• "I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have been dragged through I don’t know how many consciences."

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Wall

• "Being. Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it is left legible."

Martin Heidegger, in a letter to Ernst Junger, 1956

• "I speak rain,/ I spin you a night and you hide in it."

Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems: 1965-1975

• "And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language."

Hanif Kureishi, from Intimacy

• "I needed to touch you/ with a hand, a body/ but also with words."

Adrienne Rich, Tear Gas

• "—a sense of too much to say, to think, the urgency of the moment, so quickly passing: and then, afterward, one wonders what it is all about, what is the point of it, never saying quite enough, never touching another person quite as one might wish…"

Joyce Carol Oates, from a journal entry

• "If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling."

Fernando Pessoa

• "I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words."

Jeanette Winterson, Why be happy when you could be normal

• "There’ll be oceans of talk and emotions without end."

Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters

• "That behind every word a whole world is hidden that must be imagined. Actually, every word has a great burden of memories, not only just of one person but of all mankind. Take a word such as bread, or war; take a word such as chair, or bed or Heaven. Behind every word is a whole world. I’m afraid that most people use words as something to throw away without sensing the burden that lies in a word."

Heinrich Böll, “The Art of Fiction No. 74,” Paris Review

• "The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear."

Stephen King, Different Seasons

• "I didn’t write it down to build a poem. I wrote it down because that is what I do with the things that unravel me. I drag them across a page."

Natalie Diaz

• "We have a capacity for language. We have a capacity for love."

Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

• "I have left your letter unanswered for more days than I could have wished. But don’t think it was just because I am so careless; I enjoyed keeping silent with the letter just as one enjoys walking about in silence with another until the moment comes when one turns and puts out a hand and speaks."

Katherine Mansfield, from a letter to Virginia Woolf

• "They can be like the sun, words./ They can do for the heart what light can for a field."

Juan de la Cruz, from The Poems of St. John of the Cross

• "Alas! everything is an abyss — action, desire, dreams,/ Words!"

Charles Baudelaire, from “The Abyss”, trans. Wallace Fowlie

• "I don’t know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted."

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

• "She knew she could help him best by being silent and by being near."

John Steinbeck, The Pearl

• "Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud. Silence in the 1990s seemed only to guarantee that I would be alone. And eventually it dawned on me that the despair I felt about the novel was less the result of my obsolescence than of my isolation. Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it."

Jonathan Franzen, ”Why Bother?” in How to Be Alone: Essays

• "If you are silent, be silent out of love. If you speak, speak out of love."

Saint Augustine

• "What if I can never again locate the words that work?"

Joan Didion, from Blue Nights

• "What will I do if I find no one to talk to? To whom shall I bring my words, and who will share my silence?"

Mahmoud Darwish, from Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (University of California Press, 1990)

• "...you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear."

Stephen King, Different Seasons

• … don’t speak of gardens. Don’t speak of the moon. Don’t speak of roses or of the sea. Speak of what you know. Speak of the thing that rings in the marrow, that plays in your eyes with shadow and light. Speak of the endless ache in your bones. Speak of vertigo. Speak of respiration and of desolation and of your treason. It’s so dark, so silent, this process that grips me. Just speak of the silence."

Alejandra Pizarnik, from “Extracting the Stone of Madness,” Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

• For I am not locked up. For I am placing fist over fist on rock and plunging into the altitude of words. The silence of words."

Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems: Tenth Psalm

• "To write is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly."

Marguerite Duras

• "I swear, there was a story/ but each time I reached out/ the words grew/ feathered—"

Cameron Awkward-Rich, from “Tonight,” Vinyl

• "What goes on in the pauses/ of this conversation?"

Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986; “Torture”

• "Everything is language."

Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem, the Poetic Revelation, Poetry and History

• "I thought I would be understood without words."

Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to Theo Van Gogh

• "So many miles of night & still/ no name for it/ no understanding."

Nate Pritts, Life Event

• “The poet’s prime responsibility is to esteem nothing unworthy of notice, nothing too small or too large, too subtle or too obvious, to talk about./ To learn how to say everything and to keep silent./ Silence is the life of poetry. Not the silence of the uncommitted, but Vimalakirti’s silence that shook the world, the silence that hears us at the end of every line of poetry.”

Robert Kelly, Not this Island Music

• "I fear this silence,/ this inarticulate life."

Adrienne Rich, from Twenty-One Love Poems

• I ought to be able to know how to write by now, and it seems to me at this point I ought to know how to live. That is, I ought to be able to dig a trench in my soul and find something there."

Anne Sexton, from a letter to Claire S. Degener featured in A Self-Portrait in Letters

• "Language and everything coming in contact with it burns and this is no metaphor. It is the metonymic articulation, recurring across contingent relations, of a trauma."

Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica

• "Do I need to write anything? Or do I need time and blood?"

Sylvia Plath, from a diary entry featured in The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath

• "We abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so that you can cull from them their single, dominant meaning and, in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks. But what I try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity."

Richard Foreman, quoted by Maggie Nelson in The Art of Cruelty

• "The idea that language is a game at which some players are more skilled than others has a bearing on the vexed relationship between loneliness and speech. Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants."

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

• "But this dark is deep:/ now I warm you with my blood, listen/ to this flesh./ It is far truer than poems.”

Marina Tsvetaeva, from Poem of the End

• "He cries, ‘Tell me, tell me what you feel.’ And I cannot. There is blood in my eyes, in my head. Words are drowned."

Anais Nin, Henry and June

• "If words are veils, what do they hide?"

Anne Carson, excerpt of Cassandra Float Can, from Float

• "How well I understand your terror of words already mangled by use, already ambiguous."

Marina Tsvetaeva, in a letter to Boris Pasternak, from Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke

• "Silence itself is strategy, / a signed language, / gorgeous, fluid in the hands / of those who learned it in childhood."

Mary Jo Bang, from Apology for Want: Poems; “Gretel”

• "What is said is always too much or too little. The demand that one should denude oneself with every word one says is a piece of naiveté."

Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Will to Power

• These words are vapor-trails of a plane that has vanished;/ by the time I write them out, they are whispering something else."

Adrienne Rich, from “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib),” Leaflets: Poems 1966-1968 (W. W. Norton & Co., 1969)

• "I sleep. I dream. I make up things that I would never say. I say them very quietly."

Richard Siken, from “Meanwhile,” Crush (Yale University Press, 2005)

• "Bilingualism strikes me as a kind of synesthesia. Instead of seeing colors associated with letters and words, instead of hearing melodies, what I hear with language is the play and echo of the other language. The option to say it differently, and thus to live it differently. Language is not only a means of communication or description. It’s a framework in which we process existence. Yi writes: “It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is impossible in my native language.” As every bilingual person and translator knows, there are certain words—a feeling, a way of being—that is absent in one language but perfectly brought to life in another. A word that, by existing, gives permission to be. What if you need that which does not exist in your language?"

Yoojin Grace Wuertz, Mother Tongue