take much objection to the notion that a show is a show is a show.

Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

The way you write affects what you say.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Words are so awesome. Words are containers for power. They carry either creative power or destructive power.

Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other. If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.

True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

Words have weight, something once said cannot be unsaid. Meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what back they wash against.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

Why do all your friends talk like books?

Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.

Necessity resides in the way we talk about things, not in the things we talk about.

Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one's emotions.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

I am convinced that words are things, and we simply don't have the machinery to measure what they are. I believe that words are tangible things.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

I believe in the magic and authority of words.