Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alena Graedon Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 46 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Alena Graedon.

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Famous Quotes By Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 507694

When Vern had described Meme users so estranged from everyday language that they didn't know what words they didn't know, I — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1756412

I think this had to do with the vintage of his family's money: the older the gold, the less shiny it tends to be. — Alena Graedon

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Consciousness is a process of constant alienation. The mind, through reflection, confronting itself. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 131400

swallowed by another noise: an indistinct thudder. — Alena Graedon

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Yes. Well, as I said, love can haunt us, and make us do strange things. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1522032

Language is incarnate. It's the way our bodies evolved - to stand upright, to walk - that enables us to speak at all. And it's our senses that give us reasons to talk. We want to verify with others what we seem to perceive. It's also our bodies that give our words urgency: the tiny ticking clocks in each of our cells. Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can't go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we've seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what's not. The Word, after all, is God. Some — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1813837

Definition, like poetry, is the project of revivifying the familiar. Making things we think we know seem newly strange. To estrange, according to Hegel, is requisite to practicing consciousness. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1407850

It's always the scuffs in the marble that make its inner light seem to glow more brightly. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1417602

I guess all I'm trying to say is that language may be large, unwieldy, and in a perpetual state of transformation - in other words, language is like love - but, unlike Dr. D, I don't think it's greater than we are. I think it's our duty, in fact, to corral it into coherence; to suppress its more unruly tendencies; to verify its meaning and, more importantly, its efficacy; to test its subjectivity-bridging potential. (Again, we should treat it very much like love.) — Alena Graedon

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Language also acts like love in form. — Alena Graedon

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Our natural tendency is to be distracted - to scan the horizon constantly for predators and prospects. Books made us turn that attention inward, to build higher and higher castles within the quiet kingdoms of our minds. Through that process of reflection and deep thinking, we evolved. — Alena Graedon

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shook my head and smiled. He smiled back. Our smiles said vastly different things. — Alena Graedon

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When I made some observation about linguistic affinity and heredity and Freud - so obvious, I worried that I sounded like a philistine - Ana gave a startled, gargled laugh. Her already enormous eyes grew even wider. And I was immediately engulfed in a warm, prickly compunction. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1119336

(A man who traffics in words, I thought, should come up with better ones than that.) The note felt toxic; it left a funny taste in my mouth. Metallic, like lead paint, or the prodrome of a migraine. When had he written it? And why? Maybe someone else had done it for him. While I'd had my back turned, had he just been pretending to write? Everything about it made me ill. And then there was what the note said. What — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1884380

In Japanese, koi no yokan means the ineluctable feeling you have, upon meeting someone for the first time, that eventually the two of you will fall in love. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1923556

I was willing to get a microchip - a minor, outpatient procedure - my Meme could do even more for me. Make it easier to remember certain incidents in full, lustrous color, or forget things I'd rather not revisit (again and again). It could change my visual field so that walking or driving or riding in the train would feel like performing in a video game. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1947947

learned only later what I'd seen: the manufacture of a term that would be used to increase traffic on the Word Exchange. For some users of the Meme - those whose devices had been infected with a new virus that had recently started circulating - terms like this one would replace "obscure" words - "cynical," "morbid," "integrity" - that those of us who'd grown dependent on our Memes no longer fully trusted to our memories. But I knew nothing then about these neologisms, or the virus, or why this "word" had just been fabricated. — Alena Graedon

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Creation is collaboration," as — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 2004104

Language comes from what we've seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what's not. — Alena Graedon

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but I could feel the jealous eyes of the steexin hangers-on still in line, and I lament to report that it boosted my spirits some), he — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 2119014

Although, as you well know, dictionary sales to laymen have been waning for a long time. As books have gone out of print and we've moved from reading to "consuming data streams," "texting" rather than writing - as Memes have become king - the average consumer has had much less need for real meanings. And Synchronic — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 2133500

We both think love (and language) are interesting but taffylike diversions: soft, simple, perhaps a little salty. If either one takes over your life, you're an ass. — Alena Graedon

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Language is infinite. It can be as creative, and as chillingly precise, as the human mind. — Alena Graedon

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In truth, it was also by design: as much as I loved my mother, she wasn't often the person I sought for comfort in hard times. She disapproved tacitly of crying. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 2262866

