What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue speak and they are but hairs as in the young.

I perceived how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.

Alas! they had been friends in youth but whispering tongues can poison truth.

I just smile. And they - my opponents don't like it when I smile at them. They think I'm playing or something. But - like I smile throughout the whole fight. Sometimes I'll be throwing combinations and I just smile and stick my tongue out at them.

For all sad words of tongue and pen The saddest are these 'It might have been'.

Before the tongue can speak it must have lost the power to wound.

After I became a citizen I felt freer to say what I thought about this country both negative and positive. I think I had been consciously and subconsciously biting my tongue in the past.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

On July 26 1916 I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.