Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below
I was wondering why I was put in prison for working in an African language when I had not been put in prison for working in English. So really, in prison I started thinking more seriously about the relation between language and power.
God is gracious beyond the power of language to describe.
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
