Marguerite Duras Quotes

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

It is impossible to disassociate language from science...To call forth a concept, a word is needed.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

Words are in this respect like water, that they often take their taste, flavour, and character, from the mouth out of which they proceed, as the water from the channel through which it flows.

I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room--a complete mess--so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

I am convinced that words are things, and we simply don't have the machinery to measure what they are. I believe that words are tangible things.

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

It is not how much empty space there is, but rather how it is used. It is not how much information there is, but rather how effectively it is arranged.

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

The connection between the language in which we think/program and the problems and solutions we can imagine is very close. For this reason restricting language features with the intent of eliminating programmer errors is at best dangerous.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

Language is generated by the intellect and generates the intellect.

The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by the figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

There’s an Oriental saying I like: “If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself.