Mother Tongue

“Literature takes shape and life in the body,
in the wombs of the mother tongue . . .”
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

“Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.”
~ John Keats

“Only in the mother tongue can one speak his
own truth. In a foreign tongue, the poet lies.”
~ Paul Celan

“When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about
grammar and style, the position of the particles
etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker
to certain rules, I see they forget that the first
requisite and rule is that expression shall be
vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute,
or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue;
and last of all, artificial or father tongue.”
~ Henry David Thoreau

“Essentially, your truest poetical sentence
is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.”
~ Henry David Thoreau