“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.”
“Music is the sweetest language for hearts, kindest prayer for souls, peaceful breeze for minds, and a magical sail for imaginations.”
“As a result of the work done by all these stratifying force in language, there are no neutral words and forms - words and forms that can belong to no one ; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the taste of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived it socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else s. It becomes one s own only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people s mouths, in other people s contexts, serving other people s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one s own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easy to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker s intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.”
“I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.”
“Music is the language of the universe, which everyone, including all animals, can understand.”
“Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?”
“And if it is true that the image still has the function of speaking, of transmitting something consubstantial with language, we must recognize that it already no longer says the same thing; and that by its own plastic values painting engages in an experiment that will take it farther and farther from language, whatever the superficial identity of the theme.”
“Language is a door. Words en-trance and are an entrance; they draw you in. When you read, the book you cradle disappears and the tales within unfold in your mind. Writing is a shelter of words and reading an interior adventure.”
“Who could trust language?”
“Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.”
“Why no s for two deer, but an s for two monkeys? Brother Quang says no one knows. So much for rules! Whoever invented English should be bitten by a snake.”
“I have a disease; I see language.”
“You all right? he said again. I didn t love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn t belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was. Yes, I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole.”
“The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather opens things up to the light of Heaven by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to illumine, for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over.”