“We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.”

ursula le guin

Ursula Le Guin - “We like to think we live in daylight...” 1

Similar quotes

“The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole.”

G.K. Chesterton
Read more

“The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Read more

“We switch to another language-- not our invented language or the language we've learned from our lives. As we walk further up the mountain, we speak the language of silence. This language gives us time to think and move. We can be here and elsewhere at the same time.”

David Levithan
Read more

“... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...”

John Geddes
Read more

“We live in our language like blind men walking on the edge of an abyss. This language is laden with future catastrophes. The day will come when it will turn against those who speak it.”

Gershom Scholem
Read more