“You see a silent photograph of an Iraqi woman whose husband or son or brother has just been killed by an explosion. You know that if you can hear, you’d hear one long vowel of grief, just senseless, meaningless vowel of grief. That’s the beginning of language. Inexpressible sound. It’s antisocial, it’s destructive, it’s utterly painful beyond expression, and the consonants are the attempts to break it, control it, do something with it. I think that’s how language emerges.”
- W. S. Merwin, in an interview with Bill Moyers 2009