The choice must be yours, so here is what a good spoken answer contains, a short gloss on each quotation so you can choose on the strength of the idea, and one worked model.
- State the choice with a cue and name the speaker: “I chose Mahatma Gandhi’s line because…”
- Explain the quotation in your own words — one or two sentences. Do not simply repeat it more slowly.
- Give the reason, then the experience. The reason is general; the experience is yours and is what makes people listen. Keep it to one incident and finish it — a half-told story is worse than none.
| Quotation | What it means | What it is good for arguing |
|---|---|---|
| Gautama Buddha — words “chosen with care… for good or ill” | Speech has consequences, and they run both ways; so choosing a word is a moral act, not a matter of style | Responsibility in speech; bullying; what we post online |
| Swami Vivekananda — “We are what our thoughts have made us” | Character is built out of habitual thinking, so the guarding must begin before the speaking | Self-discipline; the source of words is thought |
| Mahatma Gandhi — “a heart without words than words without a heart” | Sincerity outranks eloquence; an unsaid but felt prayer is worth more than a fluent, empty one | Exactly Swain’s argument in the poem you have just read |
| Kalpana Chawla — “vision to find it, the courage to get on to it, and the perseverance to follow it” | A dream needs three different qualities in sequence — seeing the path, starting on it, and staying on it | Ambition; why beginning is not the hard part |
| Martin Luther King, Jr. — “not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” | Not speaking can wound more than speaking; standing by while something wrong happens is itself an act | The one quotation about silence as failure — a useful counterweight to Dickinson |
| Homer — “Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid” | If a sentence carries nothing, saying it is worse than useless | Brevity; small talk; the closest match to Swain’s “empty air” |
| Emily Dickinson — “Saying nothing… sometimes says the most” | Silence can be full of meaning — of grief, of tact, of refusal | Silence as communication; note ‘sometimes’, which keeps it honest |
| Walt Whitman — “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything” | The individual sentences matter less than the direction the whole thing is moving in | How to read a poem; substance over surface |
Sample answer:
“I chose Mahatma Gandhi’s line — ‘It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart’ — because it says in one sentence what our poem takes six stanzas to say. Gandhiji is not against words. He is saying that if you must lose one of the two, lose the words and keep the feeling, because feeling without words is still real, while words without feeling are only a performance.
I picked it because of something that happened last year. My grandmother died in June, and I spent two days writing a message to my father, who was in Dubai. I wrote it and deleted it eleven times. Every version sounded like something out of a book. In the end I sent four words — ‘Papa, I miss her’ — and he called at once and we did not say very much at all. Afterwards I understood that the ten polished versions had all been about me, about sounding right; the four words were about her. That is what Gandhiji means by a heart without words, and it is why Martin Luther King’s line does not contradict him: the silence he condemns is a silence that protects the speaker, and the silence Gandhiji allows is one that gives the speaker away.”