A WORD is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

A Word is Dead

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

a word once written will often accidentally find a life that no one anticipates; it lies

But a word once spoken who can recapture it?

A word spoken is a terrible thing when it suddenly utters what the heart has long allowed.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

Words empty out with age. Die and rise again, accordingly invested with new meanings, and always equipped with a secondhand memory.

that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence … Words, strain,
Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

The phrase, "One dies before one has lived."

Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one
which gave it birth a book is dead to us.
Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,