expression challenges Quotes

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

Words are an imperfect medium for explaining.

I just don't know how to stitch words in a predictable way sometimes. It's a weird instinct I've developed.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

In any language it is a struggle to make a sentence say exactly what you mean.

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.

There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.

Words don't come easily, like forgive me.

I don’t like to talk to people, because I can’t express myself satisfactorily. I don’t say the things I mean.

I can read and arrange, but I can't write.

The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?

Trying to convey an emotion through words is not easy.

It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.

However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.

We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!