“[Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies—with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.”
“Language is insight itself.”
“We live at the level of our language.”
“Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing, but a compromise- that which is common to you, me, and everybody.”
“Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.”
“Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.”
“exaggeration is the octopus of the English language”
“The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance starts when you try to convert it into language. Language itself is a kind of resistance to the pure flow of self.”
“How do I language a collision arrived at through separation?”
“As with . . . even the written word, the remote overview is one more wrenched perspective that developing civilization has glued, collagelike, to the once unified experience of life.”
“Language is neither merely the field of expression, nor merely the means of expression, nor merely the two jointly. Thought and poesy never just use language to express themselves with its help; rather, thought and poesy are in themselves the originary, the essential, and therefore also the final speech that language speaks through the mouth of man.”
“Ah—that’s the beauty of higher education, sergeant. Never use two simple words when one really complicated one will do.”
“Her accent s funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown s. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they re swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they re sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.”
“For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible”
“Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don t imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.”