The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Alena Graedon

We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you’re an ass.

Language also acts like love in form.

form, language, love

What if, right now, as we’re immolating language, we’re doing away with ourselves? Maybe we’ve regressed. The skills we once used for survival – scattered attention, diffuse concentration – have been adapted to finding glowing dots on screens, skimming pop-ups, beams, emails, video streams.

Sometimes the best way out of darkness is into it.

Reflection can be its own reward.

reflection, reward

But maybe because I’m from a part of the country where there are more meth labs than drive-throughs, anything harder than cough syrup always makes me nervous.

addiction, drugs

I wanted to do it once. Be a writer. Now I’m near 70, and the only thing I have to show for it is dictionary entries. Don’t get me wrong — I’m incredibly proud of it all. But let me say this, and I’ll say it just 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 not very long you’ll be right: you won’t deserve it.

Words don’t always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. People make empty promises, go back on their word, say things they don’t believe. But connection, with ourselves and others, is the only way we can live.

language, words

Language may have limits. But it isn’t just a dim likeness in a mirror. Yes, gestures, glances, touches, taps on walls mean something. So do silences. But sometimes the word is the thing. The bridge. Sometimes we only know what we feel once it’s been said. Words may be daughters of the earth instead of heaven. But they’re not dim. And even in the faintest shimmer, there is light.

language, words

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.

god, words, worlds

People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up.

The secretary of education recently unveiled an initiative for curriculums to place more emphasis on history and language. Within the decade, proficiency in at least three languages will be required of all American schoolchildren by graduation. And along with its other recommendations, the CDC has issued a promulgation that every U.S. citizen “unplug” for at least two hours each day.location 6374

education, languages, reading, technology