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Issue 5 Editor's Note
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William Gass: "What is unutterable? Utter it. What cannot be spelled without a dash? Fill in the dashes with doubts. What is obscene? Dream it. In all its tones, in seamy detail, at indelicate length. What is too horrible to contemplate? Describe it. With cool and indifferent interest. As though peeling a peach." Tahar Dajout: "If you keep quiet, you die. If you speak, you die. So speak and die." Marcel Proust: "Books are the work of solitude and the children of silence." Samuel Beckett: ". . . nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express . . . together with the obligation to express." Paul Kane: "What is not said but felt; what is apparent because it is left unsaid; or what is obviously impossible in the end to say - this is the enigmatic heart of expression." Ludwig Wittgenstein: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." Heather McHugh: "Poetry/ is what he thought but did not say." Susan Sontag: "The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that." Pat Barker: "Mutism seems to spring from a conflict between wanting to say something and knowing that if you do say it, the consequences will be disastrous . . ." Angela Carter: "We couldn’t say . . ." John Cage: "There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound." Fernando Pessoa: "It’s when they open their mouths that fish, and Oscar Wilde, are fatally hooked." Meena Alexander: "Silenced writer: I see a child who has no books, no pens, and scribbles words in the dirt, words that threaten to fly off and join the stick insects on the bark of a nearby tree." Paul Celan: "There remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened . . ." Anne Waldman: "I think of those we never heard from. Is there a poet locked in a cage at Guantánamo?" Michael Wood: "The history of pain becomes the writing of silence—of many silences. This is one of the ways in which novels and stories may get history to think again. Everything depends on the tone and the timing with which a silence is broken and on the writer’s fidelity to what words can’t reach." Vladimir Nabokov: "We think not in words but in the shadow of words."
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