I used to spend so much time reacting and responding to everyone else that my life had no direction. Other people's lives, problems, and wants set the course for my life. Once I realized it was okay for me to think about and identify what I wanted, r...
What about Danny Thomas?" Uncle Hal asks. "What happened to him? "Dead," Uncle Abdelhafiz says. "Nice Lebanese boy." "Never mind about Danny Thomas, look what happened to your whole family! Look at your cousin Farouq, Great Uncle Ziad, Auntie Seena a...
Dad says that everyone invented baklava.” It occurs to me now to wonder what that means. Aunt Aya rolls her eyes. “Your father? He is the worst of the worst. He thinks he cooks and eats Arabic food but these walnuts were not grown from Jordanian ...
It has always been difficult for Jews to take Christians serious, mostly because Christians lack the fundamentals that religious Jews learn in their youth. It remains an embarrassing fact, that modern Jews can comprehend the New Testament better than...
A Blessing on the Poets Patient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker, Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover, Sharer and saver, muser and acher, You who are open to hide or uncover, Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker; May language’...
The vocabulary of endearment, complaint, and abuse, provides, I think, almost the only specimens of words that are purely emotional, words from which all imaginative or conceptual content has vanished, so that they have no function at all but to expr...
That's just like the manual says,' said Witherwax. "If we want to have international brotherhood, we gotta get a language that everybody understands all the time.' 'You mean with no homonyms?' said Doc Brenner. Mr. Gross belched again, and held up tw...
My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes...
Lacan wrote about two levels of speaking, one in which we know what we are saying (even when struggling with something difficult or contradictory) and another in which we have no idea of what we are saying. In this second level of speaking there are ...
... Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas... And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: "I love you," "D...
Different strokes, for different folks.
Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.
When I speak in Christian terms or Buddhist terms I'm simply selecting for the moment a dialect. Christian words for me represent the comforting vocabulary of the place I came from hometown voices saying more than the language itself can convey about...
A recurrent question about photography is how much self expression it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each corresponding to a different location oh photographic skill. The opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares’s ...
When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system's defeat and demise. [...] The central subject, the essence, the core relations between Europeans and...
Violence is the language of the inarticulate.
Painting is by nature a luminous language.
The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.
In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
Symbols are miracles we have recorded into language.
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
