Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth. ... Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? ... Time becomes even more elastic than usual--minutes can stretch for ages and days suddenly snap together. [p. 97]
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]
We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.
Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had...
Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathemati...
it’s the way he uses language—which is nothing like the way fantasists used language before him. There’s no sense of nostalgia. There’s no medieval floridness. There’s no fairy tale condescension to the child reader. It’s very straight, a...
Sonny: You! Manager! Fucker! Don't get any ideas, you hear? Sheldon: Believe me, I'm on your side on this one! Sonny: Yeah, my side, shit! Sylvia: Look, there are young ladies, here. You could watch your language, you know! Sonny: I speak what I feel...
Ray: What am I gonna do, Ken? What am I gonna do? Ken: Just keep movin'. Keep on movin'. Try not to think about it. Learn a new language, maybe? Ray: Sure. I can hardly do English. [pause] Ray: That's one thing I like about Europe, though. You don't ...
If, however, we pursue what is expressed in the phrase 'the language of things', we are pointed in a similar direction. The language of things too is something to which we should pay better attention. This expression also has a kind of polemical acce...
When the human condition is finally demystified, human insecurity and nervousness will be at a maximum…for this ultimate enlightenment to be allowed, society is going to have to adhere scrupulously to the democratic principle of freedom of expressi...
That’s the cost. That’s the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you’re left with humans with no humanity. In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker
I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science.
Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind, is engaged in the work.
No other animal bonds to a human being the way a dog does. And I suspect there is no other animal to which human beings can bond the way we can bond to a dog.
Listen to me, Jez. There's no reason for you to die-" Wood...poison." No it isn't! Not to humans. And you're half human. You're vampire enough to survie something that would kill a human, but you're human enough not to be poisoned by wood.
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of li...
I'm not someone who's particularly in touch with the way they feel. I've heard it said that you should be a 'human being' not a 'human doing', but I'm a human doing, very much so.
It's like, say, if you were a dog. You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, 'Why isn't this human getting old?'... But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human.
The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in...
Language is the dress of thoughts.
