Expression Limit Quotes

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.

If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.

Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.

Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

The scope of what I have to say determines the length of what I write.

However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell.

With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.

At every moment where language can't go, that's your mind.

When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

You can't have anything else to say: you've poured out every drop of what you know.

Too much polishing and you spoil things. There's a limit to the expressibility of ideas. You have a new thought, an interesting one. Then, as you try to perfect it, it ceases to be new and interesting, and loses the freshness with which it first occurred to you. You're spoiling it.