“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and apsirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.”
“A deaf and dumb in the mist of morons is a renowed talkative among brains.”
“Great language and great literature do not survive long without each other”
“Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of Mary Jane for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember.”
“A bar, as any good dictionary will tell you, is a rod of wood or iron that can be used to fasten a gate. From this came the idea of a bar as any let or hindrance that can stop you going where you want to; specifically the bar in a pub or tavern is the bar-rier behind which is stored all the lovely intoxicating liquors that only the bar-man is allowed to lay is hands on without forking out.”
“What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one s own language as it is perceived in someone else s language, coming to know one s own belief system in someone else s system.”
“I have read in some of the old histories that in early times the Greeks did not know how to write until two men, one of whom was called Cadmus (Qatmus) and the other Aghanūn, came from Egypt bringing sixteen letters with which the Greeks wrote. Then one of these two men derived four other letters, also used for writing. Later, another man named Simonides (Simūnidus) derived four additional ones, making twenty-four. It was in those days that Socrates (Suqrātīs) appeared”
“Thirty-four, still undecided on a name, sat practicing his Realm tongue with Draker, although much of the lesson seemed to consist of the correct use of profanity. No, the big man shook his shaggy head. Pig-fucker not fuck-pigger.”
“Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone.”
“But language is malleable, and it is not always on the side of truth. This is something every writer knows. Words make and unmake the world with terrifying rapidity, and they do so without moral distinction…There is a battle going on right now over the words we use, over who has the right to speak and who does not. (Katie Kitamura)”
“The boon of language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with exactitude and without pity, even a term of endearment; the word is impartial: the usage is all. The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience--everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable. In this sense one can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man. For prose this home is a vast territory, a country which it crosses through a network of tracks, paths, highways; for poetry this home is concentrated on a single center, a single voice, and this voice is simultaneously that of an announcement and a response to it.”
“From time immemorial, some men supposed to deal in one-valued eternal verities . We called such men philosophers or meta-physicians . But they seldom realized that all their eternal verities consisted only of words, and words which, for the most part, belonged to a primitive language, refleting in its structure the assumed structure of the world of remote antiquity. Besides, they did not realize that these eternal verities last only so long as the human nervous system is not altered. Under the influence of these philosophers , two-valued logic , and the confusion of orders of abstractions, nearly all of us contracted a firmly rooted predilection for general statements - universals , as they were called - which in most cases inherently involved the semantic one-valued conviction of validity for all time to come.”
“Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory–but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.”
“He never once repeated himself and he never used either profanity or obscenity. (I learned later that he saved those for very special occasions, which this wasn’t.) But he described our shortcomings, physical, mental, moral, and genetic, in great and insulting detail. But somehow I was not insulted; I became greatly interested in studying his command of language. I wished that we had had him on our debate team.”
“The trouble with today s snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is that they don t go far enough; they don t have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don t stand for anything, push for anything; they re mere opportunists without dedication, and they don t win any victories.”