I take the words I can get and try to occupy them. Using the idea that my grandfather gave me – “If you say a word often enough it becomes you” – I borrow people for a moment, by borrowing their words. I borrow them for a moment to understand something about them, and to understand something about us. By “us, ” I mean humans. Anne Deavere Smith
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The menu is not the meal. - Alan W. Watts
  2. Words are the clothes thoughts wear. - Samuel Beckett
  3. When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. - George Steiner
  4. Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
  5. Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable. - Unknown
More Quotes By Anne Deavere Smith
  1. The creation of language is the creation of a fiction. The minute we speak we are in that fiction. It’s a fiction designed, we hope, to reveal a truth. There is no “pure” language. The only “pure language” is the initial sounds of a baby....
  2. We can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment that they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It’s the very moment that they have to dig...
  3. I take the words I can get and try to occupy them. Using the idea that my grandfather gave me – “If you say a word often enough it becomes you” – I borrow people for a moment, by borrowing their words. I borrow them...
  4. Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.
  5. Yet from time to time we are betrayed by language, if not in the words themselves, in the rhythm with which we deliver our words. Over time, I would learn to listen for those wonderful moments when people spoke a kind of personal music, which...
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