Unspoken Meaning Quotes

Everything we say has metamessages indicating how our words are to be interpreted: Is this a serious statement or a joke? Does it show annoyance or goodwill? Most of the time, metamessages are communicated and interpreted without notice because, as far as anyone can tell, the speaker and the hearer agree on their meaning.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

A work of art doesn't have to be explained.

A lot of people understand what not saying anything means, so, in effect, not saying anything is really saying a lot.

A lot of times, my work is looked at very much on the surface. It's very easy to just want to put something in a box - to say, 'Oh, since this work deals with surface desires at times, this is about consumerism.' And of course, the base of the work is... not about economics at all.

In our hands, even the straightest lyric sounded shady.

Her silence was the blank space between the words.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

When I initially read the script, it goes inside and comes out different things even without commenting on any stuff. And then, those pieces are taken out and then spread out through the movie.

Sometimes a couple notes are worth a thousand words.

Hearing is listening to what is said. Listening is hearing what isn't said.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

I couldn't give away my husband's shoes. I could give away other things, but the shoes - I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do... their attachment to the ground, I don't know - but that did have a real resonance for me.

Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue - there's this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.

I've always believed that if you are precise in your thoughts, it's not the lines you say that are important - it's what exists between the lines. What I'm compelled by most is that transparency of thought, what is left unspoken.

There are tones of voices that mean more than words.

We steer completely clear of anything suggestive.

Talk about painting: there's no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can't be said but are always the most important.

Kate Bernheimer's fiction offers a unique and delicate gift, the tempting mirage of a grace that constantly escapes. The Complete Tales of Merry Gold is an exceptional, lovely book, beautifully enigmatic, speaking a language that mysteriously evokes the unspoken.

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

Foreign-language books are sometimes more beautiful when you can't tell what's being said. It's like you ruin it by reading.

I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.

Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.