“Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don’t believe me? Get with the program, crackpot!”
“Your thoughts are certain kinds of seeds in your life. You can water them and allow them to grow on fertile soil. Or, you can let them diminish and wither amongst the weeds. Be careful that your seeds are not contaminated as they begin to take root.”
“The best grammarian still can t write a verse.”
“Grammarians make no new thoughts, but thoughts make new grammar.”
“We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads. So too often what passes for literary criticism is I couldn t picture that guy , or I liked that part , or this part shouldn t have happened. That is, we ve left language so far behind that sometimes we judge quality solely based on a story s actions. So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts primarily through plot - the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance. But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language itself.”
“No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that s one of its functions - so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.”
“How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one s own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tight rope.”
“The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.”
“Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.”
“There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man s character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.”
“Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today’s heritage and our new compositions to the future.”
“It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.”
“Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity”
“Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.”
“A man who serves language, however imperfectly, should always serve truth.”
“Poetry helps heal wounds. Makes them tangible. At the poetry reading I read a poem. A prophecy I wrote down. Almost couldn t go through with it. But it came out hurried and hot and by the end my tongue was on fire.”
“Words tend to last a big longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear - flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands - and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish.”