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"When someone uses the phrase 'the prick one', and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word 'metaphorically', you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all."
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"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
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Personal Development

"PU'RIST: one superstitiously nice in the use of words."
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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

"In Sanskrit words are like living beings; depending on context, circumstance and environment their mood varies and meaning differs."
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Personal Development

"Words can change their meaning, just by repeating them."
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Personal Development

"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
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Personal Development

"HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well."
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Personal Development

"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
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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

"One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked."
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Personal Development
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"I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!"
People

"I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I've read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I've understood them. They're about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash's autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash."
Knowledge

"Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel."
Feminism

"We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on / Bang a gong"? How long did it take him to think of that, do you reckon?' And the correct answer - 'Two seconds, and it doesn't matter' - is always beyond you, so you just tell her to shut up, while inside you're hating Marc Bolan for making you like him even though he sings about getting it on and banging gongs."
Social

"But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country, so maybe she'll enable me to get my bearings."
Discovery

"We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?"
Question

"That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself."
Mother

"The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."
Sentimentality

"And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do."
Enthusiasm

"And I have to say, books haven't helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there's always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is, Well, it's just you. And when you go, it's gone. Nothing abstract about it."
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