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"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable."
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"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."
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Personal Development

"Cussing like a commoner wasn't something I was tested on. I picked that habit up outside of high school."
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Personal Development

"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
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Personal Development

"It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters."
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Personal Development

"No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another."
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Personal Development

"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."
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Personal Development

"Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence."
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Personal Development

"Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories."
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Personal Development

"Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut."
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Personal Development

"Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing."
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"All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter."
Writing


"There are aphorisms that, like airplanes, stay up only while they are in motion."
Wisdom


"Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."
Satire


"His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence."
Frustration


"Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity."
Fantasy


"Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths-until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about."
History


"The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea."
Sea


"Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle."
Emotion


"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal."
Spiritual


"Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring."
Nostalgia
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