Words, I've come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we're history's orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 492233

and in that she's not merely pretty. It wouldn't be an overstatement to call her, as Dr. D once did, "a boldly sapient creature of divine enchantment." Form, I think, is dialectically related to content. And in fact it's perhaps her not-mere-prettiness, her intellect and sense of style and kindness and competency and good joke timing and infectious joy for life, etc., that have, to my mind (and, believe me, many others'), elevated her from the more crowded and clamorous ranks of the pretty to the rarified stratum of the beautiful. Something about her suggests the endless unfolding of possibilities. Ana — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 164130

The secretary of education recently unveiled an initiative for curriculums to place more emphasis on history and language. Within the decade, proficiency in at least three languages will be required of all American schoolchildren by graduation. And along with its other recommendations, the CDC has issued a promulgation that every U.S. citizen "unplug" for at least two hours each day.
location 6374 — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 228869

think the word you might be searching for," she finally said, "is stupefied. Or awed? Inspired?" She gave a shy little smile. "But vib. I'm not mad at you, Bartleby." My heart felt like a rubber ball bouncing down the stairs. — Alena Graedon

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Words are living legends, swollen with significance. We string them together to make stories, but they themselves ARE stories, encapsulating rich, runny histories. — Alena Graedon

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Sometimes the best way out of darkness is into it. — Alena Graedon

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Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can't go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we've seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of what's not. The Word, after all, is God. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 307015

promised him, of course, that I wouldn't say anything, which I wouldn't have anyway, because of the sheer unpleasantry of divulging an unattractive truth to an attractive person.) — Alena Graedon

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It lets us hear the clanging air of history and slips the links of our own epoch onto that long concatenation. — Alena Graedon

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But let me say this, and I'll say it only once: don't fool yourself into thinking you're just on a detour as you sail home for Ithaca. A little pit stop, if you like, with the Lotus-Eaters or Calypso. There's no Athena interceding on your behalf. No guarantee you'll eventually arrive. If there's something you really want in life - especially if it's something that scares you, or you think you don't deserve - you have to go after it and do it now. Or in the very long you'll be right: you won't deserve it. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 415408

Language may have limits. But it isn't just a dim likeness in a mirror. Yes, gestures, glances, touches, taps on walls mean something. So do silences. But sometimes the word is the thing. The bridge. Sometimes we only know what we feel once it's been said. Words may be daughters of the earth instead of heaven. But they're not dim. And even in the faintest shimmer, there is light. — Alena Graedon

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People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up. — Alena Graedon

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the 19th century saw the rise of what we came to call linear thought, a way of processing the world that was made possible only by the medium of books. — Alena Graedon

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Words don't always work. Sometimes they come up short. Conversations can lead to conflict. There are failures of diplomacy. Some differences, for all the talk in the world, remain irreconcilable. People make empty promises, go back on their word, say things they don't believe. But connection, with ourselves and others, is the only way we can live. — Alena Graedon

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In the words of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds. — Alena Graedon

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But as Hegel teaches us, beginnings are necessarily problematic. (As are endings.) How can I describe my first encounter with Ana fairly, when my understanding of her essence has passed through infinite iterations over the past four and a half years? My — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 749359

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one. — Alena Graedon

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Reflection can be its own reward. — Alena Graedon

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But maybe because I'm from a part of the country where there are more meth labs than drive-throughs, anything harder than cough syrup always makes me nervous. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 860653

Apparently I'm not the only one - we've been hearing that some consumers actually started lining up outside stores days ago in anticipation of the new Nautilus. A few analysts are projecting more than seven or eight million sales in the first week alone. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 951651

tried to understand what I'd seen. I felt as if I'd just stepped out of a limn on twentieth-century book burnings: gaunt, vampiric Goebbels screaming beside a seditious inferno; Stalin; Mao and his Red Guards; Iranian forces in the Republic of Mahabad burning anything in Kurdish; midcentury New York school kids incinerating comics in Binghamton; Ray Bradbury's firemen; apartheid-era librarians; Pinochet; Pol Pot; Serbian nationalists setting fire to the National and University Library. — Alena Graedon

Alena Graedon Quotes 1099010

She disapproved tacitly of crying. Preferred "helpful advice." But her advice wasn't always that helpful for me. I don't do yoga; don't have her green thumb; don't really like window-shopping - especially not in stores where I can't afford even the candles they burn to make you calm enough to take your wallet out - and am unmotivated, in times of sorrow, to host dinners or attend social events. I — Alena Graedon