Steven Millhauser Quotes

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

Leaving people to jumped conclusions is sometimes simpler than explaining a complicated truth

And we went our separate ways without having understood each other. As in this world nobody understands the other easily.

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

I like that confusion when people are speaking in the same language but still can't understand each other. It's also usually my experience of being in America - when I speak no one can understand what I'm saying.

If the word is not dead when it reaches the hearer, he murders it at once by a contradiction, a stipulation, a condition, a digression, an interruption, and all the thousand tricks of conversation.

A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

Language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.

I left a couple of my foreigners out last week and they started talking in foreign. I knew they were saying "Blah, blah, blah, le bastard manager..."

Indeed we are all in peril if the flawed messenger invalidates the message.

I know this world is ruled by Infinite Intelligence. It required Infinite Intelligence to create it and it requires Infinite Intelligence to keep it on its course ... It is mathematical in its precision.

Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.

It's like there's a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking.

If the Creator were to bestow a new set of senses upon us, or slightly remodel the present ones, leaving all the rest of nature unchanged, we should never doubt we were in another world, and so in strict reality we should be, just as if all the world besides our senses were changed.

Words strain, crack, and sometime break, under the burden.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each.

Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints that you do.

I'm like everyone else—I see the world in terms of what I would like to see happen, not what actually does.

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

The abuse of terms has at all times been an evil.

They looked at one another in incomprehension, two minds driving opposite ways up a narrow street and waiting for the other man to reverse first.