There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.
I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.
I heard one presidential candidate say that what this country needed was a president for the nineties. I was set to run again. I thought he said a president IN his nineties.
The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.
The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other.
What is Time, O sister of similar features, that you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that secondhand overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that fatuous circle of silver paper? A curse upon their ridiculous dictat...
I've noticed you only speak ghetto half of the time." - Stephanie "I'm multi-lingual," Rancher said. I followed him to the door, feeling jealous, wishing I knew a second language.
For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.
When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight. But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.
Weigh whatever you are about to say; what will it do to your hearer - encouragement, edification, disappointment or fear? What will it do to your life - glorify, edify, beautify or weigh you down? Speak well and things will go well.
We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Sometimes our dreams are affirmed in the most unlikely ways by the most unlikely people. That’s why we need to speak our commitment out loud.
Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst? Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.
Out here we speak Malspeak, a mangle of English and old languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian. Dialects from a time when the land was defined by many borders. Now there’s only one that matters. And I am on the wrong side of it.
He said that there would be more information available in the narthex. I leaned over to Matthew and whispered, "The Narthex? Isn't that a Dr. Suess character that speaks for the trees??
I'm trying to speak--to write-the truth. I"m trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.
He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, 'You prick.
My mother-in-law got so angry at me she vowed she’d never speak to me again, and I smiled and gave thanks for the little miracle God worked in my life.
I love public speakers who give moving speeches—particularly if they bring boxes, packing tape, and dollies. The last local politician I heard speak was so moving that I took up residence in a new county.
I speak Spanish like I chew spinach—like it’s dried bubble gum stuck underneath a park bench.
When a writer has deep thoughts, I expect him to also have a deep voice. And if he doesn’t, he should remain silent and let his writer’s voice do all the speaking for him.
