Linguistic Representation Quotes

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

Language is the dress of thought.

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

I think the names of colors are at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.

True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

The text is a limited field of possible constructions.

Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.

To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.

The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain