Diction Quotes
The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so – this is the view of Christianity – then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures.
Søren Kierkegaard
Strong language in Larkin is put in not to shock the reader but to define the narrator's personality. When Larkin's narrator in 'A Study of Reading Habits' (in The Whitsun Weddings) said 'Books are a load of crap' there were critics - some of them, incredibly, among his more appreciative - who allowed themselves to believe that Larkin was expressing his own opinion. (Kingsley Amis had the same kind of trouble, perhaps from the same kind of people, when he let Jim Dixon cast aspersions on Mozart.) It should be obvious at long last, however, that the diction describes the speaker.
Clive James
I absolutely reject the premise there is anything wrong with Black people "talking white”. It is as if to vast swathes of the privileged white left and impoverished Black community diction, education and a mastery of thought is somehow "white”... comrade, how wrong you are to say that after decades in academia I'm acting white. I'm being black. I'm being black everyday a cop pulls my car over for a "routine stop”, I'm being black each time I look in the mirror, and I'm damn well being black when I school young fools out of the myth our race is too ill-evolved to be both black and accomplished.
Elaine Brown
Every morning, I shall concern myself anew about the boundary, Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No, And pressing forward honor reality. We cannot avoid, Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion, To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction, And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully.
Martin Buber
