An illustration from The Day of Wonders by M. Sullivan (1879).  The caption reads: "The letters ... tired of lying still."

The DVD release of Anthony Newley's series The Strange World of Gurney Slade doesn't feature subtitles, so we took it upon ourselves to transliterate the following rather marvelous made-up words:

"To some extent punctuation is sound that you do not hear, a pause that implies the presence of withheld sound.  To some extent, then, language is as dependent upon the unspoken as the spoken, and the rhythm of silence as well as of sound.  In that context, however, silence involves merely a pause of sound in which sound is implied but withheld.  Inner sound deals primarily with that kind of relationship.  Language is meaningful only because of the rhythm of silence upon which it rides." —Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche

(Thanks, Tamara!)

"At one time a language existed that was immediately comprehensible to anyone with the concept of language." —William Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night

"Language is civilization itself.  The Word, even the most contradictory word, binds us together.  Wordlessness isolates."  —Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods.