Alena Graedon Quotes

shook my head and smiled. He smiled back. Our smiles said vastly different things.

Words, I've come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we're history's orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased

think the word you might be searching for," she finally said, "is stupefied. Or awed? Inspired?" She gave a shy little smile. "But vib. I'm not mad at you, Bartleby." My heart felt like a rubber ball bouncing down the stairs.

Language is incarnate. It's the way our bodies evolved - to stand upright, to walk - that enables us to speak at all. And it's our senses that give us reasons to talk. We want to verify with others what we seem to perceive. It's also our bodies that give our words urgency: the tiny ticking clocks in each of our cells. Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can't go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we've seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what's not. The Word, after all, is God. Some

Reflection can be its own reward.

Language is infinite. It can be as creative, and as chillingly precise, as the human mind.

She disapproved tacitly of crying. Preferred "helpful advice." But her advice wasn't always that helpful for me. I don't do yoga; don't have her green thumb; don't really like window-shopping - especially not in stores where I can't afford even the candles they burn to make you calm enough to take your wallet out - and am unmotivated, in times of sorrow, to host dinners or attend social events. I

In Japanese, koi no yokan means the ineluctable feeling you have, upon meeting someone for the first time, that eventually the two of you will fall in love.

and in that she's not merely pretty. It wouldn't be an overstatement to call her, as Dr. D once did, "a boldly sapient creature of divine enchantment." Form, I think, is dialectically related to content. And in fact it's perhaps her not-mere-prettiness, her intellect and sense of style and kindness and competency and good joke timing and infectious joy for life, etc., that have, to my mind (and, believe me, many others'), elevated her from the more crowded and clamorous ranks of the pretty to the rarified stratum of the beautiful. Something about her suggests the endless unfolding of possibilities. Ana

Language comes from what we've seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what's not.

People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up.

The secretary of education recently unveiled an initiative for curriculums to place more emphasis on history and language. Within the decade, proficiency in at least three languages will be required of all American schoolchildren by graduation. And along with its other recommendations, the CDC has issued a promulgation that every U.S. citizen "unplug" for at least two hours each day.
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Definition, like poetry, is the project of revivifying the familiar. Making things we think we know seem newly strange. To estrange, according to Hegel, is requisite to practicing consciousness.

I guess all I'm trying to say is that language may be large, unwieldy, and in a perpetual state of transformation - in other words, language is like love - but, unlike Dr. D, I don't think it's greater than we are. I think it's our duty, in fact, to corral it into coherence; to suppress its more unruly tendencies; to verify its meaning and, more importantly, its efficacy; to test its subjectivity-bridging potential. (Again, we should treat it very much like love.)

But maybe because I'm from a part of the country where there are more meth labs than drive-throughs, anything harder than cough syrup always makes me nervous.

Yes. Well, as I said, love can haunt us, and make us do strange things.

We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you're an ass.

But as Hegel teaches us, beginnings are necessarily problematic. (As are endings.) How can I describe my first encounter with Ana fairly, when my understanding of her essence has passed through infinite iterations over the past four and a half years? My

In the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.

Although, as you well know, dictionary sales to laymen have been waning for a long time. As books have gone out of print and we've moved from reading to "consuming data streams," "texting" rather than writing - as Memes have become king - the average consumer has had much less need for real meanings. And Synchronic

but I could feel the jealous eyes of the steexin hangers-on still in line, and I lament to report that it boosted my spirits some), he

It's always the scuffs in the marble that make its inner light seem to glow more brightly.

Words are living legends, swollen with significance. We string them together to make stories, but they themselves ARE stories, encapsulating rich, runny histories.

Language also acts like love in form.

swallowed by another noise: an indistinct thudder.

tried to understand what I'd seen. I felt as if I'd just stepped out of a limn on twentieth-century book burnings: gaunt, vampiric Goebbels screaming beside a seditious inferno; Stalin; Mao and his Red Guards; Iranian forces in the Republic of Mahabad burning anything in Kurdish; midcentury New York school kids incinerating comics in Binghamton; Ray Bradbury's firemen; apartheid-era librarians; Pinochet; Pol Pot; Serbian nationalists setting fire to the National and University Library.

Our natural tendency is to be distracted - to scan the horizon constantly for predators and prospects. Books made us turn that attention inward, to build higher and higher castles within the quiet kingdoms of our minds. Through that process of reflection and deep thinking, we evolved.

Words don't always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. People make empty promises, go back on their word, say things they don't believe. But connection, with ourselves and others, is the only way we can live.

promised him, of course, that I wouldn't say anything, which I wouldn't have anyway, because of the sheer unpleasantry of divulging an unattractive truth to an attractive person.)

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one.

learned only later what I'd seen: the manufacture of a term that would be used to increase traffic on the Word Exchange. For some users of the Meme - those whose devices had been infected with a new virus that had recently started circulating - terms like this one would replace "obscure" words - "cynical," "morbid," "integrity" - that those of us who'd grown dependent on our Memes no longer fully trusted to our memories. But I knew nothing then about these neologisms, or the virus, or why this "word" had just been fabricated.

I think this had to do with the vintage of his family's money: the older the gold, the less shiny it tends to be.