We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

It always seemed to me that [Henry James] had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly.

We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

What I had to say was so clear and I felt it so deeply that I am amazed by the tediousness, repetitiousness, verbiage, and disorder of this writing. What would have made it lively and vehement coming from another's pen is precisely what has made it dull and slack coming from mine. The subject was myself, and I no longer found on my own interest that zeal and vigor of courage which can exalt a generous soul only for another person's cause.

I believe we engage in most discourses the way we do because either we do not know the norms of language use or we have lost it as a people.

I spoke like a spoke on a wheel, as I went around and around without actually saying what I wanted to say. I was love flustered.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

So much they talked, so very little said.

It seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control.

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it. ~ Ch. 14