Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
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Samuel Beckett
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
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George Steiner
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.
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Unknown
More Quotes By Adam Gopnik
This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy.... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"--big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by "The Lord of the Rings" is...
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing.
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist.
[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is...
