We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.
Because different cultures see a particular animal as representing a certain human virtue or vice, the use of animal imagery also allows for more colorful commentary on the human condition.
To speak a language that was as intimate and free as certain dreams, saying darkly, thrillingly, My cock inside of you. Your come in my mouth ... He focused on the boy’s slim, tight hips; with the tip of his tongue he tasted an asshole’s bitter, ...
My name on his lips is a symphony. How can two simple beats of basic human language engulf me so completely? We stare at each other for a mini infinity. I’m terrified of speaking and breaking the spell that’s fallen over us.
If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the vi...
If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s...
You're water. We're the millstone. You're wind. We're dust blown up into shapes. You're spirit. We're the opening and closing of our hands. You're the clarity. We're the language that tries to say it. You're joy. We're all the different kinds of laug...
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessl...
Try - Takes the infinitive: "try to mend it," not "try and mend it." Students of the language will argue that 'try and' has won through and become idiom. Indeed it has, and it is relaxed and acceptable. But 'try to' is precise, and when you are writi...
Sometimes there aren't words, Benny knew. Sometimes there are hurts so deep that they exist in a country that has no spoken language, a place where all landscapes are blighted and no sun ever shines. Benny had left his footprints in the dust of that ...
A crease found it's way onto Joss's forehead. Because he was certain that Sirus was wrong. Girls were more complicated than boys. Girls communicated in a language that only they understood. And Joss wasn't sure at all that he would ever understand th...
They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing...
I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them.
(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
Language is power that gets abused all the time, Robin, but we've got real enemies out there somewhere and until they're out of the picture, I won't get knotted up over people who don't get all the words right. It's a waste of energy.
Without a passport humans wouldn't know where they’re from, who they are or who their enemy is, and their enemy wouldn't know why they had an enemy, what language they spoke, and where best to avoid. The passport is said to be what makes them free,...
Hey, any idea why Australians speak something that sounds deceptively like English but isn’t? I mean, I’m trying to figure out why I can’t seem to converse with another human being who speaks the same language as I do.
I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same l...
Each asana is like a sound or letter in an alphabet. Every letter in an alphabet produces a unique sound vibration. Each asana vibrates at a specific frequency. When asanas are performed in sequence, beautiful phrases or sutras result, producing a my...
Personally, I think so-called "common language" is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow" just isn't.
Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me.” As if we could scrape the color ...