A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.