“The creation of language is the creation of a fiction. The minute we speak we are in that fiction. Its a fiction designed, we hope, to reveal a truth. There is no pure language. The only pure langu...”

“We can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment that they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. Its the v...”

“I take the words I can get and try to occupy them. Using the idea that my grandfather gave me If you say a word often enough it becomes you I borrow people for a moment, by borrowing their words....”

“Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.”

“Yet from time to time we are betrayed by language, if not in the words themselves, in the rhythm with which we deliver our words. Over time, I would learn to listen for those wonderful moments when...”

“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...”