Gladys - You are a sceptic.
Harry - Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
Gladys - What are you?
Harry - To define is to limit
The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde
No one knows the power of words better than a writer. But the real secret that the best writers know is the limitations of words. Words can constrict an idea to their own connotations. When words become too important, they distract from the actual concept they're meant to convey. They can confuse the meaning or suffocate the implications of an idea by replacing the thought.
Ideas and words are not the same. They work together, but they are not to be confused with each other. The trick is knowing when to speak and when to be silent, when to open your mouth and then when to close it. What matters more than what you say is how you're understood.
The best writers know the power of silence. Silence can speak volumes over volumes, can resonate louder and farther than a series of speeches or tomes of text. And yet, as loud and moving as silence may be, its message can still be lost. It can scream hauntingly and its echoes can carry to the ends of the earth, but it will all be in vain if no one understands its cries.
Writers don't write words; we craft words to share messages and convey meaning. We create and communicate ideas, using words. We love words, sometimes too much, but we love ideas more. What we really love is always more than we can explain. We spend our lives writing because what we're trying to say is always just beyond us
'Harry,' said Basil Hallward, looking him straighten the face, 'every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself
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