But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions ar...
it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby...
Siebel, The Magazine has a man in a suit on the cover. He's not smiling, or frowning. He wears a beard that isn't a beard; it's a quotation from a film nobody can put their finger on. 'Customer satisfaction,' says the brochure. 'Seamless integration....
I have not been nourished by English Literature. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary ple...
Zorg: This case is empty. [switches to conversation between Cornelius and Leeloo, who is laughing] Priest Vito Cornelius: What do you mean, empty? [back to conversation between Zorg and Aknot] Zorg: Empty. The opposite of full. This case is supposed ...
Radagast: The Greenwood is sick, Gandalf. A darkness has fallen over it. Nothing grows anymore, at least nothing good. The air is fouled decay, but worst are the webs. Gandalf: Webs? What do you mean? Radagast: Spiders, Gandalf. Giant ones. Some kind...
Teacher: Nouns beginning with "B"? Yes, Sophie? Sophie à 8 ans: "B" for... "Big-dick", "bonk"... "B" for "Beat the beaver", "bordello", "balls", "blow-job", "bug-eyed baboon", "bitchbag"... "Beat it, bitchbag!" Teacher: Think you're funny, miss? Wha...
[holding the Ring out to Frodo after dropping it in the fire] Gandalf: Hold out your hand, Frodo. It's quite cool. [Drops the Ring into Frodo's palm] Gandalf: What do you see? Can you see anything? Frodo: Nothing. There's nothing. [Gandalf sighs in r...
Frankie Dunn: [Reads a script from a book in Gaelic] Eddie Scrap-Iron Dupris: What the hell kind of language is that? Frankie Dunn: What do you want? Eddie Scrap-Iron Dupris: I just thought you should know you got a fighter out there not talking to a...
EV-9D9: Ah, new acquisitions! You are a protocol droid, are you not? C-3PO: I am C-3PO, human/cyborg... EV-9D9: [cuts him off] Yes or no will do. C-3PO: Umm... yes. EV-9D9: How many languages do you speak? C-3PO: I am fluent in over six million forms...
When the ancient Romans would conquer a new place or a new people, they would leave the language and the customs in tact – they would even let the conquered people rule themselves in most cases, appointing a governor to maintain a foothold in the r...
Ninety-six per cent of juvenile prostitutes are fugitives from abusive domestic situations; 66 per cent began working before they turned 16. (Prostitution is their only perceived means of survival.) Millions of children work as prostitutes around the...
The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. ...
What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's...
There is no excuse for anyone to misunderstand God's Word if he will, like a child, accept the Bible for what it says, and be honest enough to consecrate himself to obey it. He must accept the Bible as God's Word. He must believe that God could not b...
I walk in the sprinkling rain like a lion. Pretty soon there won't be lions anymore. If I have to die to be a lion I'll die. I'm roaring, but in the language of rain and sand: I am invisible, I blend in, and I'm not hungry so everyone is safe. I can ...
The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality... The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy contains words that have been shaped a...
Young poets are too apt to consider themselves “children of the mist” – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which spea...
But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say....
Language is a social energy, and our capacity for articulate speech is the key factor that makes us different from other species. We are not as fast as cheetahs – or even as horses. Nor are we as strong as bulls or as adaptable as bacteria. But our...
The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors ...
