Sexuality is primarily a means of communicating with other people, a way of talking to them, of expressing our feelings about ours...elves and them. It is essentially a language, a body language, in which one can express gentleness and affection, anger and resentment, superiority and dependence far more succinctly than would be possible verbally, where expressions are unavoidably abstract and often clumsy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think w...e mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed words are dominated by one parent while the other is recessive. The way a word is used this year is its phenotype, but it has deeply immutable meanings, often hidden, which is its genotype.... The separate languages of the Indo-European family were at one time, perhaps five thousand years ago, maybe much longer, a single language. The separation of the speakers by migrations had effects on language comparable to the speciation observed by Darwin on various islands of the Galapagos. Languages became different species, retaining enough resemblance to an original ancestor so that the family resemblance can still be seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an exten...sion of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking ti...me for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poetic process is not different from conjuration, enchantment, and other magical procedures. And the poet's attitude is very s...imilar to the magician's. Both utilize the principle of analogy; both act for utilitarian and immediate ends: they do not ask themselves what language or nature is, but use them for their own purposes. It is not difficult to add another trait: magicians and poets, unlike philosophers, technicians, and sages, draw their powers from themselves. To do their work it is not enough for them to possess a body of knowledge, as is the case with a physicist or a chauffeur. Every magical operation requires an inner force, achieved by a painful effort at purification.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out... At every joint and motive of her body.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the swimmer depends on water, so the writer depends on language. To swim well, we must let ourselves be enveloped by the water,... sink into it, become a part of it. To write well, we must similarly let ourselves be enveloped by the language, sink into it, become a part of it. In short, as swimmers, instead of fight ing the water to avoid drowning, we must learn to use our body-in-the-water so it will float effortlessly: then, we can start to swim. Similarly, as writers, instead of fighting the language to make it express our ideas, we must learn to use our mind-in-the-language so that our ideas-in-words will float effortlessly; then, we can start to write.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe..., because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The novelist sets forth his characters in two ways, by direct comment upon them, or indirectly by reporting their actions and beha...vior and letting the report speak for itself. The portraitist uses the latter method only, translating everything into purely visual and self-sufficient terms. His problem is to fuse into a single unambiguous statement what he sees of a man and what he understands of him. The greater his selective faculty and power of communication the keener will be his portrait. Facial expressions and body gestures are a living language which we all have learned to read as a clue to, and use as a revelation, of character. A keen portraitist has a flair for this wordless language of the face, and simply by reporting the visible quantity of the body-soul equation he can give us insight into the hidden psychological quality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »