The Stranger Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart of the street to the river walking the rivers of the avenues feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt watching the lights turn on in the towers walking as I’ve walked...
In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings that we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do w...
Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the ‘Other’ — as that which like language is always anterior to ...
I think we should model parts of the English language after the Inuits, who have 52 words for snow. Why don't we have 52 words for love? Instead, I have to rely on metaphors like, Her love was as pure as yellow snow.
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 "thi...
My belief is that if we live another century or so — I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals — and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we ha...
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a...
It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to whic...
Bolivar Trask: How old is your son now, Major? Maj. Bill Stryker: Jason? He's coming up on ten now, if you can believe it. Bolivar Trask: Eight years from fighting age. And how many of our sons and brothers did we just ship home in body bags? Maybe f...
My parents would not permit ugly language in the house, which was okay with me. I didn't want to learn German anyway.
I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked - Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English).
Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.
This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with`disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.
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.
On this platform of peace, we can create a language to translate ourselves to ourselves and to each other.
The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.
Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
Wetiko is elusive and mercurial, for whatever we say wetiko is, it isn't, in that it is always more, less, and other than what we are able to say it is in language.
Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for ‘pleasure derived from the misfortune of others’? Schadenfreude.
...that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.
