Linguistic Trap Quotes

'Fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming.

Reason" in language - oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!

I'm a victim of my metaphors.

Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.