Toni Morrison

On language

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.

Ursula K. Le Guin

“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

Henry Beston

In Northern Farm

.....a small thing can touch the heart and the imagination, a fine phrase is as good as an epic, and a small brook in the quiet of a wood can have its say with a voice more profound than the thunder of any cataract. A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear, black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, and chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.

What imagery!!!!

An absolute must read

Fredrik Backman's My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologises

In fact also, read A Man Called Ove by the same author.

Backman's very distinct style is unbelievably charming and brings all the characters alive...

The English Spy

By Daniel Silva

I liked what this sentence conjured up in my mind:



.....had only limited accommodation with the modern world.

From Blossoms and Shadows

by Lian Hearn

Then everyone spoke of the dead man's qualities..........and the words, together with the sake we drank, and the flowers and incense, stitched death up so that it was no longer a terrifying rent in the fabric of our lives but something quite natural.

What a beautiful play of words

......small yet enormous moments in which destinies pivot

and another one, talking about the time when...

...the elaborate universe of priorities we’ve spent a lifetime constructing, combusts into stardust.

Powerful picture

 .......one of those mundane anchors of constancy by which we hang on to existence.