19 quotes
No one is alone, and each change here brings about another change there. No one is alone and nothing is solid: change is comprised of fixities that are momentary accords.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
Following a path: reading a stretch of ground, deciphering a fragment of world.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
All this means that fixity never is entirely fixity and that it is always a moment of change. Fixity is always momentary.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
Repetitions, you wander about lost amid repetitions, you are merely a repetition among other repetitions.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
Fixity is always momentary. But how can it always be so? If it were, it would not be momentary — or would not be fixity.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
It may be that, like things which speak to themselves in their language of things, language does not speak of things or of the world: it may speak only of itself and to itself.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life?
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
You are (I am) is a repetition among other repetitions. You are is I am; I am is you are: you are is I.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
The Great Monkey closes his eyes, scratches himself again and muses: before the sun has become completely hidden — it is now fleeing amid the tall bamboo trees like an animal pursued by shadows — I shall succeed in reducing this grove of trees to a catalogue.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
My phrase is a moment, the moment of fixity in the monologue of Zeno the Eleatic and Huí Shih (“I leave today for Yüeh and I arrive yesterday”).
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
The best thing to do will be to choose the path to Galta, traverse it again (invent it as I traverse it), and without realizing it, almost imperceptibly, go to the end — without being concerned about what “going to the end” means or what I meant when I wrote that phrase.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
A verbal trap; after the end there is nothing, since if there were something, the end would not be the end. Nonetheless, we are always setting forth to meet … even though we know that there is nothing, or no one, awaiting us.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)
Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.
The Monkey Grammarian (1974)