One of the recognized traits of Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema is its uniqueness in dealing with the work of quotation. Critics celebrate the dizzying forces with which his films displace and put into action fragments coming from “a thousand focuses of culture”, to stay with Barthes’s much-quoted words on inexorable sway of quotation. This article proposes a reflection on the ways this singular kind of verbivocovisual concert (or disconcert) takes place in the specific case of Goodbye to Language (2014). In answer to the proposal of this volume, it focuses on some of the literary fragments that are evoked there, examining the life they lead in and bring into the film. Special attention is given to the voices of Valéry, Rilke, Beckett, Borges, and Anouilh. “Being face to face invents language,” we hear at one point, amidst the vortex of quotations. This article shows that the desire for invention and otherness manifested in this saying gets enacted in the ways Godard puts literature and cinema face to face – while exploring, at the same time, encounters involving animals, women, the margins of the West, and art itself.