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The Word Exchange
Alena Graedon
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Without words, we're history's orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased.”
“But let me say this, and I'll say it only once: don't fool yourself into thinking you're just on a detour as you sail home for Ithaca. A little pit stop, if you like, with the Lotus-Eaters or Calypso. There's no Athena interceding on your behalf. No guarantee you'll eventually arrive. If there's something you really want in life - especially if it's something that scares you, or you think you don't deserve - you have to go after it and do it now. Or in the very long you'll be right: you won't deserve it.”
“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. Who can bother with the past when it’s hard enough keeping up with the present? But we do need the past. And things that last longer than a day.…”
“One single word – like EMERGENCY, or love – can revise a whole night. A whole life.”
“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”
“It’s always the scuffs in the marble that make its inner light seem to glow more brightly.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
compulsive, reading, god, koi-no-yokan, love, words, wisdom, word, history, emergency, life, connect, writing, worlds