“I believe she imbued my body thus, finding every touch enhanced by ambiguity of intention, as if it too required translation, and so each touch branched out, became a variety of touches.”

“I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so th...”

“I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former”

“I had the endless day, months and months of endless days, and yet my return date bounded this sense of boundlessness, kept it from becoming threatening.”

“My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and thats all Id ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.”

“God can use the jawbone of an ass!”

“Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.”

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. ...”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are consider...”

“Language disguises thought.”

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”