“The Forgotten Dialect of the HeartHow astonishing it is that language can almost mean,and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the wordsget it all wrong. We say bread and it means accordingto which nation. French has no word for home,and we have no word for strict pleasure. A peoplein northern India is dying out because their ancienttongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lostvocabularies that might express some of whatwe no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts wouldfinally explain why the couples on their tombsare smiling. And maybe not. When the thousandsof mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,they seemed to be business records. But what if theyare poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelveEthiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with boltsof long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundredpitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are whatmy body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are thisdesire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan scriptis not language but a map. What we feel most hasno name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.”

“Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. […] Consider a word that refers to a thing- “ umbrella”, for example. […] Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function. […] What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? […] the umbrella ceases to be an umbrella. It has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore it can no longer express the thing.”

“Quality conversation is quite different from the love language words of affirmation. Affirming words focus on what we are saying, whereas quality conversation focuses fully as much on what we are hearing. If I am sharing my love for you by means of quality time and we are going to spend that time in conversation, it will be with a genuine desire to understand your thoughts, feelings and desires.”

“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.'A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

“It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.”

“We have to restore the meaning of the word 'love.' We have been using it in a careless way. When we say, 'I love hamburgers,' we are not talking about love. We are talking about our appetite, our desire for hamburgers. We should not dramatize our speech and misuse words like that. We make words like 'love' sick that way. We have to make an effort to heal our language by using words carefully. the word 'love' is a beautiful word. We have to restore its meaning (31).”