language

a person who cannot control his words shows that he cannot control himself, and is unworthy of respect.

But the human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will run wild and cause you grief. Power cannot accrue to those who squander their treasure of words.

Learn the lesson: Once the words are out, you cannot take them back. Keep them under control. Be particularly careful with sarcasm: The momentary satisfaction you gain with your biting words will be outweighed by the price you pay.

Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rainwater out of a discarded tire.

jangly ganglia.

It's like breathing Cream O' Wheat direct from a blurping vat.

Some kind of blue-colored birds are walking around the lawn as if they're looking for a lost contact lens.

lackadaisical haste

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate—they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.

Wisdom cannot be communicated. Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.

A thought—that may be. I must confess to you, dear friend: I barely distinguish between thoughts and words. Frankly, I have little esteem for thoughts. I have more esteem for things.

"I know," said Siddhartha; his smile beamed golden. "I know, Govinda. And look, here we are in the midst of the thicket of opinions, in the fight over words. For I cannot deny that my words about love contradict, seem to contradict, Gautama's words. That is precisely why I so greatly distrust words, for I know that this contradiction is an illusion. I know that I am one with Gautama. How could he then not also know love? He, who recognized all humanness in its ephemeralness, in its vanity, and yet loved human beings so much that he devoted a long and arduous life purely to helping them, to teaching them! Even with him, even with this great teacher, the things are dearer to me than words, his life and deeds more important than his speaking, the gestures of his hands more important than his opinions. I see his greatness not in speaking, not in thinking, but only in doing, in living."

For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language.

Words are gossamer in a world of granite.

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need.

one does have to learn to look at art. But it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood. Most of these jokers don't want to use language you and I can learn; they would rather sneer because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If anything. Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence.

He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

"To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advance the art of human consciousness."

pelvically anfractuous,

ESTRAGON: In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent. VLADIMIR: You're right, we're inexhaustible. ESTRAGON: It's so we won't think. VLADIMIR: We have that excuse. ESTRAGON: It's so we won't hear. VLADIMIR: We have our reasons. ESTRAGON: All the dead voices. VLADIMIR: They make a noise like wings.

VLADIMIR: What do they say? ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives. VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it. VLADIMIR: To be dead is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: It is not sufficient.

CODA Ray Bradbury About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles. But, she added, wouldn't it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women's characters and roles? A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms, and why didn't I "do them over"? Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped. Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story "The Fog Horn" in a high school reader. In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a "God-Light." Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature, one would have felt that one was in "the Presence." The editors had deleted "God-Light" and "in the Presence." Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count 'em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant, and Bierce into one book? Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down, and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito—out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron's mouth twitch—gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer—lost. Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched, and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like—in the finale—Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention—shot dead. Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above? By "firing" the whole lot. By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell. The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme. Fire Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page…

There is an ongoing problem for the narrative project as outlined by Devi, a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows: First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid. Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors. Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

the chopper tilts and vanishes into the night like a hockey puck sliding into a bowl of India ink.

Everyone likes to reminisce, but no one wants to listen, and everyone feels annoyed when someone else tells a story.

The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.

the road to hell is paved with adverbs,

It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

The people were virtually packed together like drupelets. Drupelets are the pulpy little knobs that compose the outside of a raspberry.

Donald coughed, and thought of all the hero sagas of old, of men and women struggling for righteousness, always with a happy ending, always against impossible odds, always bullshit. Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story – the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

"Problem is solved," Tekla said. She was fluent in English and was perfectly capable of saying "The problem is solved," but sometimes dropped the article for effect. Anglophones found this mysterious and impressive. It was also an implicit statement of Russian pride. The language of the Cloud Ark, by default, was English. That was never going to change. But the dialect was going to evolve over time, and Russians could bend it in their direction by finding ways to inject their grammar and vocabulary into everyday speech. "Burn is complete," she went on.

So what really worried Sokolov was that this visible struggle to hold in his fury was driving Ivanov's blood pressure up to levels normally seen only in deep-sea oil wells.

Hackworth took a bite of his sandwich, correctly anticipating that the meat would be gristly and that he would have plenty of time to think about his situation while his molars subdued it. He did have plenty of time, as it turned out; but as frequently happened to him in these situations, he could not bring his mind to bear on the subject at hand. All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.

more full of wonderfully exciting people than a pomegranate is of pips,

By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true knowledge, to examine the definitions of former authors; and either to correct them, where they are negligently set down, or to make them himself. For the errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds, and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning. —HOBBES, Leviathan

Most of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.

The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

The words were as loud as the end of the world.