Ancestry Quote by Penelope Lively

“We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of…

— Penelope Lively

But who are we, where do we come from When all those years Nothing but idle talk is left And we are nowhere in…

— Boris Pasternak

“What an important lesson for all of us! The words that come out of our mouths are a direct indicator of what is in…

— Robert Morris

Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?

— Melina Marchetta

The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to…

— Anonymous

“All things have the capacity for speech -- all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings. Indeed, what is…

— David Abram

“I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

We have this enormous connection to the living world that is reflected in our language.

— Jean Berko Gleason

“I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a…

— Yann Martel

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.

— Richard Jackson

“As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information,…

— Michael Oakeshott

We make a space inside ourselves, so that being can speak.

— Martin Heidegger