7 quotes
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring.
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information, is via narrative — so I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with the first sentence of our childhood — that we all remember — the phrase: "Once upon a time."
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)