“Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.”

“Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.”

“So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.”

“Was it an insult to be called a “woman writer”? Didn’t it have a taint of, say, the “woman driver”?”

“The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.”

“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...”